Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Zack and Ali Frostic. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Zack and Ali, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

We both have a deep passion for cooking and love experimenting with different flavor combinations in the kitchen.

Zack created a great peach mango wing sauce recipe that we loved. This recipe sparked the idea to turn our passion for cooking and hot sauce into a business.

We believed that Pepper Crusaders could offer something different, something that would appeal to people who were looking for unique and flavorful hot sauces. We began experimenting with different flavor combinations, using only the freshest and highest quality ingredients.

Peppercrusaders.com opened on February 14th, 2023, and we started selling our hot sauces direct to consumer. People love the deep flavors, unique artwork, customer service, and attention to detail.

We are most excited about the prospect of sharing our love for hot sauce with others. We know we’ve created something special and want to share it with as many people as possible. We are also excited about the prospect of building a business that reflects our values and passion for quality and authenticity.

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’re Zack and Ali Frostic the creators of Pepper Crusaders! Our shared love of cooking, chicken wings, and hot sauce led us to start creating our own, homemade hot sauces.

We found ourselves looking to add flavor and heat to our meals, but were often disappointed with traditional hot sauces that were all heat and vinegar, but lacking the deep complex flavors we were craving. We knew that we could make it better at home, so we did! We spent hours formulating, experimenting, taste testing, and finally creating the perfect hot sauce.

Each of our recipes are named after a different Crusader character, based off of the historical Christian Crusades that occurred during the medieval ages. The art style is attributed to our 90s childhoods, love for comic books, and all things science fiction. We plan to make many more unique crusaders to satisfy everyone’s taste buds.

Our hot sauces are locally made, small batch, and vegan.
We are a veteran owned company

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Zack and Ali met on a dating app in May of 2020 and were married in March of 2022.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We sell on our site, peppercrusaders.com. One of the best advantages to using your own website is having access to customer data and feedback. This information helps us personalize marketing efforts and improve processes based on customer feedback. We also love the ability to control our own branding, reflect our values, be flexible with promotions, and the increased profit margin by avoiding commissions.

Some of the disadvantages are traffic and visibly. Large platforms have built in customer bases. However, we would rather cater to our customers and be able to give them the best service and purchasing experience possible. Quality is a very important value to us.

Contact Info:

• Website: peppercrusaders.com
• Instagram: @peppercrusaders
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peppercrusaders
• Twitter: @peppercrusaders

Image Credits
Zack Frostic Estee Photo Co.