We recently connected with Mary & Chris Ginder and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mary & Chris, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

In the early days, while conceptualizing our company, a friend and fellow business owner gave us the advice to start with a mission statement. He also said it would be good practice to revisit that statement once a year to see if our company is still aligned with the original core values, as well as to see if it needs to evolve. So we spent a lot of time developing that initial mission, and now, thirteen years later, we continue to revisit it every year.

We make a line of fresh pepper hot sauces designed to inspire creativity in the kitchen and support local farms. That’s been our mission for many years, however recently, it’s evolved into so much more. While that statement is still very true, we’ve since expanded our line of products to include hot honey, spice blends, Michelada mix and sea salts. And while it’s also true that we continue to support our local farms, we also support numerous charities and small businesses. We love giving back to our community as much as possible!

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?

The year was 2008, and we were making a fresh pepper hot sauce for a gathering of friends when we turned to each other and asked, why doesn’t anyone make a hot sauce using fresh ingredients from local farmers and sea salts like we use in our kitchen? The idea slowly evolved until it became an obsession, and eventually, our passion. We had to share it with the world.

When we started Gindo’s Spice of Life, we weren’t what you would call “hot sauce aficionados,” but Chris, a.k.a. Gindo, the creator behind each sauce, has made it his mission to continually learn about new peppers and spicy flavors from around the world. Some of his favorite peppers to work with include Chocolate Moruga Scorpions, Calabria, Aji Rico, Fish Pepper, 7 Pot Bubblegum, Chocolate Bhutlah, and of course, Habaneros.

Our goal is to take different peppers, ranging from mild to superhot, and make them enjoyable to everyone, not just heat-seekers. We want people to think of hot sauce as more of an experience to be savored and relished, not just a condiment that singes the tastebuds.

The first sauces we officially launched in 2011 included our Original Fresh & Spicy, a fresh versatile everyday red sauce, Jalapeno Poblano, a mild verde, and Honey Habanero, a golden Caribbean style. Those three sauces were designed to be simple, straightforward, and versatile for everyday use or as a cooking ingredient. However, we couldn’t stop there.

Gindo loves pushing the envelope with his limited releases. Some of the more unique sauces include Ginger Lemongrass Tea infused hot sauce, Chocolate Cold Brew hot sauce, 2 Fools Pinehopple Hard Cider infused hot sauce – which earned us our first Scovie Award a few years back, and one of our fan favorites – Hardneck Romanian Red garlic hot sauce. Inspiration for new flavors come from all around the world, like our Hmong Pepper sauce from Asia, the Haitian T-Malice style, the Portuguese style known as Piri Piri, Chimichurri inspired by Argentina, and Tunisian Harissa, inspired by North Africa.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We started Gindo’s in Los Angeles, and at the time, we were getting our sauces manufactured by two different co-packers. However, there were times when the sauces were not up to our standards of quality and flavor, and the minimums were too high to sustain and grow. So when we moved to the Midwest in 2015, we decided to take over production and start building relationships with local farms and businesses so we could manage every pepper and every ingredient that goes into the bottles.

For five years, we spent our weekdays hand making our sauces in a shared commissary kitchen, loading every ingredient and bottle in and out with painstaking care, hand filling every bottle by hand with a funnel. On the weekends, we worked as many farmers markets and festivals as possible, hand peddling our wares until we finally saved up enough money to open our own kitchen. I think that last year in the commissary kitchen, we hand filled close to 100,000 bottles. Needless to say, we were ecstatic to have our own facility and be able to buy manufacturing equipment like a bottling line, label machine and forklift.

Since we do all our own manufacturing on a macro level, we not only have the ability to experiment with exotic ingredients – often sourced from local farmers and small businesses, but we also have the ability to make dozens of new flavors each year. To date, we’ve made about 500 different flavors of hot sauce. We create at least one new flavor every week of the year, which gave us the opportunity to have our very own Hot Sauce of the Month Club. We’re the first and currently only company in the world to completely self produce every limited release sauce for a monthly subscription box.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

We love connecting with our fans! For starters, we try to always be available to our clients. Whether it’s a phone call with a question about a particular sauce, or an email about a broken bottle someone received that shattered in transit, or a text from someone just telling us they love the sauce, we try to be responsive and appreciative because they chose Gindo’s.

Our monthly newsletter is also a way we stay connected. It’s filled with spicy updates, new limited releases, recipes, upcoming events, and occasionally an exclusive discount code.

Farmers markets and festivals allow us to meet folks face to face in different communities throughout the US. Whether it’s a local farmers market, a makers market in Nashville, New York Comic Con, or a beer fest, we love meeting new people and sharing our story with folks across the country.

Social media is also a very important way to connect with our fans. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and we love sharing photos, videos and recipes to help inspire creativity in the kitchen and generate more awareness for the awesome farmers and small businesses in our community.

Let’s not forget our shop. We’re always there during the week, making sauce, prepping for the weekend, and we love when folks stop by to chat and shop our selection of more than 5o flavors of sauces and more. You might even be able to get a mini tour if you catch us on the right day!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://gindos.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegindos/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegindos
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-%E2%80%9Cgindo%E2%80%9D-ginder-8a264946/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsOXzTP_7pZcGXqmcfVEvlQ/featured
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thegindos

Image Credits
Mary Ginder