The first three months of the year are grim

Many other small producers I know share this feeling. The “golden months” are behind you and you’ve mistakenly taken some downtime over Christmas and New Year. Now it’s January and… nothing’s happening. Not many sales, even less trade orders, no markets and nobody has cash to spend after the festive period. And if it was only January, that would be bearable but this horror show goes on in one form or another, for months.

By the time March is almost done, it’s not unusual to have contemplated every life choice you’ve made up until that point. I considered throwing everything, and myself, in the bin at this same point every year.

This year was a little different. I’d done very well at the Aberdeen Christmas Market and the business bank balance was healthy. But that money had to find us commercial premises because for Singularity Sauce Co Ltd, it was crunch time.

There were incredible collaboration irons in the fire, I’d secured some amazing retail opportunities and more were on the horizon. With greater production capacity, it could all work out. Every day I was stuck producing at home, the likelihood of doing all of these things would start evaporating.

My plan for filling the quiet few months was to solve this.

All I needed was a commercial kitchen.

Sounds straightforward right?

As a stopgap, I asked around about the possibility of another kitchen share. I’ve already spoken about the only kitchen share done to date. It hadn’t exactly gone well but with the right people, it was still an option on the table. There were two options but sadly, neither worked out on grounds of space and practicality. I’d have been working in less space than I had at home and of course, paying for that. I’m forever grateful to the two local businesses who took the time to show me around and discuss shared arrangements and costs. If nothing else, it confirmed the only real solution for the business. A premises of our own.

Next stop was Aberdeenshire Council. I knew they operated a number of units and just by driving through a reasonably close industrial estate they managed, I knew a bunch of them were sitting empty. So I got in touch.

There were only two units they were prepared to talk to me about. One was immediately too large and expensive for me so I arranged to go and view the other one.

It was a little large and cost a bit more than I’d budgeted for. It also wasn’t in very good order. I spent some time looking at what could be done financially and after a period of time buried in a spreadsheet, I figured it could be possible. It would require a bit of risk but raising the extra revenue was in my plans and with the extra capacity, I had the means to do more, produce more and make it work.

That’s when I started getting ignored. I had to push over and over for basic replies to emails and all through this period, I felt like an inconvenience to them. It was beginning to feel like the planning department situation over again. Eventually they told me the unit in question was under offer. My time felt wasted and we were already in Feb.

As for the empty units, I’d drive by them often and they remained empty. Yep, even the one I viewed.

I have no idea either.

Raising Kapitaal

I needed something to cheer me up a bit. Because one month with little income, the usual outgoings and being no further ahead with a kitchen, had caused me some concern.

I needed to raise a bit of cash and do something to cheer myself up a bit.

I made 100 bottles of Scottish grown habanero infused Scottish rapeseed oil. The rapeseed oil was sourced within 25 miles of the home kitchen and it gave me the opportunity to use some fancy bottles I’d bought a while back for another project that didn’t go ahead.

I called it ‘Kapitaal’ for three reasons:

1. I needed to raise capital for whenever the move would happen

2. Aberdeen was once known as the oil capital of Europe (I found it amusing)

3. I thought it sounded cool when I gave it a “K” at the beginning and doubled up on the “a’s”

All of those bottles sold very quickly. Except for a few which I kept or gave to friends. I grew the Habaneros myself, which meant my costs on this product was the rapeseed oil and a small run of labels only. It did cheer me up. Which at this point, was very much needed.

In the end, this product remained a one off. A talking point until the end for sure but a deviation from the core product type. Until I could get the hot sauce business operating out of commercial premises, I had to remain focussed. Until you know, I got so disheartened with things that I needed another tangent to amuse myself with.

Like this Tepache I made not long after for example…

Most common question first: What is “Calienté”?

Sorry for explaining if you already know. I fielded this question so many times, I need to head it off here and now first. In simplistic terms, it means “hot”. This is the hot category of the awards. The one that secretly, every hot sauce maker wants ;)

Singularity Sauce Co had done well to rank in the top hot sauces lists curated by Bauce Brothers over the years. This year, they’d stepped things up and formulated the whole process of public voting into an actual awards. The Craft Hot Sauce Awards in fact. There were 5 categories each with 5 shortlisted products from the national public voting process. Guest judges were brought in to pick the winner from each category.

I hold this up as the best hot sauce I made. It’s the one and only 7 Pot Pineapple.

Yes, I still have the trophy.

You can watch us laying waste to the best of the UK, 2021 right here. See? I told you it was good!:

That’s warm, have a great day

This was a sauce deliberately engineered in a attempt to give Hairy Spice stomach cramps.

Now I know that sounds like I deliberately wanted to hurt him, I didn’t.

I’d become friendly with Dean but as a hot sauce maker with a reputation at the hot end of the scale, I felt it was my duty to try and slow him down. I’d tried a few times by sending him particularly hot things and I’d noticed that heat itself was no real match for him.

This time I added sourness and volume to the equation. A 1L bottle ought to do it, right? This was to be my final attempt at trying to make him concede defeat.

As for the name, well those words came directly from the mouth of the big guy himself when trying the last evil concoction I’d tried to slow him down with. That was a little creation called “Why do you have to ruin everything?” Here’s the exact moment it happened:

And did it slow him down? Of course not. The man’s tolerance for extreme condiments is god tier.

Wrapping up 2021 with record market sales

I spent every weekend in December until Christmas, at Aberdeen Christmas Market. After a fairly disappointing run at the end of November, December arrived and it was like a switch had been pressed.

Not only did the full 6 week period smash all sales records, so did each individual weekend in December and so also did each Friday and Saturday throughout December. It was absolute chaos. I loved every minute of it.

I found myself making hot sauce all week and then being almost entirely sold out by the end of each weekend again. Throughout December, I had to limit the stock levels on our website so we’d have enough sauce for the market. Remember the Chipotle infused Maple Syrup and Redcurrant & Habanero Jelly from the last post? Both sold out entirely before the middle of December, along with everything that wasn’t nailed down. At one point I was selling experimental hot sauces with temporary labels just to meet demand. I was selling 5L jerry cans made for catering and every bit of merch I had too. Every Friday and Saturday I got home with almost no voice left.

That fear I felt in November that i’d maybe done the wrong thing by trading at the market had disappeared entirely.

Looking at my constant queue and from speaking to hundreds of people, It appeared that all the work I’d been putting in to grow the reputation of the brand was paying off.

But now it was time to call it a day for 2021 and head home for Christmas with the family. The business now had a very healthy bank balance which would set us up well for 2022.

Because I still had a premises to find and that was by far, the most important item on the to-do list.

Sometimes I liked to go a little left field. You’ve already seen that with journeys into hot honey. I had two more things I wanted to make and Nov 2021 felt like the right time. Neither was done on a whim, both had months of plotting and even picking behind them. It just felt that this point, ahead of Christmas was the time to move on them.

Trees give us good things

A simple idea that had been rattling around that head of mine since I first had a go at making hot honey. The one thing about hot honey that bothered me a little, was it wasn’t vegan. I’d gone to some trouble to make sure everything Singularity Sauce Co made was vegan and that was one of the reasons I didn’t force through a Hot Honey product all those years ago.

I had a look at three syrups: Agave, Birch and Maple. I ruled Agave out fairly quickly. It felt just too sweet and not much else. Incidentally, I used Agave syrup to add sweetness to many products over the years. Birch was what I really wanted to use but finding it any larger quantities or at anything like a reasonable price proved an impossible task. I wasn’t so sure the world was ready for the flavour of Birch syrup but I liked the provenance of it and that it was unusual enough to cause a scene.

When it came down to it, Maple Syrup was available in bulk quantity direct from Canada and it has an ideal flavour profile for what happened next.

It would have been expected for me to just throw ghost chillies at it and make something of a talking point but for this, I wanted something more. So I began the process of infusing it with the best chipotle I could get my hands on. That super smokey blast balanced with a little heat and the maple syrup flavour was a winner. It was a real labour of love to make it but if you were one of the lucky ones to pick up a bottle, you know all that effort was worth every minute in production.

There were just under 100 bottles of it made. Never to be repeated again.

Redcurrant & Habanero Jelly

Months before I started cooking up this mayhem, I’d been out picking redcurrants with my family, because back in summer I had an idea for a Christmas special. Christmas specials from hot sauce makers had been awash with cranberry sauces for years. I hope i’ve established that doing the same thing as everyone else wasn’t the Singularity Sauce Co way. So I turned my focus to the delicious redcurrant, of which there were millions on hand.

I couldn’t just buy berries or buy in some pasteurised berry puree. Oh no, I decided we should go and pick every single berry by hand. It took us all afternoon to fill bags with them. I got them home, spent a very long evening washing and de-stemming them before portioning them into 1KG freezer bags. Those were launched in to the freezer for later in the year.

When November came, I was probably still washing the berry stains off my hands from summer but those berries had a date with a mountain of sugar, plenty homegrown habaneros and a splash of lemon juice. This was the first time I’d made a jam/jelly of any description. A more sensible person might have started small to find their way. Not this guy. I made 10KG of it. It’s a simple enough process but when pouring that molten liquid into jars, wondering if it will in fact turn to jelly, that’s a moment of worry for the ages.

I was very pleased to discover that it did thicken. It then sold very quickly indeed. It was understandably INSANE with cheese, finding it’s way on to many cheeseboards over the next couple of months. Fantastic in toasties, on peanut butter sandos and with heartier meat dishes. Yes, it was great on ice cream too. Tales of people stirring it into their Christmas Day gravy made me feel I’d done something good.

This was one of the products I was asked to make over and over. As it turned out, this was the only batch ever made. Around 80 jars in total. Not my last jelly though, you can stay tuned for the Hot Honeyberry Jelly that came later down the road.

Storm Arwen decided hot sauce production by candle light was a thing

As the latest storm to batter us at the end of 2021, Storm Arwen was by far the most destructive. It took down trees and power lines all around us. The devastation of it is still very visible in the surrounding woodlands almost 5 years on.

Power cuts were frequent and long. The power companies struggled to keep up and get homes re-connected. It was sometimes days without power but as said in a well known book and movie, the spice must flow.

So under the cover of darkness, I looked out candles, torches and my trusty camping stove and got back to work. It was a much slower process but we got the job done until the electricity came back on.

I got hung up on yellow bags

The first paper bags I bought for putting peoples purchases in at markets were plain white paper bags with a handle. I bought a stamp so I could add the logo to them. I hated them. They showed none of the fun, excitement or intrigue of hot sauce and they made no impact at all. So I tried natural brown paper bags. I hated those ones even more.

It was going to have to be yellow.

A red stamp completed the look and in the latter months, a black stamp. By the time that black stamp came into play, there was a similarity with a very special retailer in London. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that same retailer was a stockist of Singularity Sauce Co.

Singularity Sauce Co started becoming far more visible in crowds at markets and events.

These were an important part of the Singularity Sauce Co brand identity.

The Times Christmas Shopping Guide

In 2021, The Times (yes, that one) got in touch asking if I could add one of our hot sauces to their official Christmas gift guide. It cost nothing and put the brand out in front of millions of people. Jalapeños & Apples sold out rapidly, followed by a very enjoyable spike of website sales across the range.

First experiences of Aberdeen Christmas Market

It was on, it was off, it was on again. Above all else, it was windy. Very windy.

This was the first occasion we attended the Christmas Market in Aberdeen as a trader. There was significant cost to having a stall for the full six weeks of it. A fee well in excess of anything I’d paid out before and I had to think long about it.

On the other hand, we’d been having a successful period of website sales after The Times feature and there was cash in the bank to cover it.

The end of November at the market wasn’t all that great. I had fear that I’d spent a lot of money on being at an event that might not be worth all the effort and the expense involved. That fear was about to be launched into space when December arrived. I’ll cover that off in the next post.

November 2021 saw us turn two years old as a Limited Company. We’d had plenty of highs and lows through year two. If you’ve been with us for the story, you already know. I thought I’d be learning a lot about how the business would grow and develop.

And I did learn that.

I also learned a lot about how I needed to grow personally and professionally. Th…

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After god knows how many months of being messed around, a sequence of events happened which should have resulted in Singularity Sauce Co. moving to it’s very own commercial premises in the Aberdeenshire countryside. This was going to be the moment it all came together.

Spoiler: It didn’t.

As a very quick catch up, some time ago we’d found a suitable building reasonably close to the family home which could be quickly and easily converted into a commercial kitchen with warehouse space. We’d agreed terms with the landlord and we thought that only two things now stood in our way:

1. We required Scottish Water to connect the building to the water supply

2. We required planning permission for a change of use to the building

Our belief was on getting those two items checked off, we’d be good to go.

If you’ve been following along, you will know of the frustrations I’d had with being absolutely stonewalled by the Aberdeenshire Council planning department.

Down below the paywall, you’ll discover what happened. It was as disappointing as could be. A real tale of moving the goalposts and many, many wasted months of frustration.

It probably isn’t the reason you’d be expecting…

An update on Environmental Health

COVID was ongoing and it was time for another “remote inspection”. I’d made a point of sending my up to date HACCP documentation, cleaning schedules and other relevant documentation, unprompted to the EHO for each of the years that remote inspections were a thing. Nothing had been flagged up and the process was very easy. They were happy with our processes and procedures. And we once again got the sign off required.

I kept meticulous records of every process, every supplier and every batch of hot sauce I made. There was traceability in each numbered batch back to every ingredient used and the supplier it came from.

This was massive overkill against what the EHO requested, but I liked the challenge. Truth be told, HACCP itself was also a step up from the basic risk assessments they required.

I was determined that Singularity Sauce Co. would operate as a proper business. When I secured premises and scaled up, I would already be fluent in the much higher standards of food safety management. I thought it best to implement this stuff now, rather than when I’d likely be swamped with all the management/admin around operating a premises.

I got myself ahead of the game.

Down below the paywall, I’ll unpack the details of why we couldn’t move to the commercial premises we’d spent years trying to get into. There’s a bit of gore down there. It was a real punch in the guts. Paid subscribers get access to all the info which might be a little too juicy to be widely available. Also, all the recipes and processes we created while running the most famous Hot Sauce Co ever to have come from North East Scotland.

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My mash size experiments had all been done in 1L and 2L glass jars. That way I could keep an eye on them closely and see what happened day to day. I had my ratios in order now and it was time to scale them. That meant moving away from glass and into vessels which weren’t see-through.

The ultimate test of my own belief. Could I ferment a huge amount of mash at one go, blindfolded?

Below the paywall you’ll find the methods/recipes for my core mash products. These products were used as the fermented base for a significant percentage of the hot sauces made by Singularity Sauce Co.

For example, the mashes explained below became the base for the entire HET SASS range, PI-RO, Miso Hot Sauce, Hot Curry Ketchup and a perpetual list of small batch, experimental hot sauce.

Moving to mash ferments was the ultimate game changer. Learning how factors like temperature, time and salt content could all work together to develop a range of flavours from essentially the same ingredients opened up limitless potential for new hot sauces. Developing the underlying base flavour of the mash itself, created the tangy, funky flavour that was unmistakably Singularity Sauce Co and developing layers on top of that gave us ultimate room to manoeuvre.

If you fancy starting your own hot sauce business, my tip would be to start at this point and take advantage of the methods discovered here.

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I said yes and then started panicking about the “how” part.

Who ordered 1250 bottles of Het Sass?

That title goes to “Scotland’s Number One Modern University“, Edinburgh Napier University. They were making welcome packs for their new intake of students and Het Sass was seen as a nice addition to each pack. So they got in touch and gave me a heart attack. And I loved it. I loved the idea, I loved the reasoning, I of course loved the size of the order but more than all of that, I really loved the idea that so many people would be getting their first taste of Scotland and/or Edinburgh and they’d soon be holding a bottle of Het Sass in their hands.

Panic Stations

It would take every bit of capacity I had to complete that order and even then, I wasn’t sure I could do it alone. You have to realise that although Singularity Sauce Co might have looked something of a polished outfit, the reality was it was one lone person doing every job in the business. Me.

Looking at the timescale, I knew I would only get one shot at this. There could be no margin for error. Even a single bottle breaking would be a big problem.

Straight away I couldn’t put the delivery of this sauce into the hands of a courier. I’d have to deliver it myself to avoid breakages. Fortunately for me, my pal “ice cream Andy” had a van and a similar appetite for chaos as I had. For the price of a night out in Edinburgh, he got involved and solved my transportation problem up front.

Can I even make that much hot sauce in that timescale?

Firstly I had to figure out how long it would take to label, seal and box 1250 bottles. I knew I had to be finished by 18th July which was also a problem because I was booked at a farmers market that day. So I had to be finished by 17th July. (Spoiler: I didn’t manage that, my wife and daughter had to save my skin by rolling up their sleeves on the Sunday. It was them who saved the day.)

Knowing when it all had to be bottled by, I could plan the rest of production. I could see there was just enough time for the fermentation phase but I had to move fast. I ordered all the ingredients required and filled every fermentation tank I had. Even then, I had to bring in a 60L tank I’d borrowed from Fierce Beer.

The process of making/pasteurising the sauce and getting it into bottles is the fastest part of the process. I was getting 200 bottles out of one “cook” in my largest pot and a second batch of 120 bottles out of a second pot. I’d got the lot done by turning around 4 pots of sauce.

Labelling, shrink sealing, applying BBE/Batch stickers and boxing it all up came next. And that took ages. Way longer than I’d thought. Seeing me clearly in distress, my family jumped in to help.

We were all done by 9pm on the 18th thanks to “Team McAulay”.

Moving hot sauce across Scotland

On the morning of the 19th, Andy and me loaded his van with the most amount of Het Sass that had ever existed in one place until this moment, and drove south to Edinburgh. This precious cargo couldn’t wait so we drove directly to Napier University.

We delivered the sauce to the amusement of the customer…

Summary

I had become used to being the whole business and sometimes I needed to be reminded that I needed the help of others to get everything done. This was the first crystal clear example of exactly that.

I’d never been good at asking for help. It was a personal failing that I started working on at this moment. Even all these years on, when people offer assistance, my first instinct is to say “thanks but I’ll manage”. Those words just fall out of my head before I really understand what I’m saying.

This order would never have gotten finished if it wasn’t for my family helping and it would never have gotten to Edinburgh on time and in one piece, without the help of Andy. If I hadn’t accepted help, I wouldn’t have been able to write my most favourite article title yet…

Out of nowhere, I had a wholesale order from a business in Berlin. This was huge! I didn’t know if there was a right or wrong way to go about this so I just boxed up a load of sauce and sent it on its way. The sauce arrived and the sauce was now for sale in Germany. This would then open a few other doors later when Singularity Sauce would start occasionally appearing at chilli festivals around Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany.

Singularity Sauce Co probably missed all sorts of processes and procedures making this happen. Probably broke a few rules too, but it was quite a moment!

The devil makes work for idle hands

I was doing everything I could to try and get us into commercial premises. Space was tight at home and demand was on the rise following all the recent successes and good fortune.

I was facing up to the fact that it wouldn’t be long before I’d have to start saying no to people.

For the moment, I had finished making as much sauce as my cashflow and storage capacity would allow. I was fully stocked to the rafters. I had the most amount of new ferments on that I could house in my fermentation tanks and that lot would be quietly doing their thing for another 30 days yet. That lot had a purpose which I’ll explain in the next post.

I turned my attention back to the ongoing commercial premises/planning application/water connection saga and you’ll find that update down below the paywall.

This was the time of tangents.

Let’s make a spicy beer

I’d been making sauce with Fierce Beer for a while now. So when they turned the collaboration tables on me and suggested we were going to make a spicy beer, I was just about as excited as it’s possible to be.

I had a stash of Purple Naga Viper Brain that I used to make the PNVB & Blueberries hot sauce. They’re still some of the best tasting super-hot chillies I got my hands on.

Fierce immediately dismissed the chilli ratio I suggested. I couldn’t be trusted with a decision like that for their beer. They knew best and it’s probably lucky that I listened.

The artwork followed suit from the hot sauce and the cans looked fantastic. Even though the beer was mild compared to how it might have been had they listened to my foolish suggestion, it was still reported as being quite full on. It was a curious sour.

I’m completely biased of course, but I really enjoyed it.

Quite a lot of it.

Let’s make a spicy ice cream

I’d been up to no good with Aberdeen’s “Ice Cream Manny” for years now. The latest product was the most polished of them all.

Our plan was to ripple PNVB & Blueberries into a base blueberry ice cream and that would of course be utterly fantastic. But Andy and me aren’t like the others. So we came up with the idea of adding lemon coated popping candy to it as well. That would ensure this was one of the most memorable ice creams you’d experience.

We called it “The Quickening”. A reference to the film, Highlander. That moment when one immortal takes the head of another and they power up. It just felt right.

And the label artwork? You KNOW we were giving STALLAN a shout for that one. Singularity Sauce Co was the first hot sauce producer to use his artwork on hot sauce and now we were the first to use it on Ice Cream.

Magnificent. Isn’t it?

Let’s make spicy pickles

Who doesn’t love dill pickles? Well, I do, so listen up.

You’ve probably bought dozens of jars of pickles from the supermarket and there’s nothing at all wrong with those. There’s something different about making them yourself though. The process of putting it all together, regularly eyeballing those jars, the wait for them to be ready. It’s a bit of theatre and that experience is worth the effort alone. Raiding that jar on an hourly basis afterwards is the icing on the cake.

I made two kinds:

1. Standard Dill Pickles

2. Moruga Scorpion and Cardamon Dill Pickles

I made them with baby cucumbers and I loved them both.

I would also make Moruga Scorpion and Cardamon pickled carrot sticks. These were fun but that’s for another day.

My alternative recipe involved big heat from Moruga Scorpion chillies and that unmistakable cardamon flavour. These were special. Sure, go ahead and use them just like a regular dill pickle but at least once, try finely chopping them and mixing them through natural yoghurt with a little splash of that pickle brine. Get that on a kebab and have a nice day.

To be honest, these pickles went a little mushy after a couple of weeks in the fridge. They still tasted great but the texture started dropping off as they became less crunchy.

I’d go on to make the second version of these using lacto fermentation and they held their crunch a bit longer, but in this exact moment, it was a traditional pickling brine I made and used.

Recipes down below the paywall for our paid subscribers as usual

This is where our free readers leave us. Down below the paywall, you’ll find an update on our proposed move to a commercial premises. You’ll also find the recipes for those pickles. I still make pickles today.

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They asked three producers to help. With sauces stocked from the best around at all times, I was absolutely stoked that they’d asked me to make the hot sauce :)

I chatted with Jen and Glenn and we looked at what was missing from the range of anniversary hot sauces.

We landed on a Bajan style sauce.

I’d never made a Bajan sauce before so I was completely dialled in for the challenge. I had plenty of Mustard experience and I knew this sauce would feature some of that. The style was Bajan but the execution would be all Singularity Sauce Co. It was going to rock. I’d make sure of it.

By now, I had a long relationship with Hop, Burns & Black. They’d been stockists of mine at every turn and were very responsible for the fast growth I saw throughout London in the early days. They also got me worldwide attention by featuring my Reapers & Mangoes sauce on Hot Ones. I had nothing but mad love for them at all times.

When they trusted me to make something important to them, I made sure this sauce was equally as important to me too.

And I started researching, planning, testing, tasting things and writing notes.

There were ingredients I landed on quite quickly but it was the chillies I decided on last. Because I didn’t want this to be a red sauce, I wanted it to be lighter and warmer in colour. I considered using yellow Scorpions but that would have been massively overpowering. I looked into yellow Scotch Bonnets too. But I wanted to engineer the flavour and heat delivery a little differently. Bonnets would have delivered a fruitier flavour with a slower, creeping burn. I wanted more immediacy and for the heat to tail off quite quickly to allow the mustard to do its thing. It had to be Yellow Habaneros.

I was quite prepared to turn the entire universe yellow by using fresh Turmeric in there. There would also be Onions and Marjoram in the mix.

I would be fermenting the base of this sauce for 30 days. White wine vinegar would come in to play for that typical Bajan tang but as always, I wouldn’t let vinegar dominate. It was the Singularity Sauce Co way.

Not traditional choices across the board, granted, but Singularity Sauce Co weren’t ever about straight-up copycat styles or doing the same as everyone has always done. I wanted this to be it’s own experience. Unmistakably Bajan in style but delivering that unique Singularity magic.

The full recipe is available to paid subscribers as usual, it’s down below the paywall.

This version of BURNS remained for sale at Hop Burns & Black until the final days of Singularity Sauce Co. It was one of the sauces I’m most proud of. Taking a traditional style and giving it a new edge was something I’d really enjoyed doing.

That I was asked to make it for lovely people who had been so supportive of my sauce co through thick and thin will stay me with me forever.

I didn’t always get things right but I fucking smashed this.

This is where our free readers leave us. Down below you’ll find the recipe for the 7th anniversary BURNS sauce, a summary and a heads up of what’s coming next.

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Things were moving for Singularity Sauce Co. With our recent twist of luck in Selfridges, a chance appearance on Hot Ones and the ongoing success of Reapers & Blackberries, I wanted to make a little more noise in the US.

I knew I couldn’t just appear and be taken seriously so I’d started exploiting every opportunity to get mentioned, spoken about or reviewed. It wouldn’t be a quick thing and I’d been making tiny moves for a while. The Hot Ones outing kicked things up a gear for me and I had to make the best of that opportunity for the brand.

Making more of a nuisance of myself in the US

The US has always been the largest craft hot sauce market on the planet. Breaking into that was a future ambition. The scale of the task made it impossible at this point. I figured that without manufacturing in the US, it was very unlikely to happen at all. And given that I still didn’t have a commercial kitchen in North East Scotland, it was simply too ambitious.

Fake it till you make it

One thing I very much could do, was to begin positioning the brand for if and when a real opportunity came. I’d make sure the name and the sauces were already something of a curiosity in as many corners of that huge market as possible.

I’ve already spoken about my collaboration sauce with Luke’s in New Jersey, having my sauces enshrined in the worlds largest hot sauce collection in Arizona and of course, that my outing on the Hot Ones lineup had bought me recognition across many parts of the US. I had also shipped sauce to hot sauce reviewers in Florida, Utah, Texas and New York. Seeking out reviewers with higher audience numbers and good activity on their videos.

Any opportunity there was for me to make a noise at some kind of scale was fair game. And the whole Scottish Hot Sauce angle worked because “brand Scotland” is one of the strongest there is and nobody expected the juxtaposition of “Scotland” and “Hot Sauce”.

Building even a small amount of brand recognition now would deliver a foundation to build on later.

You’re up California

My next point of focus was the international hot sauce competition held in California each year.

I figured the idea of a Scottish Hot Sauce might raise some interest out west.

I believed in my sauces enough to put them up against anything made by anyone. Why not compete with the very best?

Even if it was just to see how valid my apparent arrogance was.

How to send sauce to the US without tearing your hair out

It was taking weeks to get sauce over the Atlantic. It was expensive, there were delays at customs and two shipments had already vanished during their journeys.

I spent some time working out how to do this properly. I had to register with the FDA.

That way, I’d be able to ship hot sauce into the US without attracting the wrong sort of attention at customs. It was actually quite easy to do the registration. I mean, the US government website was a bag of spanners but I got through it.

I’d spoken to DHL about being the carrier for this and they could make things very easy and fast. It cost a fair bit to ship but this way I was all but guaranteed plain sailing through customs and I could now get sauce to anywhere in mainland US within 48 hours. Often next day.

I now had all my paperwork and logistics in order.

Now it was time to formally enter the competition and send Reapers & Blackberries out to California to see what they made of it.

I had little optimism I’d get very far in the competition. The best I could probably hope for was a mention on social media or a name check on YouTube along the way. And I was honoured to get those with all the other sauce makers from across the planet.

Staying up late

There’s an eight hour time difference between Scotland and California and there was no way I wasn’t watching the livestream.

I got some snacks, went heavy on the coffee and settled in for the long evening ahead.

Keeping excellent company

It was fascinating seeing the different sauces from all over Europe, Australia and North America. Some incredibly inventive concoctions and many sauce makers I’d never heard of before. Even as an exercise in finding out who was doing what further away, this was extremely valuable.

Fun fact for you. I went on to make an extremely popular Miso Hot Sauce. I got the idea of using Miso in a hot sauce from this very competition.

Paid subscribers will get that recipe along with all the others they already have access to and all the rest still to come.

How the awards ceremony ran

Category after category, there would be a countdown through the shortlist of 10 finalists, finishing with the top 3 who got a very cool looking trophy. The 1st place winner taking the ultimate bragging rights. There were additional categories too, including “worlds best small batch hot sauce producer” and “worlds best label”.

They take this very seriously.

The main event (for Singularity Sauce Co.)

When it was the fruit sauce category, I watched as the sauces and makers were announced and to my surprise, saw Reapers & Blackberries finish in 4th place.

Only one place outside the trophy positions!

For a first outing into such a huge international competition, I’d done pretty well. And I was sure to let everyone know.

I had a taste for this now

I’d enter this competition a few times over the years, encouraging other small batch sauce-makers in the UK to take part also. The cost to enter and to ship sauce out there was a commitment but I kept coming back to one thing…

Singularity Sauce Co had (almost) made its mark in California. I wouldn’t rest until I’d made top 3 in any category. I learned what I had to from the 2021 competition and I started planning for 2022.

Think the local press would even mention this?

Of course not.

But, I’d been catching the eye of other smaller, indy reporters covering local culture with more positivity and excitement.

POST were a breath of fresh air

I was using my own channels to tell each story and I was seeing results. My own posts across social channels were being shared by organisations and people I didn’t know. I was receiving orders and wholesale enquiries from new customers. I had people get in touch to collaborate that I didn’t expect. I’ll cover each as they hit the story.

One channel in particular, regularly quizzed me about what was going on. They are focussed on championing the cultural scene around Aberdeen. They had more care, attention and accuracy than I’d experienced from more traditional local press. And that felt important to me.

Meet POST. Two guys doing things off their own backs, for the benefit of of Aberdeen and the region. Here is an interview they did with me as Singularity Sauce Co.

Until…

I got a mention from someone I was already aware of. He goes by the name “Hairy Spice”. He’s a madman. But also an extremely nice fella. He’d bought some Reapers & Blackberries and was now splashing it around online. He had nothing but good things to say and all of that made me smile from ear to ear.

See, Hairy Spice has a reputation. He’ll happily chug whole bottles of hot sauce and other less sensible condiments and he has a follower count to let everyone know that he’s the real deal.

Back in 2021 he had over 100k followers compared to my 100 or so. But now, because he was talking about us, that follower count as on the rise. It was clear that I could no longer treat TikTok like a second class platform.

Every now and then, I’d try to keep up with him as he did strange things with hot sauce.

Hairy Spice went on a mission to grow my TikTok follower count to over 1000 and he smashed that quickly! He said lovely things about my sauces and we got to talking. We spoke a lot over the years, hatched some inadvisable plans, worked together on things and honestly, I just really like the guy. I still chat to him on and off to this day. He’s one of those rare types you meet online who turns into something of a friend.

He was absolutely invested in the hot sauce scene and he’d try to blow up as many makers and products as he could. He’s quite literally “taken one for the team” for many of us over the years.

If he likes what you’ve made and thinks others would too, you can expect to see a video about it.

Audiences have always loved him. He’s got presence because he’s authentic. He’s not being hired to be an influencer, he’s not putting on a show because someone is paying him to. What he talks about is real. He does it because he loves doing it. He loves hot sauce. You can tell he enjoys every minute of it. Maybe not the stomach cramps. Definitely not the chilli in the eye thing…more on that in the video down below.

In those early days of interacting with him, there were loads of fun and exciting moments. But there were two stand out moments for me.

Have you tried Reapers & Blackberries on ice-cream?

The moment I asked him this, I could just feel that I’d maybe gone some way to making his day.

I’d been splashing fruity face melters on ice cream for a while but I had to remind myself that this wasn’t considered normal. (People still look at me in a funny way for suggesting it, years later in 2026.)

Hairy Spice would probably enjoy the experience…

Hairy Spice would probably take this too far…

…and probably injure himself along the way.

“Singularity Sauce Co make my favourite hot sauce”

Some of the greatest words I ever heard. At the time, Reapers & Blackberries was on a mission to change perceptions of what hot sauce could be.

Not just because it was being made in North East Scotland, but because it wasn’t yet another clone, or vinegar heavy disappointment. Oh it was damn hot but it lead with heavy blackberry flavour. It put itself about and it put Singularity Sauce Co on the map.

I’ve already written about it a few times and you lucky paid subscribers already have the recipe available in a previous post. I’ll be writing about it some more because it was one of the most important hot sauces Singularity Sauce Co made.

I may even take my ego for a walk and suggest it was one of the most important hot sauces ever made in the UK.

Seriously, I don’t even want to mention his name. It’s really helped me to think about this another way. I got to hurt him right in his stupid face with a monstrous condiment.

Mark, how’d you like to have your sauce on Hot Ones?

There are questions that have caught me off guard before, but at the time, this one nearly spun my head off my shoulders.

I remember answering the phone call…

Which was lovely. I’ll keep saying this forever, Jen and Glenn at Hop, Burns & Black are the nicest people anywhere. Today Jen was on a top secret mission.

It was COVID times and the world was still largely difficult to navigate. That meant the Hot Ones crew couldn’t get the official hot sauce lineup into the country for the episode they were shooting.

So they did what everyone should do when they have a hot sauce issue that nobody else can help with, they called Jen at Hop Burns & Black. And Jen helped them put together a custom lineup based on sauces which could be sourced in the UK.

Jen was trying to fill the number 10 slot in the lineup (That’s the hottest one in the lineup. The main event.) and when it came to big heat, her instinct was to dial my number. And I have always been honoured that it was my number Jen called.

Because I had a couple of sauce options available.

Which ones hotter? Reapers & Blackberries or Reapers & Mangoes?

There wasn’t ever much in it but at this particular moment in time, Reapers & Mangoes was a good bit hotter. So that was my suggestion for the Hot Ones lineup. Fortunately Hop Burns & Black always had a good supply of my sauces on hand so it wouldn’t be a problem getting it where it needed to go.

Secrecy and waiting

Because this was Hot Ones, that meant the episode was recorded well in advance of it airing. As such, I was sworn to secrecy until it went out. I can’t tell you how long that made each and every day between Jen’s call and the show finally broadcasting on YouTube. I watched the episode with my family. I couldn’t sit down the whole time. It just felt like a dream.

The rest is history

Now, because of the behaviour of that particular celebrity, I didn’t get as much of a legacy out of this experience than I might have had, but when it comes to bragging rights, no other Scottish hot sauce co has ever supplied the hottest sauce in a Hot Ones lineup.

I still hold that accolade.

Gordon Ramsay was the first Scottish guest on Hot Ones but Singularity Sauce Co predated him as the first Scottish brand.

I had dozens of enquiries from sauce collectors in the USA looking to complete their Hot Ones collections. Sales enquiries from across the planet followed. I even had a chat with the Hot Ones crew and First We Feast about potentially featuring Singularity Sauce Co in a more regular lineup down the road.

Oh you’d better believe that Reapers & Mangoes sold out almost immediately.

This remained a talking point for me in almost every conversation about the business. Here I am still talking about it a year after Singularity Sauce Co closed its doors for the final time.

And all because Jen decided to call me. Thank you Hop Burns & Black, I’m forever grateful.

People who say things like “you make your own luck” haven’t heard the story of how a category buyer from Selfridges came to be in touch with Singularity Sauce Co.

In later years Selfridges flooded their roster with countless small batch hot sauce brands. Back in 2021, there were only three craft hot sauce brands sitting on the shelves of one of the worlds most famous food halls.

Singularity Sauce Co was one of them.

This is the story of how that happened.

Many years back I’d set myself a rule to only check my emails twice a day. I can’t remember if it was my 10am or my 3pm check that day but one email caught my attention above all others.

Because it was from the Selfridges domain.

It was an introduction from a category buyer and they were interested in learning more about my range of sauces with a view to stocking them in the food hall.

REMAIN CALM.

A whole day passed until I was convinced this wasn’t some kind of cruel wind up or a big mistake. I very humbly replied with my product list, complete with descriptions and wholesale pricing and with the most pressing question of them all…

Where did you hear about Singularity Sauce Co.?

After years of strict email discipline, I was now checking my inbox about twice a minute. And the reply came quite quickly.

The buyers name was Beth and she had already put the sauce in front of her boss. They felt it was a great fit for Selfridges and wanted to know more. Having supplied the product info, they didn’t get back in touch again for another couple of days but in that time, I had unravelled the mystery of how HET SASS had ended up on Beth’s lunch.

A coffee shop?

At that time, I had only sent sauce to one coffee shop in London and they’d only ordered 12 bottles of sauce as a trial to see how they sold. It was tiny little place, but also a beautiful place. It turned out that Beth got coffee there every morning on her way to work. And one day, something new caught her eye.

No amount of strategy or marketing delivers luck like that.

I guess the sauce didn’t sell well in that coffee shop because they didn’t order any more.

The repercussions for Singularity Sauce Co over a single bottle that did sell can’t be understated though.

I did email the coffee shop several months on to tell them the story. They were genuinely happy for me. I still didn’t get that second order from them though.

Can’t win em all.

Ok, Selfridges are really keen

I had a call with Beth and tried to answer all their questions like I’d done this a hundred times. I hadn’t of course. There was a strong reek of “fake it till you make it” in the air. They wanted me to send the full range to their team for testing/tasting and they’d make a decision based on the outcome of that.

I packaged up three bottles of every sauce I had (except Buy Ice Cream, they wouldn’t have understood that chaos and It wasn’t available at scale anyway) and I sent it all to Selfridges in London.

I also emailed over my HACCP documentation, my EHO sign-off and confirmation of my insurance.

Now it was a waiting game. My anxiety levels were crushing.

The decision

Just over a month later, I had an email with confirmation that they wanted to progress things. They wanted to stock four of my products:

• Reapers & Blackberries

• Jalepenos & Apples

• Habaneros & Carrots

• Het Sass

Remember that guy in North East Scotland who said he didn’t have any interest in Het Sass because it was “too parochial”? That very sauce was now going to be stocked in one of the greatest food halls of them all.

I was given supplier access to their back of house system to input product details for each of the four sauces. Selfridges appointed a wholesaler to manage the logistics. The initial order came soon after. Six cases of twelve bottles for each sauce. 288 bottles in a single order was nice. I had to make sure I always had at least the same again in stock at all times as we didn’t know how soon they’d likely re-order. Turns out it wasn’t long at all. The order size fluctuated based on which products were selling faster/slower than others but it was a healthy order each time.

So all very positive from the outside.

This wasn’t without its problems. A costly issue raised it’s head over time when the wholesaler started regularly throwing a spanner in the works. I’ll cover that down below the paywall.

I supplied Selfridges from April 2021 to September 2022 when I was suddenly not able to because of a decision made by my local Council. I’ll get into that in full at the time.

This is where our free readers leave us. Down below the paywall I’ll get into the issue mentioned and another disappointing turn of events. There will be the usual summary and a heads up on what’s coming next. Because it was high time we caused a celebrity some discomfort.

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I’d been looking for a particular style

The first time I saw Stu’s artwork on a skateboard deck with Doric Studio, I knew I’d found my guy. That discovery set me off down a rabbit hole investigating the artwork produced by STALLAN. A local Aberdeen artist with the kind of dark side I could entirely get on board with.

I was smitten with his art.

Still am.

In this post, I’m covering the Buy Ice Cream artwork but over the years, we’d work on a whole lot of stuff together. From hot sauce labels to ice cream labels and even the finest hockey shirt you’ll ever see. We’ll get into that over time.

So I sent him a message and we chatted a bit. He seemed keen. Then I sent him the worst brief I’d ever sent anyone…

The brief for Buy Ice Cream labels

That first brief I gave to Stu set the scene for all the others to come. I got progressively less prescriptive as my trust in his ability continued to grow.

And let’s face facts, that first brief was an absolute shocker.

I didn’t send those words in isolation of course, they accompanied this image i’d found somewhere online all those years ago now:

And Stu absolutely nailed it

It was so much more than I’d ever hoped for. I could see it’s application straight away. For the first couple of days, I’d just open it up and look at it. I knew this would sit on a transparent sticker, directly on the glass.

The sauce was very far from being ready when I got the artwork, so there was time to pop round to Milk Print Studio (sadly, another COVID casualty) in Aberdeen to get some t-shirts screen-printed.

Stu brought the darkness, I made the hell to welcome it to the world of hot sauce labels

While all of this was going on, I was fermenting things, making my own chocolate and generally getting the sauce together. The recipe was the same as the previous version (paid subscribers already have access to that). This version had more of everything. More scorpion heat, more chocolate, more fruit.

There wasn’t a lot made each year. Making the sauce was an involved process and my aim was for it to sell out as quickly as possible. This was already a cult sauce. I wanted its scarcity to make people question if it actually existed at all.

It was very much made with my most loyal customers in mind.

Those who’d had it before knew it was coming and what to expect. For the 2021 batch, almost half of it was reserved before it even made its way into bottles.

The big reveal

The artwork was already out there on 50 screen-printed t-shirts so the illustration itself wasn’t a secret. I had decided on keeping the bottle clean with only the illustration applied on a transparent sticker directly on the glass. Of course, legally I had to cover all the bases of ingredients, volume, manufacturer and allergens etc, so I designed some cardboard tags which covered all requirements. Every one was manually applied with an elastic band by me.

The result was a unique and very desirable bottle. If there had been a sensible way to print the illustration directly onto glass bottles, that would have been the only improvement I’d have made. That costs a fortune though and I just wouldn’t ever have the volume to justify it.

Like I say, this was never intended to be a widely available sauce.

This one was for us.

Summary

Working directly with an artist was a different experience. Not better or worse, just different. I enjoyed it massively. This was the start of a relationship with Stu where a whole bunch of art was created for Singularity Sauce Co.

I made those introductions and watched over time as Stu’s artwork started appearing on hot sauce labels all over England. I received some unwelcome chastising for “giving your sources away to your competition”. The same business advisors calmly explaining I was “shooting myself in the foot” and I bet there are even some of you now questioning my actions?

Let me explain…

I wasn’t a gatekeeper to other peoples artwork or design. I never directly employed any of the designers and artists I worked with over the years. I never once asked for exclusivity.

I also wanted all of them to succeed. Closing doors on them wouldn’t achieve that.

Working with me gave them a new market to benefit from. Not a single one of them ever refused to take on work from me in future because they were working with my competition. They knew I had their back and they knew I’d happily open doors for them where I could. That was a win for all of us.

When it’s all said and done, the first piece of STALLAN artwork to grace a hot sauce bottle was done in early 2021 with Singularity Sauce Co. for Buy Ice Cream. Other sauce-makers chose to follow. And who could blame them? Stu’s work is incredible.

Next time: It’s a tale as old as time. How supplying a tiny coffee shop in London with only 12 bottles of hot sauce lead to an outrageously high profile stockist hunting us down. See ya then!

Transatlantic Habanero Express moved to my standard sized bottles

My collaboration with Luke out in New Jersey was crazy popular but it was a bit of a pain to make and people were getting through it more quickly than ever. Until this point it had been packaged in 100ml bottles so the obvious thing to do was to start putting it in 150ml bottles so people ran out of it a little more slowly.

365K Got the Mark Kemp treatment

I’d been making 365K with The Coffee Apothecary in Udny for a while now. It was full of Blueberries, Ancho, Scotch Bonnets and Coffee. It was growing in popularity and it was time to replace my slightly half arsed labels.

In stepped Mark Kemp, my former design agency colleague and also a friend of Jonny at The Coffee Apothecary.

Mark really cut loose with this one, getting down and dirty with some graphic design fun. I gave Mark our logo and typeface. He laid out the grid and set the type like all good designers do and then he went to town.

He gave Jonny a paintbrush, some paper and a glass of coffee. He then had Jonny paint the “365K” with coffee until they had what they wanted. That was then digitised, vectorised and used in the design. This was fantastic. It had a bit of each of us involved in the label and it really set this hot sauce apart on shelves.

Alright Graeme? Fancy designing a couple of labels?

I’ve known Graeme Smith forever. A very experienced graphic designer who designed the first proper brand identity for a wee brewery round these parts called Brewdog. Graeme has some chops. I reckoned he’d have fun working on hot sauce labels.

I was right.

7 Pot Pineapple

I didn’t have any labels at all for what had become my favourite hot sauce, 7 Pot Pineapple. (Paid subscribers already have the recipe for this one and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I always have).

So we started there. My only two requirements were that as a base colour, it had to be proper Pantone neon pink and it absolutely must make use of holographic foil. Other than that, Graeme was free to do what Graeme does best.

When I saw the artwork before it went to print, I could only imagine how it would come out but nothing prepared me fully for its absolute magnificence. I had a specialist printer in Aberdeen called Windmill, produce them. I knew they’d do a better job than anyone of the holographic foil. My favourite hot sauce just also received my favourite labels. We won’t talk about the cost of them. I think i’ve mentally blocked that part out.

Just look at them though!

PI-RO

This was my latest collaboration. A sauce made with The Gaff in Ellon, sadly no longer around either. As this is the first time I’ve mentioned this sauce in the story, paid subscribers know they’ll find the recipe down below the paywall ;)

I had been determined to make a sauce which was a good fit for Pizza and this was it. It was heavy on fermented peppers, had loads of black pepper involved, a good slug of Maple Syrup for sweetness, lemon juice and a smokey hit of chipotle to round it all off. An immensely popular sauce, looking good it’s new labels from the hand of Graeme Smith.

This became an award winner in time but we’ll get to that later.

This is where our free readers leave us. Down below you’ll find the recipe for PI-RO, a summary of how things were looking and a big heads up on what’s next.

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New year, New…oh for fuck sake…

After 5 mins downtime over the festive break, it was straight back into the same living hell I’d just clocked off from. COVID wasn’t done with us by a long way yet and with that, everyones favourite lockdowns were back.

2020 had been hard. Mentally difficult. Trying to stay positive and see the current situation as a temporary one was tough. That got progressively more difficult as the situation most certainly didn’t improve. It was about now that I started noticing other small producers closing their doors. Not just locals either. Other sauce makers from all over the UK I’d been chatting to had hit the point of no return and were calling it a day. I did see the market opportunities as they did that. Much as some of my competitors saw the gap left when I had to call it a day too. Nothing wrong in that. You’ve got to take your opportunities.

Did what I did to stay in the game

Knowing how close to the wire things had gotten in 2020, I did what I had to do and arranged a further £10,000 bounceback loan to head off the undoubted cashflow horror that was heading my way once more.

Thankfully all repayments were deferred again but now with a balance of £20,000 to start paying back a year from now, I really had to meticulously plan for that if this continued any further. I decided there and then I wouldn’t borrow any more through the scheme, even though they’d have happily given me up to £50,000 in total, no questions asked. It really was ridiculously easy to borrow this money. There has to be a point of acceptance though. If I couldn’t grow to the revenue needed, it was probably going to have to be the end.

Deep in that head of mine, there was hope. I remained optimistic that one day COVID would be over and I could turbo charge things to get back on track. I could see big opportunities and even with my initial revenue projections from 2019, things would be ok.

As long as they didn’t get any worse.

It was around this time that cost increases caused by Brexit started to become a serious problem. Those cost rises continued from this point until the end. Slow clap for all the Brexit voters. I still don’t think many can see the damage done to small business in the UK.

I wonder if anyone would like my mustard?

I could have wallowed in pity and misery. Or I could cheer the fuck up and do something positive by making something memorable…

Because for a while now I’d been experimenting with making a mustard sauce unlike anything that had gone before, or has come since. Pretty sure it’ll never be beaten. I know how arrogant that sounds but there are two sides of the argument. Those who tried it and those who didn’t.

Only one side matters and they’d fight you to the death for more.

Readers of previous posts will be aware of how I was using retained brine from some ferments to make new and interesting flavour experiences. It was this mustard that really showed the potential of that method. That was the secret to it’s totally unique flavour. I’ll explain all in the recipe, down below that paywall.

There wasn’t another product like this on the market. I of course didn’t invent mustard and I also didn’t invent hot sauces using mustard either. See Bajan style sauces in particular. I’ll return to that style of sauce when I cover the 7th Anniversary sauce I made for Hop, Burns & Black in London further along the road. But for now, I was flexing some heavy duty mustard skills and to seal the deal, I’d need some exceptional labels. I hired Paul Mullen of Bough Studio to do what Paul does best. This was the first Singularity Sauce Co. label I’d not designed myself and just look at how magnificent it still looks all these years later.

Everyone should hire Paul.

A new collab emerges

First, a little context…

There was a small group of businesses which all started around the same time in my area. One was Bare, a refill shop owned by Kirsty, another was The Gaff, an artisanal pizza place owned by Mike. We all got on really well, spoke to each other a lot and shared our battle scars often. Sadly all of us ended up closing along the way. For a while, we were comrades, fighting the good fight. We all supported each others businesses, shared each others social posts etc and supported each other as best we could. There are some business organisations who could learn what practical support actually looks like from how we helped each other along.

Bare were lifetime stockists of our products. I’d occasionally do pop-ups in their shop which brought my crew right into their place of business and let their customers meet one of the producers on their shelves. That was good for everyone.

My most memorable popup involved me turning up with as much of my own stock as I could bring, selling the lot, then selling all the stock in Bare and also having to raid The Gaff for all their stock to sell too.

And it’s The Gaff I’m going to speak about now.

Mike made some of the best pizza not just in Aberdeenshire, but anywhere. When he asked me if I’d make them their own house hot sauce, it was immediate “yes please” but it would happen as a proper brand collaboration between The Gaff and Singularity Sauce Co. And if I was going to do this, it would be done right.

I’ll get into all the ins and out’s of it in the next post to give it the space it deserves. Paid subscribers can of course expect to find the recipe for it there too :)

Paid subscribers will find the mustard recipe down below the paywall. l dare you to make it better. You’ll also find the usual summary and a heads up on what’s coming next.

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Bringing the curtain down on 2020

This is the 30th post in the series. So far I’ve covered 2015–2020 but here and now I’m going to think back to how I felt at the end of 2020. This marked the LTD company turning one year old. I’m going to keep this positive even though there were significant challenges and roadblocks from the problems with finding commercial premises to the ongoing COVID pandemic.

I want to focus on what was achieved, the improvements, how we were being received and how things were looking ahead of 2021.

Improvements to my processes

Fermentation had now taken over the majority of everything I was making. I had largely been working with brine ferments and that wasn’t going to change…yet.

Learning my craft with mash ferments was starting to kick things up a bit. In terms of flavour, there wasn’t much difference. Maybe things in a mash would have a slightly more intense flavour but the big win was really in efficiency of volume and in stability of the ferment. I could make a lot more sauce from mash than I could from brine. But brine ferments were giving me an additional unique ingredient. The brine itself was finding its way into more products in place of vinegar. Soon you’ll discover it’s role in one of my surprise products of 2021. One that made me think hard about the whole direction of the business. So I resolved to continue working with both methods of fermentation.

At least for the time being.

Where growth did and didn’t happen

Being honest, I was well behind where I expected to be at this stage. World events had put a huge dent in my ambition but I was where I was. The larger growth through events and markets couldn’t happen although when I could get out and sell face(mask) to face(mask), it was really rewarding. The growth into retail I’d hoped for hadn’t happened either. I had a number of existing retailers and I’d managed to pick up some more but honestly, I’d hoped there would have been a lot more. Nothing I could do about that either.

The largest growth was coming from my D2C work through the website and social media. Order sizes were of course a lot smaller than to retailers but the profit margin was higher and the order numbers were higher too. That gave me a lot of admin and dispatching to do. But it also kept the lights on.

What others were saying about us

This was what was keeping my optimism high. Against the backdrop of all the uncertainty, people were loving what I was making. There had been awards and accolades. Those were great for the ego and for keeping me from launching everything, including myself, into the sea.

I hadn’t seen much online negativity either. Before I put myself out there and started banging the drum, there were of course nerves that I’d be on the end of a kicking soon enough from the old keyboard warriors but surprisingly, I’d had maybe only one person who had nothing better to do with his life than to tell me my Jalapẽnos & Apples sauce was the worst hot sauce on the planet. That just bounced right off me. I recognised it for what it as immediately. Having spent 20 years in the design industry, he’d have had to try a lot harder than that to put me down.

My hopes for 2021

Of course, I was hopeful that the world would settle into some form of state where I could push on with my growth plans. I was really enjoying doing collaboration work and had found a pattern which worked well for every side of a collab. I wanted to do more. Both with other small producers and with some other big names.

I still had my hopes pinned on getting into commercial premises so I could really push on and uncouple the business from the family home.

That was going to be the key to increasing production.

Until I could do that, I just had to work on increasing demand and orders. You know, give myself an almighty production headache. Because I believed that with a good bit of growth, I might unlock some assistance from business organisations to help with things like employing people and exporting to some of the countries I was already making a nuisance of myself in.

There would always be new products. I had books full of recipes I’d been working on for years.

The future felt uncertain but I was willing to do everything to make it positive.

Down below the paywall, you’ll find a “state of the business” update with a financial overview of where I thought we would be and where we actually were. Why we took on the £10k bounceback loan and how it all fitted together to allow the business to survive until the end of 2020.

This is where our free readers step out. Our paid subscribers get access to the recipes and additional detail of running the most famous craft hot sauce company to come from North East Scotland between 2015–2025.

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Fermentation was a big part of my life by the end of 2020. Our family home always had weird bubbling jars in many corners by now. I was fascinated by the magic of it all. Whether through combinations of ingredients, the ratio of salt used, the temperature each ferment was stored at and the length of time ferments were left for, I was often amused at how the same ingredients could yield slightly different end flavours. This kept my mind racing and kept me experimenting.

By now, it was very unusual for a ferment to go bad on me. In earlier days, I’d seen mould appear under some conditions which of course meant, flushing the lot down the toilet. But I had things pretty dialled in now. Using slightly higher temperature to kick start a ferment and then reducing that temperature to slow the process gave nuances of flavour from otherwise identical ingredients.

Some things would get a very quick ferment just to adjust their sweetness/sourness and other things went on for 14 days, 20 days and most commonly for 30 days. Some went longer to 45 days, 60 days and 90 days. It was in September 2020, I filled a jar and a tank with ingredients and called it “The Future”. The plan was that this would make the first sauce when I got into commercial premises. That first sauce idea didn’t actually happen and “The Future” aged in that environment with only the occasional top up of the tank airlock water for over 4 years in the end. I’ll come back to that further down the road.

Until this point, one ferment made one sauce. That’s how I’d developed each recipe with fermentation of the ingredients a full part of the process. I’d had an idea in the middle of summer to start combining different fermented products to open up an even larger world of flavour possibilities. If my “one ferment, one sauce” was like a single malt whisky, the idea of the mixed fermentation was to create something like a blended whisky. Felt like a good thing to play around with so I went ahead and added even more bubbling jars to the family home for a while.

The result was a limited edition series of 5 sauces. Every one of the sets sold in a heartbeat and the leftover individual bottles disappeared at the next farmers market I was allowed to go to.

Finding new ways to work with fermentation kept things interesting. I didn’t feel there was too much benefit to continue the limited series but this was the moment I figured out how I could be hugely more efficient with the HET SASS range in particular. Had I not been playing with this idea, I might not have had that realisation until much later. I’ll get to that later.

And of course, this little adventure had to have it’s own logo. Just a simple mark to visually explain each sauce was a combination. I had planned to use this mark again as an extension of the Singularity Sauce Co identity when collaborating with others but I felt that was a bit extra. Collaborations already had each collaborator logo on them and adding another logo for the sake of it felt unnecessary. Shame though, because I did like that little mark.

For now, here are the 5 sauces made:

Council headaches continue

We were Getting to the end of the year and for most of it, I’d been waiting on a decision from Aberdeenshire Council about planning consent for our proposed new commercial premises. It all just felt wrong. Like nobody was actually doing anything. I got in touch with our local councillor to ask his advice and to ask what the hold up could be and if anything could be done about speeding things up.

He got stuck in to the problem for me and raised it at various meetings on my behalf. I really valued his advice and input and that he was fighting my corner for me. The actual decision wasn’t down to him and he wasn’t in the council planning department so his input was to continually press on my behalf, which he did. He showed great patience throughout when I occasionally vented my frustrations and concerns to him. He was a calm head and a solid ally throughout. For the first time in the process, it felt that something was actually happening.

Spoiler, it would take another year until any decision was made. Yep, having spent most of 2020 waiting on a decision, it would take until the later months of 2021 for the application to be voted on. More on this down below the paywall.

This is where our free readers step out. Our paid subscribers get access to the recipes and additional detail of running the most famous craft hot sauce company to come from North East Scotland between 2015–2025.

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A short re-introduction

I wrote previously about Reapers & Blackberries but as a quick overview if you’re new round here or just can’t be arsed reading the other post, here are the headlines.

Reapers & Blackberries was part of the Singularity Sauce Co core range. Three sauces using a local ingredient, fermented with other goodies to produce an exciting and unusual hot sauce.

Of the three core sauces, this is the one that got me the most attention. Not because it was the hottest sauce on the planet, although it was very hot, but because I’d done something magical with the flavour and market positioning of it.

That time Reapers & Blackberries was named the 4th best hot sauce in the UK

We’d already had some great national exposure when HET SASS made the list of top 100 best hot sauces in the UK the previous year. There was no way I wasn’t asking for Reapers & Blackberries to be considered in the next years honours. And when the organisers did the huge amount of work to create that top 100 list, I wasn’t surprised to find it included.

I was surprised to be told that it was 4th on the list.

From all the amazing sauces being made in the UK at that moment, making the list at all was huge for our national exposure. Being named in the top 10 would have been a dream but Reapers & Blackberries made it into the top 5. And that gave it the attention it deserved from the UK Hot Sauce scene.

Quite the achievement for a guy working out of his home kitchen in North East Scotland.

Then it was awarded a 2 star Great Taste Award

I’d seen those great taste stickers on many different products during my regular visits to deli’s and other indy places I was hoping would stock my sauces. I figured a star would help me sell into places. I registered on the Guild of Fine Food website so I could enter my products.

Looking at the cost of entry, I chose to only enter one single product. So I entered the one I thought had the best chance of getting a star.

Approximately 30% of products entered will receive a 1 star award, 10% receive a 2 star award and 2% receive a 3 star award. I figured I’d give it a shot and see if Reapers & Blackberries would make the grade.

Because I’m the way I am, I wanted to know why that was the big achievement the Guild of Fine Food seemed to believe it was.

I asked some questions.

In 2020, there were 12,777 products submitted to the awards. 1294 products received a 2 star award. That meant Reapers & Blackberries just made the top 10.1% of all products submitted that year. Top 10% of 12,777 products is a nice thing to think about.

More about this award and our top 100 listing in our summary below the paywall

Was this the best sauce made by Singularity Sauce Co?

Frankly no, but also, yes.

Flavour wise, I made better sauces over the years but in terms of putting us on the map and getting the brand out across the UK, this was the champ. Even today, almost a year after the closure of the business, I’m still asked about this sauce. It still comes up in conversation. I was recently at the Northern Lights Beer Festival in Aberdeen. Last year I was there as Singularity, selling hot sauce. This year, several people stopped me to talk about Singularity Sauce Co and this one came up in every conversation.

Why I believe Reapers & Blackberries was popular

Reapers & Blackberries was just different to other hot sauce at the time. As UK craft hot sauce grew, the focus was very much on replicating other sauce styles and brands from other parts of the world. As an observation, it still largely is. There’s nothing wrong with that and I’m not being critical of others, I mean let’s face facts, some of them are still in business and I’m not.

I’d always wanted more from Singularity Sauce. I wanted people to be excited about hot sauce and this one was the very epitome of that. And finally, there was a properly hot and extremely flavoursome UK hot sauce, equally at home on grilled meats, game, cheese, salads and of course…ice-cream.

It grew in infamy but I believe I got the positioning of it just right for the market it was built to capture. Like almost all the sauces made over the years, there was no compromise on taking as much time as required in fermentation to get the taste experience right. There were no cut corners in the ingredients used. There were no shortcuts here at all.

Because of that, the cost of producing this sauce meant it could never realistically make it into larger retail. It had no hope of a supermarket listing and I was perfectly fine about that. I used that fact to my strength when selling it in to artisan stockists. It was perpetually sold out due to the 30 day fermentation stage. I could have doubled or tripled down on it and made a lot more but it’s scarcity made it more desirable than any marketing campaign or ad spend, ever could.

But it doesn’t have to be infinitely scarce for you. Paid subscribers already have the recipe and process to make it. It’s over to you to keep this sauce alive, if you want more of it. And if you’re not a paid subscriber yet, you know how you can get more of it too ;)

This is where our free readers step out. Our paid subscribers get access to the recipes and additional detail of running the most famous craft hot sauce company to come from North East Scotland between 2015–2025.

From the kitchen

Reapers & Blackberries

This recipe is available in this previous post about Reapers & Blackberries.

Summary

I went on to have several gripes about the Great Taste Awards which I’ll cover a later date. Serious concerns about the judges feedback and also the prohibitive cost of entering every product for a small producers like me. If I remember correctly, I think it was around £70 per product. In addition the requirement is to send 3 of each product entered. For a guy trying to make ends meet while the world burned around us, that’s a significant outlay. With 6 core products at the time, It would have cost me over £420 to enter plus 18 bottles of hot sauce I couldn’t then sell, plus shipping. Every product which didn’t receive a star would mean a financial loss of £70 + 3 products. Speculating one product only to see how I got on was the sensible decision for me at that time.

Getting the local press and food & drink scene to take us seriously had been an ongoing battle. It was like that to the very end. I’d receive coverage and exposure from other parts of the world but the local food & drink writers never really gave us a chance. Over the years I’d learned to accept that. Something about not being able to be a hero in your home town. But Singularity Sauce Co had just won a 2 star award at the Great Taste Awards. Surely that was newsworthy enough even for a basic mention in the local press? I had to go mob handed with other producers who’d won stars that year and try everything to get them to understand that local people making local products to the betterment of the regions reputation in food & drink was something to be proud of and something people would have an interest in. I did get a tiny mention in the end but I’d decided there and then I wouldn’t put myself through that frustration again. They knew of Singularity Sauce Co and they knew how to get in touch. The next time a journalist reached out to me was in the days following the notice of the liquidation of the business. I gave them the same respect they’d shown me over the years and gave them nothing.

The 2 star award gave us a boat load of new enquiries from across the UK. Not every enquiry lead to a sale. Reapers & Blackberries was an expensive sauce to make in terms of premium ingredients and time to produce it. The RRP put it squarely in the “expensive” bracket (around £7 per bottle at the time). Stockists would have to be sure they had the right customers willing to spend that for a bottle of hot sauce at that time. There were orders from across the UK with the most significant coming from a group of artisan butchers shops throughout London. They consistently ordered 60%–70% of every batch I made for the next year. They had zero problem selling it above the RRP either. That worked well for all of us.

But it wasn’t just the orders of Reapers & Blackberries which came. That 2 star award had just positioned Singularity Sauce Co as a trusted maker of hot sauce. Orders from new and existing stockists ramped up for all products.

And there had already been an uptick of website sales following the Top 100 listing. I was now reaching a much wider audience of hot sauce lovers. To this audience, the “industry” recognition is what helped rather than the Great Taste Awards.

Doing well in both gave me good traction in my primary market of Hot Sauce lovers and also in wider indy retail to people coming new to craft hot sauce in the UK.

Next up, a small mixed fermentation product that had been rattling around my head for a while and I’ll dip back into the latest with my council frustrations. See ya.

So much for a quick and easy decision. The landowner had underplayed just how awkward a process this can be. I mean, they’d been through it many times before and would have known that. I hadn’t. I believed it would be a straightforward process and it was now already clear that it wasn’t going to be.

Alarm bells should have been ringing when the landowner insisted that my name went on the planning application rather than his. I mean why on earth would that be for the best? Unless there was some history between the landowner and the council that I wasn’t aware of…

By July, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be an easy ride.

So at this point in time, there was no movement from the planning department. I’d put that down to the world being in the bin with everyone having much more important things to deal with as COVID continued to impact everyday life.

But that wasn’t the story after all.

Because plenty of other businesses were getting on with things. There seemed to be a problem I didn’t know about. I was in no immediate hurry to move in to a premises. The trading conditions had made the prospect of taking on a commercial premises much more daunting. It was still achievable under the deal we’d struck though. I decided to see what happened over the next couple of months and maybe we’d be closer to a new home by then.

Neither does a mains water connection

Then there was connecting the building to the water supply. It seemed that Scottish Water were in no hurry what-so-ever to get that done for us. There had been no movement at all from them and the landowner told me they hadn’t been able to provide a connection date either.

Three months on from making an agreement in principle with the landowner, there had been no progress at all on either the planing consent or the water connection.

And again, I wasn’t in any hurry. There was so much uncertainty around and unless trading conditions improved, the sauce co may yet be forced to close.

A new Environmental Health process

I had a new EHO but I couldn’t meet her because in-person inspections had been cancelled during the pandemic. We chatted by email and on the phone. They were going bigger on process, documentation and data recording. I’d had all of this dialled in for a while through my HACCP plan. This was a good chance to stress test that and make sure all my documentation got the clean bill of health each of my in-person inspections had received to date.

I guess everything was good because I submitted all my documentation and was immediately granted a pass. That felt good but…too easy. Was the EHO actually reading and appraising the contents of the documentation or just making sure it existed?

I just had to trust the process and I knew if there was a problem, they’d be in touch. Time to get the head down again and just keep doing what I’d been doing.

Boxes could still be made quickly

Mark Kemp is a friend and former colleague of mine. I spent several years under his charge at an Aberdeen design agency and those were some of my most enjoyable years in agencies. Every now and again through this story, his name will pop up.

I asked Mark if he could help me find a box manufacturer.

I needed more professional boxes to ship the sauces in. I had decided on boxes of 12. So I’d need a stable outer box with dividers for 12 bottles inside. I also needed at least the logo on the side of the box. I didn’t have barcodes at this time so just a basic design would fit the bill. That box would fit both requirements for shipping ecommerce orders and for shipping to businesses.

This is the point that Mark took control. He put me in touch with a manufacturer and let us do the money dance between us. Mark just went ahead and did the design/layout work for the job too. A short while later, 1000 flattened boxes arrived at my house on a pallet. I could have spent a long time contacting various manufactures, messing with mockups/signoffs and Mark just took most of this right off my plate. I’m forever grateful to him.

Summary

A really strange period for the business. I felt really stuck because there was no action on the proposed new location but at the same time, I was nervous about making that move with the way things were in the world. Financially it would have been fine but the initial dramatic drop off through my events and hospitality sales channels had been alarming. If things got worse or something like that happened to my ecommerce channel, it would be the end. But staying optimistic, with the work i’d done to bolster my performing sales channels, when the others eventually came back, I would be in a stronger position than before COVID. I’ll return to this thought a few times because it turned out to be true.

I now had dealings with Aberdeenshire Council on two fronts. With Environmental Health as usual and now with the Planning Department. My experiences with the EHO had always been great. I’ve written about that previously. My current experience with Planning was disillusionment. I had no idea if they were doing anything or if things just took this long or if I should have been doing more. It was new and confusing. I wasn’t getting any helpful assistance or clear instruction. World events meant I was a bit more relaxed about it but I had expected better to be honest. I felt I was being ignored. If anything, I felt abandoned.

I did now have some very cool new boxes though.

Next up. Enough of this misery for a while. Reapers & Blackberries made it’s mark and also made our name in many more national stockists. See ya next time.

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