We recently connected with Zac Perkins and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Zac, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

No, I do not wish I formed my company sooner or later. HDSC was formed exactly when it was supposed to be. If anything had been done differently, I wouldn’t be where I’m at now. Could it be better? ABSOLUTELY – but it also be much much worse. I am 1000% happy & content with where HDSC is & the slow steady growth I have seen over the last 6 years.

The backstory to High Desert Sauce Co is rather interesting to say the least…

Hi, my name is Zac & I am a former homeless drug addict/alcoholic. I struggled with addiction most of my life. Jails, institutions and just short of death on multiple occasions (a few times self inflicted) was how I lived as if it were “normal”. I cannot count the amount of times I have been arrested, gone to detox, rehab or been placed on 72 hour psych holds. This was just typical existence for me.

June of 2016, I really started to take sobriety seriously and did fairly well for myself. Found a job, paid my bills, started the process of paying fines in order to get my driver’s license restored… I was doing great. Fast forward to new years 2016 where I relapsed. This “hiccup” almost cost me everything I had built in the 6 months prior and I mean EVERYTHING!

January 3, 2017, after spending a few intoxicated days in a sketchy hotel (I was out of money… Out of alcohol), I found myself at an all too familiar forlkin the road… Continue down the path I was currently on or, try something different with my life. This was the day my life changed… No idea what was different this time but something clicked & I was determined to live differently.

Shortly after this experience, I started making hot sauce as a way to keep occupied (idle hands are the devil’s playground). It was a fun creative outlet for me & I was good at it. I spent 1+ years making sauce to give away to friends and family… One can hear “why is there not a label on this, why are you not marketing this” so many times before you say F it lets do it. High Desert was formed September 8, 2018. I started this company with $200 and absolutely no idea as to what I was doing. Here we are just over 6 years later doing 6 figures in revenue and year and growing slowly but surely.

Seeings how hot sauce came into my life when and how it did, I do NOT wish I would have done anything different. Hot Sauce basically saved my life – had it gone any other way I might now be here.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Homeless to Hot Ones!

We were featured on Season 15 (2021) of the hit YouTube series Hot Ones with our Tikk-HOT Masala (Tikka Masala inspired hot sauce). At the time, production was limited to 8 to 10 gallons of sauce per run and we could not fulfill an order of 3000 cases (36,000 bottles) ourselves, so we had to bring on a co-packer… Basically someone to make the order for us. We definitely chose the wrong company to work with – just one nightmare after the next. Eventually, the co-packer completed the order late (almost 4 weeks late), so late I personally had to drive 240 cases of sauce from AZ to PA to meet an absolute deadline – thankfully I got there a day early.

Show airs and product gets sent to customers, then… .. … I received a few emails about how the sauce was exploding upon opening. Seemed like an couple isolated incidents so, no biggie it was a giant order kind of to be expected. Then more emails and more emails… Turns out the co-packer bottled our product incorrectly resulting in a recall of 24,400 bottles of hot sauce. I had to scramble, beg & borrow to get those 24,000 bottles replaced with a different co-packer (which I had to pay for out of pocket since the OG co-packer told me to get F’d and took 0 responsibility for). I made it happen! I didn’t have a choice, it had to be figured out. This whole situation put me $250,000 in debt which I am still paying off today. But here I am making it happen!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hdsauceco.com
• Instagram: highdesertsauceco
• Facebook: highdesertsauceco
• Youtube: HDSC
• Other: TikTok
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