We recently connected with Josue Rivas and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Josue, thanks for joining us today. 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 found myself launching a hot sauce business during the 2020 pandemic. I was working in IT as an engineer at the time, but had previously have been a chef in earlier years. I was watching more food shows and ended up playing with spicy sauces using flavors from Peruvian childhood recipes. After sharing some of those sauces, my niece advised could not enjoy the heat of the spicy sauce with the Amarillo pepper. I wanted to create a way for her enjoy the flavor and balance the heat in a craveable way, that is how our number one “JALA PEPA” sauce was born. It was just a creative hobby, but I did intend to respectfully use spice with emphasis on big natural flavor for my friends and family to enjoy. It felt good to be creating and sharing around food.

Once I received excited feedback from so many of my friends who tried my sauces, I thought I should give the business a try. My sauces were creamy and easy to cook with in recipes. I had to figure a lot out, and dusted off my college graphic design skills. After months of slow grind in small batch production, sending out samples and selling to a few stores, I ended up with the big call from the “Hot Ones” hot sauce show. To this day, I feel proud of the sleepless days and nights of determined hard work that built this business to what it is today. I hope others can see that hard work, integrity and caring for others still can expand you into the right places.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in Peru with a grandfather who loved business and with generations of women cooking recipes that had been passed down for decades. After ending up in the US, I ended up at culinary school despite my computer engineer career path. A catering company and few restaurants later, I had successes, failures and endless life lessons. I landed in Austin Texas, and started SAVIR FOODS. Our company currently offers seven hot sauce flavor lines, without seed oils, artificial ingredients, or added sugars or colors.

I am an immigrant and chose to build and accomplish so much in every US state I have lived in. Bringing in cultural flavors from my Peruvian family recipes was an important infusion to my business. I want to inspire others to know they can accomplish anything despite any limitations or barriers, “you can start now and start from nothing”.

Along with having my company SAVIR FOODS, it is a huge passion to stay in restaurants as a Consultant sharing my expertise for those wanting to start, or recipe/menu creation or rebrand. My college hobby of photography is still around, and I just added food styling. In my personal life, I try to stay grounded by taking care of my health, asking for advice from those I respect when a business problem comes up.

Nourishing and connecting people around food always brought joy to me. Food connects all of us, creates community, and provided much life experience. Cooking taught me patience and discipline, while working and managing a kitchen taught me to be leader.

A bonus to being in the hot sauce culture and community is that “spicy” people are far from boring.People who love heat on their plates tend to have more passion and be more adventurous. I’m grateful for this business and my team, I hope to keep serving up big flavor.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Managing is a little bit like parenting, while offering direction and support the priority is not to be their friend. We have a great team and all highly respect each other, but I have a responsibility to my team to be a leader first. Further, I have had to learn I must learn how to manage myself first to be a strong manager. Become aware and strategic in navigating my own strengths and weaknesses and decide how I best can apply discipline to create consistency. If I cannot manage myself, my team will not respect me, they will not follow me.

The outstanding lesson that comes from my culinary and business experience is to be assertive in decision making, not to doubt yourself. When leading a team, back yourself up and own the decisions. Apologize later if needed, but execute with confidence. After years of learning, I lead a team differently now then in previous years. Something else I prefer to do, is to be sure I learn each role that I will be asking an employee to do. That step can promote trust, and create better feedback on tasks.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I have learned to keep the main thing the main thing. It is not the time to build a new product or expansion of your business if the regular product lines or routine processes have yet to be stabilized. Some offers and opportunities must be declined in certain seasons. In that regard, progress forward may look backward. I recommend The E-myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber as a great tool for any entrepreneur building out a company or even someone who is thinking about starting a business.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.savirfoods.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/savirfoods/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SAVIRFOODSatx

Image Credits
All by the Savir Creatives in house. *Josue at his brother’s restaurant in Tampa (https://www.terrasurcafe.com/) *Josue and his wife hiking in Amarillo *Josue at the Austin Chronicle hot sauce show *Josue presenting for media at Earth Day show in Dallas. * three current sauce profile photos