We recently connected with Tim Paulman and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Tim thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
I used to joke that my hot sauce brand should probably be considered “outsider art”. I’m not a trained chef. With the exception of a two-month stint of serving chicken tenders at a cafeteria job in college, I had never really worked in a commercial kitchen. I was as “outsider” as “outsider” could get.
My proper training was in technology. I have an BS in computer science and an MS in “New Media”. But after spending 20 years in the tech world, I had grown hopelessly disillusioned with the industry. When I entered the workforce in the mid 90s, the internet was just beginning to be utilized by the general populace. I genuinely believed it provided the hope of a better future full of inter-connectedness, common-ground and shared understanding that would re-shape the way humanity progressed. But those aspirations slowly faded with the years and I found myself trudging through the endless treadmill of a soulless corporate machine. I began to realize that my work life was no longer resonating at a frequency that matched my own internal vibration. When that happens, you can either accept it as “well, that’s just the way it is. No one actually enjoys working. That’s why it’s called work.” or you can go back to the drawing board and re-think your entire career. I can’t say which one of those two options is correct, but I do know which option I chose when I walked out that door six years ago.
I had always been interested in “products”. I like having a tangible object in my hands — something physical to hold and sense in real-time. I’ve been a collector of “things” for as long as I can remember: LPs, rock & roll posters, exotic cacti, silver coins, etc. Whatever came next in my career, I knew I wanted to be making and selling some sort of physical thing. I had grown tired of making digital “things”.
I had been making hot sauce as a hobby for many years by that point. What started out as a gift idea for friends and family turned into a series of unique recipes, each with their own small fanbase. With every iteration of the product, I had gotten reams of user-testing notes and I had the recipes dialed in to the point that I was certain I could productize them. After a bit of deliberation about packaging size, branding and “shelf appeal”, I was ready to bring three products to market and officially make my entrance into the professional world of hot sauce. I named my brand “Paulman Acre”; my last name is “Paulman” and I was working with a single acre of land to grow peppers. It was a bit of a California riff on brand names with “acres” or “estates” in the name. In SoCal, we got *one* acre. Singular. Paulman Acre.
With all of the productization work done, all I needed was a contract manufacturer to help me bring these products to market. That part should be pretty straight-forward, right? People bring new products to market all the time. There’s got to be someone in the industry dedicated to helping the “new to market” brands, right?
As I quickly discovered, that’s not really as common as one would imagine. The contract manufacturers that I contacted each gave me a similar response. They all wanted to make changes to the recipe to make it easier to produce at scale, and they all wanted to run the product at a volume that is untenable for a new-to-market brand. I was looking to manufacture the product at 20-40 gallons per run. The contract manufactures wanted to run the (adjusted recipe) product at hundreds-of-gallons per run. Both of those scenarios were a deal-breaker from my end. I did not want to compromise my recipe and I could not come out of the gate with several hundred cases of product. “Well, maybe I can figure out how to manufacture the product myself. How hard could that be?”
In most states, it’s not a terribly complicated process to bring a new food product to market. In California, however, it’s a bit more involved. I spent hours meticulously weeding through the red tape at the county, state and federal level. I even went down to the San Diego location of the State of California Department of Public Health and began knocking on doors because I had questions. They weren’t too happy about me being there, but I had gotten my questions answered. I had a path forward. I just needed a kitchen.
Starting a licensed manufacturing operation out of a shared kitchen can be tricky. There are several shared commercial kitchens throughout San Diego county. I called every single one of them. All of them had their own nuances and processes that were potential roadblocks. Shared kitchen spaces are, typically, geared towards customers operating food trucks, catering businesses or hot food for farmer’s markets. My use case was a bit of an outlier. But I was fortunate enough to find Oceanside Commercial Kitchen and it checked all of the boxes for my needs and growth potential. OCK became by base of operations for the next several years.
I always tell me kids, “doing is learning”. If you want to learn how to do something, you just have to do it. You won’t get it right the first few times, but, if you do it long enough, you’ll figure it out. That’s good advice for learning how to play the guitar. It doesn’t always work so well when running a business with limited resources. But that’s how I started making large batches of product at scale. I just dug in and did the work. I scorched a batch or two along the way. I got peppers in my eyes. I made batches that just didn’t taste quite right. I filled out the governmental forms incorrectly. I had bottles break in shipping. I think I made every single mistake there was to make as a new business. But, eventually, it started to work the way I had envisioned it and my product slowly started to gain traction in the local scene.
In late 2018, I took my daughter to a field trip in Temecula. While she was on the field trip, I was going to stop by a local hot sauce shop and pitch my product to them. When I got there, the owner told me they were shutting down because their lease had just been pulled. I offered my condolences and purchased some of the remaining product from their shop. One of the sauces I bought was from a sauce maker in LA — “J’s Small Batch Hot Sauce”. I took it home, tasted it and enjoyed it. So I reached out to J’s and said, “Hey, I’m a local maker as well down here in San Diego. Wanted to say hello and that I enjoyed your product.” That single happenstance of fate completely reshaped my entire business.
Within weeks, we were chatting regularly. We sent sauces back and forth to each other. We talked about the industry at large and the strategy for our own brands. We hatched a brilliant idea: “Hey, if we combine our efforts, we may be able to bring down the overhead for both of our product lines and gain some more traction.” And that’s exactly what we did. We pushed Paulman Acre and J’s Small Batch Hot Sauce under the same parent company and named ourselves “California Hot Sauce Solutions”.
Almost immediately, we got a call from one of our friends in the industry — “Hey, you guys are making each other’s hot sauces? I’m looking for a new co-packer. Do you want to take over manufacturing for my brand?” When we said “yes” to that initial client, we had no idea how drastically that would change the nature of our business. Word of mouth spread and we started getting calls from other brand owners asking us to make their product. Very quickly, we went from being hot sauce brand owners to hot sauce contract manufacturers. We had inadvertently become the contract manufacturers that neither or us could find when we brought our own products to market years prior.
When Covid hit in the spring of 2020, we had our schedule booked for several months in advance. One of the projects on the schedule was a large deliverable for the popular TV show “Hot Ones”. A brand owner out of LA had gotten picked up by the show, but they did not have the means produce their brand at the scale required for the order. They came to us and we told them that we could scale up the product and meet the requirements for the order.
As the scope of the Covid shutdown came into focus, we started getting calls from our scheduled clients — “Hey, have you run my product yet? No? Great! Don’t run it! Cancel the order! All of my upcoming events have been cancelled”. Those calls came in by the dozens and our booked schedule started looking spotty at best. When we got a call from the Hot Ones client, we could see the writing on the wall. “Yeah, yeah, we know, we know. You want us to cancel your order.” His response was, “No, they’re still running the show! And they want more than they had initially told us! Go Go Go!” That order, in and of itself, got us through the early days of the Covid shutdown. I don’t know how we managed to hang on through the duration of the down-time, but we did. There were some lean months during that time full of uncertainty. But we somehow made it through.
We repeatedly outgrew our space at Oceanside Commercial Kitchen over the years. We grew into bigger and bigger spaces until there was no space left to grow. We were packed floor-to-ceiling and we spent way too much time playing “Pallet Tetris” in the warehouse. In late 2022, we moved into our own 3000 sqft space on Oceanside Blvd. The location had previously been a bagel shop, so it has everything we need to keep our production going. It has dedicated kitchen space, warehouse space and even a small public retail space where customers can purchase all of the hot sauces that we manufacture on site.
At our new facility, our daily throughput is 80-160 gallons per day depending on the product. The grand opening of our public store is slated for early May. In addition to growing our own internal brands, we continue to fill the niche in the industry by servicing new-to-market brands as well as medium-sized existing brands.
In the software world, there are programatic patterns called “factories”. I often tell people that I got tired of making software factories, so I decided to build a real-world factory instead. There’s a level of joy that comes from watching someone thoroughly enjoy a product that you made from scratch with your own two hands. I’ve never gotten that joy from looking at a monitor or a phone screen, but I feel it every time I watch someone crack open a bottle of Paulman Acre hot sauce.
Tim, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
There’s inherently a degree of apprehension involved with handing your creation off to someone else in hopes that they will give it the same attention to detail that you would. We’ve heard horror stories from clients who had taken their product to a contract manufacturer in the past and they were ripped off, their recipe was manipulated, the bottles of sauce began exploding, etc.
We are hot sauce makers first and foremost. By focusing our area of expertise to hot sauce, we’ve developed a deep understanding of what it takes to manufacture a quality product at scale. That provides an immediate rapport and level of confidence with the other brand owners who bring their product to us. We are “hot sauce guys”. We have our own brands at market. We know to navigate the trouble spots of a recipe at scale. We’ve done the expos, the farmers markets, the wholesale orders and the subscription boxes.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
We have built our clientele of contract manufacturing entirely from word-of-mouth. Every single customer has been referred to us from other people in the industry. Despite the saturation of the hot sauce market, it’s a pretty tight knit industry. As word started to spread, we began getting calls from Seattle, the Bay Area, Tucson, Maine, etc.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
When Jason and I pushed our brands together to create California Hot Sauce Solutions, we could only get dedicated kitchen time during the nighttime hours. During that phase of the business, we were working 8pm – 8am every single night churning out production runs of hot sauce. It was a pretty grueling time for both of us. We tried out some paid helpers during those overnight shifts and every single one of them quit on us; usually during their very first shift. But we stuck it out and, when we finally bought our first steam jacketed kettle, we were able to switch back to a more manageable schedule and keep moving forward.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.PaulmanAcre.com
- Instagram: @PaulmanAcre
- Facebook: Paulman Acre