If you regularly reach for a bottle of craft hot sauce—any one of the hundreds of them on the market—there’s an excellent chance Baton Rouge entrepreneur Chris White had a hand in spicing up your meal, Business Report details in a feature from its current issue.
White estimates his three businesses, which handle everything from procuring pepper mash to producing and managing the patented shipping containers in which it’s delivered, touch 80% of all consumer products in the rapidly expanding industry.
It’s a good business to be in these days.
The hot sauce industry has expanded 5.3% annually since 2010, with revenue scorching up to $1.2 billion last year, according to industry research firm IBISWorld. And it’s not showing signs of cooling off.
“This year it’s kind of crazy because all three businesses are just booming,” says White, president of Chemetec, Braid Logistics North America and Louisiana Pepper Exchange, all of which collectively generated $45 million in sales in 2015.
White isn’t your ordinary culinary entrepreneur, and his journey to the top of the pepper industry has been anything but conventional.
White got his entrepreneurial start in 1996 as a salesman at his father’s industrial equipment company, Chemetec. He worked his way up through the highly technical company selling its top line product, called Chemineer agitators, which allowed him to acquire a unique expertise in mixing and agitation systems.
During that time, White developed a relationship with a longtime customer, McIlhenny Company, maker of Tabasco pepper sauces. White was tasked with engineering a solution to effectively ship McIlhenny’s pepper mash, a combination of pureed peppers and salt or vinegar that serves as the base ingredient for hot sauce. The liquids in the mixture tend to separate during overseas transport, requiring the buyer to remix the material after arrival, which is time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, the products were formerly confined to larger, pricier shipping containers.
“After about four or five years of being covered in pepper mash, we finally figured it out,” says White, who solved McIlhenny’s dilemma by developing a 6,000-gallon flexible mixing and shipping container that was cheaper to transport because it could fit into a 20-foot container.
White patented his design and formed Gray Hog Industries, which made the special container, called an agitank, available to importers of pepper mash, like Crystal and Louisiana Hot Sauce. It can also be used to ship wine and food-grade liquids, along with nonhazardous chemicals and specialty oils.
Seeing an opportunity to cater to small and midsize hot sauce makers, White formed Louisiana Pepper Exchange in 2010 to import pepper mash and sell it to them. What began as a small side venture has evolved into a spicy importing empire with nearly 500 customers worldwide. And it’s poised for even greater growth.
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