We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lorne Graham a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Lorne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think it takes to be successful?
Overall, I believe success to be a very personal benchmark for each business owner, whether it means a larger net profit year over year, or more contacts with customers to educate them about your offerings and their benefits. For us, we thoroughly enjoy talking with people about our hot sauces and the joy we experience in being a part of the hot sauce community which is very supportive and close-knit. We had a successful first hot sauce festival in 2021 when we were invited by a fellow sauce maker in NJ who reached out to the two green newbies with just two sauces. On Day One, another sauce maker, Maggie Dilley from DefCon Sauces, came to us at the end of that first day and kindly explained that we should have plastic squeeze bottles for offering sample tastings instead of pouring straight out of the 5 oz woozy bottles. She told us she had a couple at her house and would bring them for us the next day so we and our customers would have a better experience. And sure enough, she was there the next morning at 8am trimming the tips of 2 bottles for us with a leatherman blade so we could garner more sales and focus on our story rather than the pour… no ego, no sense of competition, just another sauce maker who wanted to help the new kids on the block.
Lorne, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Susan and I are both classically trained musicians, flute and trumpet, respectively. In 2019, my Mom gifted me 10 superhot pepper plants (Scotch bonnets, Ghosts, and Carolina reapers), peppers you cannot enjoy as a snack in the backyard on a lazy summer evening. Because of my obsession with the Hot Ones show on YouTube, a celebrity interview show based around eating 10 progressively hotter chicken wings, I decided to look into making hot sauce and searched online for some recipes to start out with. Since improvisation is part of being a professional musician, I started doing my own improv work in the kitchen trading out and adding ingredients that might make a tasty sauce, and kept going after friends, work colleagues (the full time gig is working for a music company), family members and neighbors encouraged me to sell hot sauce, that they would pay “real money” for them. Soon after this the Covid lockdown happened which took out all music gigs for about 2 years and forced a Work from Home situation for the same two years’ time. During this time, Noah Chaimberg, owner of Heatonist, a Brooklyn based hot sauce store and the producer of Hot Ones, started a series of Instagram Live interviews of sauce makers. I reached out to thank him for buoying so many viewers who were stuck at home and asked about a mentioned page of resources from one of the shows that was a guide on how to get started, from where to go to take the Certified Course for Manufacturing Acidified Foods, to contact info for some commercial kitchens for making the sauce(s). A year later, we launched Hot Graham Sauce Company on March 9, 2021 and have been having a lot of fun with this small business since.
The business continues to grow albeit slowly, but we really enjoy educating folks about hot sauce: the ways it can be paired with different foods; the fact that hot sauce does not have to hurt you, that for us, it should have a great flavor profile and the heat should be secondary; that most of us small batch makers are excited about flavor pairings first and foremost over heat factors; and the fact that our state, New Jersey, has 8% of the hot sauce companies in the US, a fact I discovered after reading a March 2023 article that stated there were 345 hot sauce companies registered in the United States, and when I wrote down a list of NJ makers we knew and/or heard of, it numbered more than two dozen!
The chief thing that sets our brand and sauces apart from our friends in the hot sauce community is the fact that we use garam masala, an aromatic Indian spice blend, in all of our sauces. This came about because we are film geeks and if you ever saw the 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham on DVD, you may have noticed there was an extra on the disc where the director, Gurinder Chadha, shows how to make Aloo Gobi. This is a delicious dish of potatoes and cauliflower in a tomato curry sauce, the ultimate Indian comfort food! I learned how to make this dish, we both fell in love with that spice blend, and when we decided to start a hot sauce company, that was to be our own personal signature in all of our sauces, and it still holds now four years later with five sauces in our lineup.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I believe our integrity in dealing with our fellow sauce makers, our co-packer partner, event producers, and wholesale partners has helped us galvanize a solid reputation in the hot sauce community. We have sauces that are very unique, with an undertone of earthiness with the garam masala in each, from two people who came to that ingredient by chance, and who did not grow up around Indian cuisine, but came to it as adults. We embrace the complexities of other cultural cuisines, and we both know we still have much more to learn and experience. The hot sauce community is by and large a very loving and supportive community and supports people from many diverse backgrounds, and it continues to blow me away as to how many people have your back and are ready to help their fellow hot sauce makers. The friends we have made here in the last 4 years are friends for life. Everyone comes together with products which are unique to them, and yet still fit within the requirements of an acidified food which is regulated and registered through the FDA and by the Code of Federal Regulations. It’s a 12-bar blues with the same 12 notes available, and yet most everyone comes to the set with a different and unique solo…
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Susan and I have been married for 31 years, so we are life partners and business partners. We met in music school on move-in day at The Peabody Conservatory of Music (now The Peabody Institute) of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore MD in 1986. She and her roommate lived directly above me and my roommate, and they dropped a note into our open window that said “Who are you?” We looked up at the two young ladies leaning out their window and introduced ourselves. Now, it ended up that I dated Susan’s roommate that freshman year but it only lasted until the summer. I do tell people that I then decided I’d try dating the other roommate next, which is humorous and was a little awkward, but we hit it off and we continue to root each other on to this day, have raised two wonderful children who live in other states, and we continue to make music, enjoy good movies together, and create hot sauces. And the most interesting part of the story is that although Susan can sell hot sauce to new sauce fans like nobody’s business, she has absolutely NO heat tolerance for capsaicin at any level. When asked what her favorite hot sauce is, she will deflect by stating our most Popular hot sauce is The Warmup, a terrific entry level jalapeno sauce with roasted pineapple, ginger and cilantro…and when pressed that her response didn’t answer what her favorite sauce is, she will then fess up with the dirty little secret that she can’t eat hot sauce herself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hotgrahamsauceco.com
- Instagram: @hotgrahamsauce
- Facebook: @hotgrahamsauce
- Other: Our TikTok is also @hotgrahamsauce
