We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Zachary Goodman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Zachary, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

So for anyone from Raleigh you already know how many “Oak City ……..” companies there are, We actually had a debate when starting out about what to name it and I had another name in mind, i cant remember what it was now, but the rest of the team outvoted me. However I think its worked out for us, the Oak City name is recognizable to people from the area and lent us an air of legitimacy when we first started out.

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?

We are a craft hot sauce and spice maker from Raleigh, NC, at this point we might as well be a “Specialty Foods” company due to how much we’ve branched out but hot sauce was always the core of it.

We really started unintentionally, I was working in a kitchen for Marriott at the time with my business partner, Chef Devin Bayles, and we had originally set out to use some local peppers in a special for the menu. I quickly realized after some experimentation that it just wasn’t going to be the right fit for our menu, but I had already bought all these peppers so i made a quick batch of a couple hot sauces, with the intention to take them into work and just make people try them.

What I didn’t anticipate was the response, people loved them so I set out to refine the process, we were eventually added to the menu as a wing sauce, and that was really the starting point.

As a business iv always strived to follow a path of honesty, sustainability, and local collaboration. I came up in the NC punk rock scene as a teenager and there was a big focus on DIY ethics. We never wanted to be super corporate, it was about establishing a grass roots following by offering a good quality product at an affordable price and more then anything making sure we treated our customers and partners with respect. I would rather lose a sale then sell something the customer was unhappy with, and i think that focus on building connections and friendships within the industry based upon a mutual profitability is a big component to our success

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Funding is always scary, and we wanted to operate as close to zero debt as we could, a fact I’m very proud to say we continue to do. We used Kickstarted to launch our first run, combined with me cashing out my 401k to fund being able to do it. It was a gamble but it worked out.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

I think the best example of this was landing our first distribution contract with Harris Teeter. We did one of the last trade shows in the state prior to Covid, and we were so unprepared for it. I had dyed my hair bright blue the night before and the dye had stuck to my skin in weird spots, our banner wasn’t even set up straight, we were deeply out of our depth. But at some point throughout the day a buyer came by and really liked our product. We got invited to pitch to a distributor, we both showed up in our best (and only) suits and just sat in the parking lot practicing our pitch, we had these badly printed pamphlets we had made the night before. I was terrified when we walked into that room but they stopped us 30 seconds into the pitch and just said “you’ve got it, pick your three best products and well send you the contract” It blew me away because I had no idea if we even had a chance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.oakcityhotsauce.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oakcityhotsauce/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OakCitySauce
• Youtube: Oak City Hot Sauce Co