I may have mentioned in the past, but as others have noted, being a chilehead who loves hot sauce, particularly a chilehead on a budget and who is not getting comped product, can be a challenge. You have basically brick-and-mortars, sections of grocery or specialty stores or online. In many areas, brick-and-mortars are hard to come by and even when they do exist, such as a few around in the Salt Lake City area, the stock is so badly in need of rotation that you can frequently have a sauce that is spoiled or that has its taste severely modified and compromised by age. Unlike wine, hot sauce does not do particularly well with age, especially those with no preservatives at all, save for what salt and vinegar is in there...which is generally not enough to do the job.
After having mined all of the specialty sections of every place I could find within approximately an hour driving radius of Salt Lake City, as well as the existing brick-and-mortars (most of those appear as posts in these pages), I ran into an empty well...that and the fact that I could not get anywhere near the selection of some of the great sauces I'd seen discussed at some of the various chilehead informational spots online. So, like any good red-blooded American, I turned to Amazon to see what they could offer. Their selection is probably the worst of any online retailer, since food items are still relatively new to them and what is there is grossly overpriced. The shipping threshold admittedly is lower (still $25 when I first started looking, now $35, depending on the source), but with such an obscene markup, it was hardly a value. To date, I have yet to buy anything from this purveyor and it seems less likely I will.
From there, given the somewhat recent Black Friday/Cyber Monday wave that has hit the actual hot sauce vendors themselves, timing happened to coincide with this and I was able to take advantage of specials offered by Blair's, CaJohn's and Torchbearer. All of them, I'm pleased to say, conducted themselves well and I have no complaints...save that you can wind up spending a lot more with one particular manufacturer than you had otherwise intended, in order to get to that vaunted free shipping.
From there, it was on to some of the aggregate providers online. I can say with certainty that none of them that I've found are the one true good source. I have used Peppers.com probably the most, but they're frequently out of stock of a number of bottles and their selection seems at times to be almost whimsical. Their pricing, however, is structured well, free shipping is at $75 and the packaging that it comes in is excellent. It happened they were out of stock of a number of things I wanted this year, in fact, which caused me to look around and try out Hot Sauce.com. Again, packaging was excellent and they had the most of what I wanted, though they also were far from perfect. Pricing was about right in line, though slightly more than Peppers.
I get it; selection is hard here, with vendors adding and deleting sauces seemingly constantly. Add to that a shelf life, a somewhat small (though expanding) market base and perhaps a lack of historical data to draw from by way of predicting where the sales will go and it definitely proves to be challenging, since probably everyone is also price shopping. Speaking for myself, I also took a look at Insane Chicken, iBurn, The Hot Sauce Stop and Mo Hotta. While I know everyone can't carry everything and some of the smaller sauce makers probably don't have deals, none of those I mentioned were enough to convince me to place an order.
Selection, while hard, is really the big deal here, though, as most of us have a lot of sauces we want to try, but don't particularly want to put our entire budget to strictly one manufacturer, particularly if trying a sauce for the first time. I'm hopeful that eventually someone will come out with a one-stop shop that does a better job of having everything in inventory, but I suspect that will take a very concerted effort on the part of the packager, to go out and get those smaller run sauce makers and a solid investment and commitment to create basically the ultimate in specialty shops. I notice that most of them also have subsidiary crap like t-shirts, hats, dry spices, BBQ and/or wing sauce and other food items and I suppose we could take from that the market is not yet enough to support a shop slinging strictly hot sauces. I know from what I've seen of the brick-and-mortars here, it's not enough to support one of those, as the market is not enough to bear that kind of overhead, but an online sauce shop should carry a lot less of that. I think the day is coming and I really hope it gets here soon, as wading through a stable of sites to place a bulk order is not the most enjoyable expenditure of time...the way that hot sauce in general is expanding, it seems likely and I think it would almost be worthwhile to trade some of our chilehead exclusivity for it...on the other hand, if you really look at the explosion, it's all in generally mass-produced crap, with little of it breaking the 10K SHU barrier, let alone upwards, where all the real fun is...could go either way, I guess, but it would still be really nice to have one shop you could count on to not only have everything, but also be competitive price-wise...
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