How Ultra Spicy Peppers Revolutionized The Multi-Billion Dollar Hot Sauce Industry | Big Business

The craft hot sauce business is exploding in the US, with hundreds of small producers challenging centuries old brands with creative flavors and newly engineered, extra-hot peppers.

Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
01:32 – Smokin’ Ed Currie’s pepper farms
05:21 – PuckerButt factory
09:50 – NYC Hot Sauce Expo
15:35 – Hell’s Kitchen Hot Sauce
21:22 – Tabasco and the history of hot sauce
28:19 – Frank’s RedHot
34:25 – How hot sauce started trending
35:52 – EZ Paella & Tapas
37:45 – Hot Ones and Heatonist
42:21 – How Smokin’ Ed found peppers
44:06 – End credits

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How Ultra Spicy Peppers Revolutionized The Multi-Billion Dollar Hot Sauce Industry | Big Business

[Music] There are more small batch hot sauce makers like Ron Menon than ever before in the US. It doesn’t get much more authentic than two two in a kitchen making hot sauce. Like it doesn’t get much better. But most craft producers don’t have resources to grow their own chilies. So many buy a base mash from Ed Curry. The man who’s bred the world’s hottest peppers twice is like birthing a baby. His most recent creation, Pepper X, is 1,000 times hotter than a jalapeno and holds the Guinness World Record for spice. But not even two decades ago, only a few massive brands dominated the US hot sauce industry, like Tabasco and Franks, which gets its mashed peppers in these 20,000galon rail cars. Today, the big brands are also racing to innovate as changing demographics have turned hot sauce into one of America’s favorite condiments. I grew up in Mexico. I need heat. I love it. So, how did Hot Sauce become the new craft beer? And what are legacy brands doing to stay on [Music] top? Ed Curry has several farms growing hundreds of thousands of peppers across South Carolina. I am nurturing my own children here. Are your kids jealous of your bever? No, they don’t care. They got their friends in their video games, you know, in Tickity Talk or whatever, Insta Twit or whatever else they’re on. His two record-breaking hottest peppers are grown in top secret locations, but are closely guarded. All of us are armed in South Carolina, including the guys who are picking. It took Ed 10 years to breed his second spiciest pepper, the Carolina Reaper. If you see, these are two different plants. This is one. This is another. You just take this little paint brush right here and you go in and you look for some pollen. And by the way, isn’t that a beautiful flower? And then you go to this other plant and you transfer the pollen. And it’s just back and forth like that over and over and over again. It doesn’t always work. A lot of times in year five or six, they revert back to their parents and that’s that. Ed engineered the reaper by breeding a ghost pepper from Pakistan with a habanero from the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. The result was a pepper with an average level of 1.64 million Scoville heat units. Zero is a bell pepper. 1.5 million to 5.3 million is policegrade pepper spray. The Carolina Reaper was certified the world’s hottest chili pepper by Guinness World Records in 2013. It’s about twice as hot as a ghost pepper, 20 times hotter than a habanero, and 800 times hotter than a jalapeno. But Ed broke his own record when he created Pepper X, which became the world’s hottest pepper in 2023 at a whopping 2.69 million Scoville heat units. The stuff that makes peppers taste hot is capsain, a chemical compound that works as a defense mechanism for plants to keep some insects and fungus from eating them. That tricks our brain into thinking we’re on fire. We’re not on fire. It’s just a trick because capsain is a poison to your body. You need to eat your body weight or more in order to die from it. I think you should say that your body perceives it as a poison instead of saying it is a poison. Like it is a poison. Tom. Tom. Yes. Is capsain a poison to your body? Your body perceives it as a poison. No. No. Is capsain a poison to your body? Yes, but technically it is. But it would take at least 35,000 mg or about 350 Carolina reapers to kill a 150 lb person. Capsain also has health benefits. It can help fight inflammation and chronic muscle pain. In animal studies, researchers found that it can be used to attack and kill prostate cancer cells without harming healthy ones. Ed sets aside 10% of his peppers for replanting and breeding. 20% are ground into powder. He only sells about 2% of his peppers whole to other hot sauce makers. Most of each harvest gets turned into pepper mash. Brandon Peters oversees that fiery process. We wear respirators when it gets really bad, especially like right now we’re making pepper X. The team handles about 10,000 lbs of peppers on an average day. And then they’re dumped into the hopper. They go up the conveyor belt, come into the chopping machine, the fits mill is what it’s called. And that thing is powerful. This machine can chop a whole 1,000 lb bin in just 5 minutes. Not something you want to put your hand in. It actually shows fingers cut off on the machine. It throws an extra spicy mist into the air. These guys that you watch in here working, they’re on fire and they’ve got a great poker face, but it burns. We are in a constant perpetual state of fire on our bodies. Then they move to step two, cooking the mash. This robotic arm dumps the ground up peppers into one of these five kettles where they boil. We used to do this whole process manually with buckets and it was rough. So they got us this. Saves our lives. Some of these machines are customade. If I had to throw a number on it, I’d say probably at least four to5 million worth of equipment in this building. So, he’s just hosing this out to make sure we get everything we can out of there. This is actually my son. He’s one of the best in the business. Then, they add water and vinegar until they reach the right pH that will make the sauce shelf stable for up to 2 years. We call pH our Bible. The pH is the acidity in the food and bacteria can’t live in acidic foods. So we we have to keep that level to a certain standard. If the pH is below 3.1, they’ll add more water and mash. If it’s above 3.9, they’ll add more vinegar. This batch is good to go. Now they heat it in this steam kettle for 1 to two hours to sterilize the mash. Yeah, that is an angry kettle. Yep. Go ahead. Temper up. Where are we at? I got 206 on that. 206. Beautiful. I’ve been doing this for 4 and a half, 5 years and I’m still coughing. You can only build so much of a tolerance and it’s just going to hurt no matter what. You just get a better game face. The team fills 25,000 of these 5gallon buckets of mash every year. Many small batch hot sauce makers across the country buy it from Ed and use it in their own recipes because they don’t have farmland or factories to produce their own. Today, Brandon’s making a classic Chile de Arol hot sauce. They dump the pepper mash back into one of these kettles and add ingredients. It’ll go into a pureeer that we pour into the top and it comes out extremely fine. A very fine consistency. Ed’s team makes about 200 sauces and salsas under his own brand, Puckerbot. Good lord, I have no idea the exact number of sauces. A lot of them haven’t even seen the light of day. When the company started in 2003, Ed and his workers were filling 300 to 500 bottles a week, all by hand. Automating has helped them scale up 10fold. The machine runs anywhere from 25 to 60 bottles a minute. Now, the company cranks out millions of bottles every year. And because Ed’s peppers are so spicy, he doesn’t have to use a lot to make his sauces, well, hot. One of the benefits of having a hotter pepper is economies of scale. If they were using 55 gallons of habanero mash to heat something up, I can do the same with one gallon of pepper X. [Music] Every year, his creations are featured at expos like this one in New York, where thousands of people come to taste and stock up on small batch hot sauces. I have tons in my purse just in case. We got candy this year. Our mouth is on fire, so it helps. We have hot sauce holsters. We’re on We’re on a mission to help people to never be without their sauce again. Okay. Steve Sabbury started this event in 2013. A few years after founding his own hot sauce company. I just want everyone to experience things that they can’t normally find here. Yeah. Everything here we we focus on craft artistal uh hot sauces. You know, it’s kind of like runs parallel with the micro brews, you know, craft beers where, you know, um, like almost every city now in the country has their hot sauce company. One of the highlights is the pepper eating contest. Ed brings the peppers for it all the way from South Carolina. It’s kind of like the oldtime Roman gladiators. You know, why would you go watch anybody be eaten by a lion? Well, you know, they pack that house full. That’s what happens at these. A few rules we’re going to have to go over for these brave seven competitors. Give it up for them. First up, today I’m here to judge an official Guinness World Records attempt for the most Carolina Reaper chilies eaten in 1 minute. 3 2 1 go. He’s at potential pace to break the world record right now. He’s going. So, for today’s event, there’s going to be a few guidelines I want to make sure are followed. First, they have to be official Carolina Reaper chili peppers. They have to be raw, not peeled, and with the stems on. [Music] Uh-oh. It’s hitting them. It’s hitting them. Swallow. Go back for more. Come on. You can do it. Come on. 3 2 1 go. [Applause] Halfway. Come on, Harold. Don’t break it. Just pay attention to the bowl. Come on. Come [Applause] on. Come on, Harold. Let’s go. These people want to break this record. At the end of the 1 minute, I’ll call time and we’ll make sure that there’s no peppers in their mouth. We’ll weigh anything that they didn’t eat. We’ll deduct that from the original bowl total and we’ll get a final count. Go. Come on, brother. You’re on pace. You’re on pace. This year’s rocket. Ladies and gentlemen, your winner once again at the NYC Hot Sauce Expo with a total of 52 g, the spicy king of New York, Eric Law. [Applause] The record stands at 122 g. That’s about 24 peppers. It was set in August 2023 by Freddy Rubio in Portland, Oregon. I got fourth place in the Guinness World Records Carolina Reaper eating contest. How many peppers did you eat? I ate they I think they said six. And she already ripped Thomas. You actually get like a crazy head rush. So, I couldn’t really tell what was going on and I just knew that people were cheering and I was like, I can probably do one more. But I don’t know how many times I had that thought. Like your eyes just immediately start pouring water and it feels kind of like you’re floating like you’re walking on clouds. But I knew if I just rode it out it would be fine cuz I’ve done this before. Ed has done some damage. He persuaded me to do it. So when he tells you to do something, you get up on stage for him. Ed is a celebrity at the expo. We really have 192 different sauces. My favorite thing. This is the three hottest peppers in the world all in one bottle. I go through two or three bottles of this a day. Here. I’m not going to hurt you. Okay. Okay. All right. Cheers. Cheers. It’s so good. Yeah, it’s delicious. But the same thing you’re feeling, I feel, too. So, I can’t stop my mouth from salivating. I can talk and do an interview because I’m used to it, you know. Ed says he’s also here to support other small hot sauce makers like Ginger Goat, a company from Canada. It’s harder to grow chilies there. So, it leans on Ed for mash. We knew who Ed was and our first gallon of mash that we ever bought during recipe development came from the butter company. A few stalls over, Ron Menon from Hell’s Kitchen hot sauce also gets some of his mash from Ed. I’m known for my interesting flavor profiles. They call me the Willy Wonka of hot sauce. Ron won the Screaming Mimi at the 2024 Expo. That’s like winning an Oscar in the hot sauce world. And it was for this one. It’s a Moroccan inspired, really, really tasty and quite unique. I don’t think there’s a sauce quite like it in the world. In the craft world, smaller producers are able to do more eclectic, esoteric things. Let’s go. This is where Ron cooks around 16 different varieties of hot sauce. Today he’s making his best seller, Westside Red, in this 100gallon vat. He starts with the base, apple cider vinegar, plus his special twist to make it sweet, blue agave nectar. Hot sauce is very formulaic, but where the soul comes in, the creativity is what what takes something from, oh, this is good to, oh my god, I’ve never had anything like this. There’s an element of danger to hot sauce, you know? That’s why I love it. Like, there’s an element, oh, is this going to be too spicy for me? You know, Ron adds berries. The Incredible Hulk, right? He uses frozen ones because they’re usually a little easier to work with and they’re they’re fresh. It’s not like pureed or anything. They’re fresh. You know, hot sauces. You can impart characteristics through a variety of techniques. Fermenting, adding fruit like you would perhaps with a wine, you might add a different fruit. Everything good starts with garlic and onion. Hot sauce is very good for you. It’s unintentionally healthy. He doesn’t add any preservatives, just gallons of distilled white vinegar. And then pepper mash. This is really nice and fresh. It’s not oxidized. Right. So, this is the Fresno. See how dark red it is? It’s nice. Oh, and see proof that it’s fresh. There’s a there’s a whole Fresno in there. Say Ron doesn’t make his own mash. He buys it from producers like Ed. This keeps you young. They mix it once now to check its consistency. Weapon of sauce destruction. Yes. They need two blenders in the vat to mix everything, but they don’t always have enough hands. We kind of tie this up. It’s good. It doesn’t go anywhere. He gets deeper in to get the garlic and the stuff, the the bigger chunks from from below. And this is up on the top so you get it from both sides. And it makes it blend faster. And as you heat it up, it all it all blends together and it all cooks together. It’s like making a soup. There you go. [Applause] [Music] For a little extra kick, they add fresh lime juice. A great hot sauce has flavor first, then heat. It’s not just what you put in, throwing everything in. It’s when you make the additions. It’s it’s how long you cook them and and and and you take a little bit of time. When you have a smaller production and you’re able to control factors and make the pepper flavor come through more, you are taking more care. That’s why making an artisan product is a lot different from a big production. The whole cooking process takes about 4 hours. [Music] In the meantime, they label their bottles. That’s kind of cool. Ron adds a little extra twist to some of his bottle caps. I really try to lean into the New York thing in a real way. I’m a real New Yorker. It doesn’t get much more authentic than two two assh in a kitchen making hot sauce. Like it doesn’t get much better. Very nice. Nicely done, fine sir. Once the sauce hits the right temperature, the liquid’s at 203°, right? He’ll start bottling. That’s a right there. This is called hot fill and hold method. When you fill the with the hot liquid at the proper temperature, you cap it, right? And then you invert it. What are you doing? You’re creating a natural vacuum. This basically sterilizes the bottle and the cap. Ron says they’re good to flip after 15 minutes and label. Ron has gone from packing 30 boxes a week when he started his company in 2015 to [Music] 300. This is what I was put on the earth to do. It’s a privilege to be able to do what I do. It really is. Yeah, it really is. The holidays are extra busy. His demand spikes, especially for the 2 oz mini bottles. Ron also supplies 170 stop and shops in the Northeast. And online, he sells a 5 oz bottle for $12. That’s four times more expensive than a bottle of Tabasco. But customers are willing to pay more for these artisal flavors. It’s like fish, you know, in in a in a lake. There’s little guppies, then there’s like I’m like the medium-sized goldfish, and then there’s the big shark in the in the ocean would be the your Tabasco or your Melindas or whatever. You you know what I’m saying? So, there’s different there’s levels to anything, you know? But big hot sauce makers like Tabasco have been perfecting their recipes for years. The company grows peppers just for seeds inside this greenhouse at its headquarters on Avery Island. We’re also looking for the plants that produce the richest color, red peppers at perfect size, and then flavor, too. Christian Brown is the great great great grandson of founder Edmund Melhenny and the company’s agriculture manager. Yeah, everything’s looking good. No signs of aphids. He sends only the strongest seeds to 5,000 Tabasco farms around the world. Tabasco says their peppers originate from the Amazon in South America. They’re about six times hotter than a jalapeno, only 1 to 1 and 1/2 in long and weighing a gram each. Because the peppers are so small and easily damaged, machines don’t harvest these. People have been growing chilies for at least 7,000 years. They’re native to Central America, where Aztecs were believed to be the first to mash chilies into a liquid. They’d use the drops to help relieve tooth pain because of capsain’s anti-inflammatory properties. They’d also mix their chili mash with herbs and water to spice up their food. There’s one variety that’s native to North America, the chilapene pepper, which is about twice as hot as a cayenne. Christopher Columbus brought chilies to Europe in 1493, but people there thought they were too spicy. A few years later, Portuguese explorers took peppers to the Indian subcontinent. Locals there were already used to heat. They’d been cooking with their own native spice, black pepperc corns. Chilies added just a little extra kick. In the US, the first commercial hot sauce popped up in the early 1800s. It was made from cayenne peppers in Massachusetts. Enslaved people used hot sauce to make bland food more flavorful. And later, black Americans carried it in their bags because segregated restaurants required them to bring their own utensils, plates, and condiments. Something Beyonce referenced in her song Formation. I got hot sauce in my bag. Swag. But hot sauce wasn’t mass- prodduced until Tabasco hit the US market in 1868. To this day, the company has had a unique process. The team sprinkles salt on the peppers and uses a giant machine to mash them into a paste. This pump siphons it into white oak barrels. Some are 60 years old. Most of these barrels in here essentially are used bourbon barrel. Why? I don’t really have the answer. I know it works and we’ve been doing it 150 plus years, so I’m not changing it. A team works together to seal each one. One truckload will fill up to 110 barrels, but they can’t pack them to the brim because if you have too much pressure, sometimes those caps blow off. Sometimes the lids will pop off overnight. It’s a really simple fix. Just kind of move it to the barrel next to it. It can take 30 minutes to finish one row. The barrels don’t have a perfect seal, so workers pour salt on top. It lets gases escape while limiting oxidation. Salt on top is is just an extra protective layer. There is an imperfection that will help. The team stacks each barrel by Mash Origin. So this whole bay here going as far back to as you can to get to the wall is is about 1100 barrels of Columbia 2022. The mash releases lots of gases during fermentation, so a tiny valve on top helps relieve the pressure. You have to have some ventilation process or it’s going to explode. And that happens sometimes. It’s like a Tabasco ghost. They come in here at night and they pop the lids off and we come back and there’s six or seven we have to fix. After 3 years, the mash inside will stabilize, shrink, and darken in color. We can see that it was filled to about this level here. And you can start to see rings on side of that barrel where the mash is going down. Although it has shrunk, the aged mash is no less spicy. No coffee. Not yet. Not yet. But it is hot. So let’s remember this is 10 times more hot than actual sauce. Next, the aged mash is pumped into the blending room. Here, the pepper smell will hit you right in the back of the throat. I could say like getting maced, I guess, every day. It really hit you hard. That’s how I put my kids through college. So, I’m I’m good with that. I I love it. Morris Montgomery overseas blending. But he goes by Knuck. The Army veteran ensures all the mash tastes the same even though it’s coming from around the world. I try to do a three or four different countries and put them together. So it could be like a little Colombia, Peru, and a little Ecuador and Honduras. He pumps in vinegar and blends it all up for up to 28 days. 72 tanks mix at the same time. Knuck will take a sample for the lab to test for pH. And then this is finished to sauce and this is ready to go. Uh next step to the bottling floor. That’s where John Simmons comes in. And I’m also a member of the sixth generation of the Maloney family to make Tabasco sauce. John’s factory fills over a million bottles every day. From minis to the iconic 5 oz one, it also pumps out tons of different flavors from original red to habanero. Sriracha has been one of the company’s fastest growing ones. Today, machines do most of the filling, capping, and labeling. So, a bottle is going to go through in about 13 minutes. They gather the bottles and package them into cardboard boxes. We’re doing it really fast at like 300 bottles a minute. Next, the shipping room. We’ve got product for Germany, Japan, Sweden, Taiwan, the Canary Islands, South Africa. Typically, newly packaged products leave the warehouse within 3 weeks. [Music] In 1918, a man named Jacob Frank got inspired by Tabasco. He was running his own spice company in Cincinnati and wanted to see if he could do what Edmund did, but with a different kind of pepper, cayenne. He got his first batch from a farmer in Louisiana. And together, they started processing it into hot sauce. It was somewhat similar to Tabasco in its high vinegar to pepper ratio, but Franks had his own secret in the way he mil his peppers to help them retain their flavor. By 1920, he’d perfected his recipe and launched Frank’s Red Hot. We visited the biggest American hot sauce brand at its new home in Springfield, Missouri. We always have peppermash ready to be making Frank’s red hot all day, every day. That’s John Martins. He works at the spice giant McCormick, which bought Franks in 2017 as part of a larger acquisition worth $4.2 billion. So, what we’re looking at right here is one rail car, a peppermash that we are going to inspect, identify, and unload to make into Frank’s Red Hot. The cayenne peppers are grown in Mexico. They arrive here pre-mashed in these 20,000galon rail cars. We’re checking these seals down here just to make sure that no one has touched that rail car. John’s team has to measure the spice and viscosity of each batch so they can get the ratios just right for Frank’s Redhot. Then they attach a tube that carries the mash to one of these 5,000galon tanks. So we’re in the mesh tank farm right now. All 15 tanks in here are full. So this is what the pepper mash looks like before we convert it into Frank’s Red Hot upstairs. So what we’ll want to do here, we’re going to turn the agitator on just to get them moving as well. That keeps the mashed up peppers from separating from their juices. You can tell it really has a strong smell. This one might have a little more punch, so they dilute it with a milder batch. They mix them together in what they call the blend tank. Frank’s biggest secret is in how it mills its peppers. We have a unique process in the way that we make Frank’s Red Hot, which is part of what maintains the flavor of the pepper. Milling is what gets the sauce to go from this pulpy mash to this. Then workers perform what they call the slick test. This is what we do every hour. We perform visual checks to make sure there are no particles too big or too small in our sample so we have good product ready to be bottled. This is how it looks. So, now that we’ve made our Frank’s Red Hot sauce, what we’re doing next is sending it to our bulk tanks for storage. On an average day, the company makes about 130,000 gallons worth of Frank’s Red Hot. Here is one of our large tanks for storage. We’ll turn through these tanks over 10 times a day. If you want to come up here and take a look, I wish you were here because this smells amazing if you if you could taste it through your nose. If that doesn’t wake you up, I don’t know what will. From here, the sauce travels through a network of pipes into a different room where it gets turned into one of Frank’s 155 other products like its buffalo sauce or chicken dip. The company has 12 packaging lines. We make hot sauce into everything from 12 oz bottles that you see in your refrigerator, gallon bottles that you see at the restaurant or 300galon totes are all the way up to 45,000lb tankers. They can all be sent simultaneously through this maze of piping behind me. And to keep it moving, each of these machines has to run at a precise pace. This capper can close 100 bottles in just one minute. As we come further down the line, we’re going to pass through an X-ray unit. We’re going to make sure we’re only sending out quality product all day, every day. The facility pumps out about 20 million gallons of Frank’s Redot every year. It ships these all over the US and to over 48 other countries. Since McCormick bought the company eight years ago, it’s more than doubled Frank’s sales internationally. The Super Bowl is its biggest week as Americans load up on chicken wings lathered with Franks. In the US in 2024, people consumed 1.4 billion chicken wings the day of the Super Bowl. And Frank’s hot sauce sales are 25% of the entire hot sauce sales in the US during that time. 2.5 times more volume than any other brand in the hot sauce area. Tabata Gomez runs marketing at McCormick. We try to ensure the brand is present in moments that matter. We don’t have to push ourselves into a Super Bowl. We’re already part of it. The brand is also trying to compete with craft hot sauce makers by launching creative flavors like dill pickle hot sauce. In 2024, Frank’s also introduced $1 minis to ensure that we overcome that risk barrier. Hey, will I like it? Will I not like it? Should I use my money on that or not? Changing demographics have had an effect also on heat acceptance across because the cultures are starting to interconnect. In the 1990s, America was becoming more diverse. A wave of immigration introduced spicy dishes from all over the world and heat slowly started becoming more popular. I grew up in Mexico. My boyfriend is American, but he eats a lot more heat now because I bring that to the mix, right? You can never ask a mother to pick a favorite. When the Mexican hot sauce Cholula hit the US market in 1989, it blew up fast, eventually becoming the second bestselling hot sauce in America, behind Frank’s. In 2020, McCormack decided to buy it for a whopping $800 million. They’re not competing of each other, but they’re actually complimentary. So, it is very common that you will go into a household and find two of them. In recent years, hot sauce has become one of the most popular condiments in America. Between 2019 and 2021, sales shot up almost 22%. The global hot sauce industry that year was valued at about $3.3 billion, and that’s supposed to double by 2032. In the US alone, the industry is worth about $1.1 billion dollar with 93% of Americans saying they eat hot sauce. Chefs like Alex Delggo are catching on to this trend. The truth is when I moved to America, I came by myself with some friends and I was tired of uh eating dollar burgers. So, Alex started a restaurant called Easy Paella, named after the Spanish dish he often ate in his native Venezuela. I said, you know what? I am going to create a different paella. So, I need something that tastes like curry but and spicy at the same time. So, he turned to Hell’s Kitchen hot sauce that happened to be just a few blocks away. So instead of me creating a formula, I just went to Ron and he gave me this beautiful sauce that I use for a lot of my dishes. We add the rocking Rasa sauce. It’s a Jamaican coconut curry hot sauce that’s ranked at three out of six on Ron’s chili pepper heat scale. So it’s pretty spicy. the rocking raa sauce that goes around. You see that? It will be enough. Then we actually se very well and we serve it right away. We don’t want to cook the sauce. We want to make sure it goes fresh in the plate. Hot sauce enhance all the flavors of the paella. For example, the chicken paella is very nice. You can taste the saffron. You can taste the olive oil, everything. But when you actually put this the the sauce for those people who like spicy food, it’s it’s it’s like a magical moment in the mouth. Hold on. Heart rate’s about 130. What the? But eating hot stuff isn’t always a magical experience. Oh, I feel it. Did you feel heat? Extra hot sauce gets everyone crying the same on the YouTube show Hot Ones. Oh, no matter how famous you are. Guess what got me? God. Let’s take 5m minute break. Yeah. When sauces get featured on the show, their sales go through the roof in what’s been dubbed the Hot Ones effect. We have the founder of Heatness, Noah Chamber, in the building. Noah Chamberg provides the show with its fiery 10 bottle lineup. So, we’ll try and kind of yank around the celebrities taste buds and really give them something to respond to. This is the bomb. Beyond Insanity, it says. We try and think of the hot sauces as other characters on the show that they can interact with. He sources those flavors from all over the world. So, we’ll end up trying usually about 20 a week, which when you do the math, comes out to over a thousand sauces a year that we’re tasting. Noah also comes up with the recipes for the Hot Ones own brand of sauces. Our new Hot Ones Buffalo hot sauce. We look at, okay, what’s popular with food trends? What’s happening in the culinary scene? And then also, what are customers gravitating towards in the grocery store? What’s going to resonate with them? And then heat level is always important. Of course, he brought in levels 2, 3, 5, and 10. The mildest of these is the hot ones, the classic garlic Fresno. So deliciously tart. You feel it in your cheeks. But what stands out with this sauce are the Fresno chilis, which are like super grassy and fresh tasting. I wanted something classic that you could use on your eggs in the morning. Third in the lineup packs a little more punch. Let’s see my pouring technique. We see Sriracha is really having a moment and very popular, but we want to bring something new to it. Totally different aroma. So, what we created is a pickled garlic Sriracha. Then we wanted to add an extra little twist. So, we put some key lime juice in it. Sauce five in the lineup is Noah’s favorite. I’ll take a big porlo scalientes cuz I love it. Warm spices, cumin in there. So delicious. Smoky. The name Los Calientes came. One time I was on vacation. I sat there on the beach and I was thought out loud and I said, “How do you say hot ones in Spanish?” Los calientes. I said, “That’s perfect. We’ll go with that.” The part I left out of that story is like you sparked up a dub man. How do you say hot ones in Spanish? Last but certainly not least, the infamous, the notorious, the last dab experience. And it’s called that because this one has three forms of pepper X in it. Fresh pepper X peppers. It has pepper X powders. It’s also made with pepper X distillate. If you notice the clouds on the label here is because it just sends you places. Oh, that’s too much. When we were first making the last app back in 2017, I knew that Smok and Ed had another pepper up his sleeve. I wish I had eaten something first. I said, “Ed, I want to come out with the hottest sauce on the show, and I want to use your secret pepper.” And he said, “Okay.” We started working on the recipes. And when the recipe was set, I said, “And what’s the name of the pepper? We’re going to start working on the label.” And he said, “Oh, I can’t tell you just yet.” I said, “Okay, no problem. In the meantime, I’m just going to put pepper X as a placeholder. That is that is so delicious.” And I don’t know what happened from there, but the name Pepper X just kind of stuck and we went with it. Some people start sweating. Personally, I get the hiccups. Um, you invent that Pepper. Why? Smok and Ed is practically a regular on the show. We have Smok and Ed Curry, the sick twisted mind behind Pepper X and of course the owner of Puckerbutt Pepper Company. We’re here at the Puckerbutt video studio. Ed hosts challenges on his own YouTube channel, too. I’m smoking Ed Curry. I’m the president, owner, mad scientist, and chef at the Puckerbutt Pepper Company, and we’re going crazy. 3 2 1 go. What is this? We’ve seen him spice up some cupcakes. I’ve had this drunken pumpkin. It is amazing. So, of course, we had to ask him what else he’s put hot sauce on. Gelotinous bone marrow and hot sauce is just to die for. But Ed had never tried super spicy food until he got to college and ate at a Vietnamese restaurant for the first time. They gave me these little bird peppers. And when I ate that, it was like boom, the whole world changed. Cuz I I at the time I was a drug addict and alcoholic. And that was like my new drug. I wanted peppers. I got clean and sober uh almost 26 years ago and it’s been nothing but peppers since. Maybe a little nicotine, but nothing but peppers. Ed says peppers gave him a second chance and now they’re his life’s purpose. Look at the oil in there. Is it a happy coincidence that your last name is Curry? You know, the whole world thinks that I I changed my name, but my name is Curry. So yeah, God had a plan going on that we didn’t know about. [Music]