We recently connected with Drew Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Drew, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I’d started gardening about 5 years ago and realized I had an abundance of peppers and no use for them. I looked up some basic hot sauce recipes and started making my own sauce and bottling it. I was, at the time, passing these bottles off to friends and eventually they would throw me a couple bucks for it.

I was making it out of my garage at the time because I was banished from the house due to macing everyone in the household from the vaporized peppers. Out there I would throw on a horror movie on the tv and just waste time making the sauce. From there I’d worked on several recipes and entered into a competition and won. After that day people online (through Instagram) would ask to buy some and eventually I was selling out by delivering to people’s doorsteps. Seeing the excitement for something I created was pretty damn cool and I kept grinding with the brand.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The hot sauce market is very saturated. I won’t claim I’m doing something new. There’s hundreds of brands out there. With the popularity of shows like Hot Ones and social media viral videos on TikTok, hot sauce has had a huge boom recently. But, if you can find a group of people who you feel you can reach through your branding that otherwise hasn’t been touched, then you can find creative ways to set you apart from the race.

Hot sauce brands tend to be boring or cliche. You have the very crafty looking bottles that look mundane where you buy once as a Christmas gift, or you have bottles that feature profane pictures of asses exploding with names like Sphincter Destroyer. That’s not very appetizing, but these brands survive through tourist shops and gag gifts. You also have brands that don’t resonate with anyone, they don’t tell a story. They sometimes exist just to be on a shelf. I wanted to change that. I found horror films to be a great vehicle for this. Like horror movies, hot sauce has its fans. Most people love both, and if you don’t, I bet you know someone that does.

Horror Struck Hot Sauce resonates with both. To be horror-struck is to express an emotion of shock and awe. There’s something about being scared, it’s that boost of energy and adrenaline. Those same feelings you can get from something very spicy. Each of my sauces tell a story, not only from their inspiration, but from their creation.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I won’t lie and say it’s easy, but it’s not particularly hard either to do this. But you do have to put your nose to the grindstone. It’s a hustle in a overly saturated market. Like I said previously, you really have to stand out from the crowd. When you get started with making hot sauce, it’s just a hobby. You kind of are just sitting around trying to flex your culinary muscle with some ingredients you got from the store. From there you maybe grow your own peppers and learn a bit of horticulture. Pretty soon you’ve got 100 plants in your back yard for no reason at all and realize maybe there’s something more to it.

But when you look more into what it takes to do scale this type of business and make it legal, there’s a bit more in it to win it. That was where my hang up happened. I realized just how many regulations and laws were in place to make a stable product and especially not kill people. You have take courses on microbiology, food safety and handling practices. I almost gave up realizing I had to rent a commercial kitchen and be licensed by the Department of Agriculture. These types of things not only take patience in order to organize but money too, so when you don’t have any to begin with, it’s just dollar signs adding up.

That is where I almost stopped and said, “don’t quit your day job”. I still haven’t but I just had to work extra hard for this in the after hours. Eventually I made money here and there, little by little and maybe put that towards the license, or a deposit on a rental kitchen. Little by little you make it on the up and up until all those puzzle pieces fall into place. Pretty soon what you’re doing looks legit and you’re on your way to take care of the things that truly make this successful.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

I’ve got a unique product in that you HAVE to get it into people’s hands. No store wants to just buy a case of your stuff, hope that it sells on the shelf, and then you make money hand over fist. That’s not going to happen. On a shelf of hot sauce, what is it you’re going to buy? It’s the old standby or maybe a unique bottle. You have to be out there in person telling your story.

I do a lot of markets and events in person. I’m tasting the sauces, explaining food pairings and gassing myself up for folks. It’s boots on the ground person to person sales. Hot sauce has it lucky in that people are drawn to you because they want to try it. A lot of these people just want to say “what’s your hottest sauce”? and then they walk away when you don’t meet that expectation, which is why you have to sell them on the experience.

Why is my sauce better? I use fresh ingredients that I grow myself in the city.

What food would you eat this on? I made this sauce because of XYZ and you should try this with tacos for example.

You are selling an experience and telling your story in person, live to an individual and hoping something resonates with them. I’m out at a booth drawing attention with my aesthetic and a mutual passion for spicy foods and horror movies. It’s a vibe.

Contact Info:

• Website: horrorstruckhotsauce.com
• Instagram: @horrorstruckhotsauce