Free recipe + 5 year anniversary
Five Years
- a commentary by Ira
Five years...
In reality it's the culmination of a lifetime of experience. Hot pans, long nights and lots of meals. I started cooking professionally at 14, I was a prep cook at a chain restaurant, but little did I know that it would bring me along a culinary journey that would place me here today, with a five-year-old hot sauce company.
We have had lots of ups and downs, made great friends, and I have even run into an actual ghost. We've spent many long nights toiling away only to wake up an hour later to go to our full time jobs.
Lisa and I have taught ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Learning the ops side of business ownership was new to us and Lisa is slowly becoming a master. In our corporate lives, we are marketers but we had to learn quickly that sometimes a business owner has to separate themselves from what they know and we had to be open to the notion that marketing doesn't solve everything for the business.
That's all part of bootstrapping a start-up. Learning, failing, and relearning. And it's a journey we would do again! It’s been so much fun and such a great puzzle to figure out.
When you first start making something with your hands or cooking something new, you share it with your friends and you expect them to "like" it, but you never know...somewhere someone told William Hung he sounded like Pavarotti. Imposter syndrome is real, but there comes a time where you know you have something special. The first time someone told me about a great hot sauce in their fridge and it turned out it was ours was that time for me. I didn't know that person and they didn't know me, they were just sharing a product they loved because someone told them I like hot sauce!
Five years...
We made a little video summarizing our five years and you can see it here: https://tinyurl.com/2uz6728k
However long you’ve been following our journey, we thank you and love you for being here with us and seeing us through our dark days wondering if we should still continue.
We are so excited for this season and we have so many great things floating around in our minds and on our Kultivar idea board. We can’t wait to share all our new ideas with you!
A Recipe for you
Here’s the recipe for Red Beans and Rice that we cooked at our pop up a few weekends ago. Let us know if you make it and what you think! It’s vegan, but you could easily add in some ham or beef broth to suit your personal preferences.