The Hot Squeeze Story (Part 2)

Hi Reddit, it's Sue. And if you have no idea who I am, I don’t blame you. But, a few months back I ended up at the very top of your frontpage after telling the story of my 8-year-old sauce business, Hot Squeeze.

It was a story that had everything in it -- action, romance...chipotle. And in the spirit of Reddit and its oddly cool penchant for sauce companies, I thought I’d tell you how things have moved along since then. Because a lot has changed.

Some of you may have heard my story -- but just in case, it kind of goes like this. About eight -- or nine-ish -- years ago, I built a sauce and dry rub company out of a successful catering business of mine. I did this thing called the Fancy Food Show, which is kind of a big deal in the food industry, and ended up in something like 2,000+ grocery stores over about two and a half years.

My sauce sold like crazy, but as is the case so often in life, “the man” got me down. You see, there’s these things called distributors that are basically the middlemen between you (the consumer) and me (the maker), and they like money.

They like it so much, in fact, that I found myself selling $12,000 in product and getting back maybe $500 -- and yep, that’s an actual figure from an actual invoice that I received. It wasn’t exactly what you would call “sustainable,” so I pulled out...of grocery.

(note: The above picture isn’t that exact invoice, but it’s pretty close to it -- $3500 in sales turned into 50 bucks)

Now, I’m not one to go down without a fight. So after hearing about a certain website called Reddit that had a thing for sauces, I launched a Kickstarter to sample out my Squeeze.

And it, uh, worked.

I got a distribution deal with a certain major Northeastern supermarket who cited “internet people” calling in and even landed a “handshake deal” with Kroger. And that’s kind of where my story last ended six months ago.

And while I wish I could say it’s been all butterflies and sunshine since then, it hasn’t. Three months after my “handshake deal,” I got word from Kroger that they were reneging, and I figured that that was it. Again.

But then something really cool happened. My online sales that I kept on expecting to just kind of fall off never did. The internet kept on buying, and some of my highest sales were coming from places like California and Oregon way over on the other side of the country.

For the first time in my business’ long life, I had real cash flow coming in.

So I expanded. My new employees ended up being young and hip -- okay, ‘hip’ might be subjective, but we’re definitely young.

A lot of them were in their 20s and some were even redditors, themselves. And they were surprisingly passionate and wanting of real responsibility -- so I gave it to them.

It was actually kind of scary giving up stuff like equity and big jobs to people that were so young (to me), and a lot of people tried talking me out of it, but so far it’s worked like a charm. The whole team has gone completely above and beyond the call of duty.

And so, with this new chapter in my business’ life, I wanted to change the look of my Hot Squeeze. I redesigned the packaging and the bottles and am right now doing this whole $5 only sale for a time...not that I’m trying to sneakily market that fact to you guys or anything.

Heh.

But seriously, thank you again, Reddit. You guys have pulled me out of of the frying pan over and over again. I thought this business was going to be gone by December and then January and then February, and yet, here I am -- exhausted and a little bruised on the ego -- but for whatever crazy reason, still trucking along.

This really is a magical place. A magical place with an arguably excessive amount of cat pictures, but a magical place, no less.

...oh, and I’ve got some cool stuff on the horizon -- like weird videos -- so look forward to that.

Much love,
Sue