There are a lot of ways to make hot sauce cheaper. You can cut corners on ingredients, thicken it with gums, boost shelf life with preservatives, and make everything taste “consistent” by dumping in artificial flavor. You can use powdered versions of real ingredients. It's inexpensive, efficient, and gives you better control of your raw inventory.
We don’t do any of that.
Every bottle we make starts with whole ingredients. Actual fruit, real peppers, fresh citrus. If you can't buy it at a farmers market, we don’t use it. No powders, no extracts, no concentrates. We roast the peppers ourselves. We hand wash the blueberries. If something needs to be thickened, we use kudzu. That’s it.
The truth is, this kind of sauce costs more to make. It takes longer. You get less yield. And the batches aren’t always perfectly identical, because that’s what happens when you work with real food. A jalapeno from July won’t taste the same as one from October. We don’t fake that away. We work with it.
We’re not trying to scale into something industrial. We’re trying to make sauce that tastes like someone gave a damn when they made it.
You can see it in the texture. You can taste it. That’s the whole point.