Today we’d like to introduce you to Homero Gonzalez.
Hi, Homero; thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, you could tell our readers some of your backstory.
Before the idea for Harmacy Hot Sauce Co. became a reality, there was only the love of good eats and sharing culinary experiences with friends and family; growing up in a Cuban household, delicious food has always been a part of my life. Abuela’s cooking was always something to look forward to! Showing love through food was the way I was taught, and it is a language I’ve learned to speak fluently. The value of taste is not measured in dollars but in ‘Mmmm’s’ and memories made.
Countless hangs, parties, and shindigs led to the day a friend brought their hot sauce collection to a wing night for everyone to enjoy, Hot Ones style. It was there that I learned how tasty hot sauces could be! Until then, I was at least a fan of the classics like Sriracha, Crystal, and Tapatio, but I had never considered the vehicle that hot sauces could be for incredible flavor. As a broke engineering student at the time, when I looked online to buy some of these, I was floored by having to pay so much for a small 5oz bottle on top of shipping! Looking at the ingredients of a few sauces, I thought to myself, “I’ve been cooking for 15 years; I can figure this out”, and so the wheels began turning on how to start crafting my delicious sauces. Mind you, there were no business aspirations or thoughts of the future; I just wanted tasty spice that wouldn’t break the bank.
Leveraging what I had learned from creating that first sauce, which eventually became the framework for my tomatillo and clementine sauce “Cinco,” comes the hilarious story that resulted in the creation of my favorite sauce and my three-time award winner, “Brimstone Rimjob.” You can read more about how this sauce came to be on my blog post about it, The Ballad of Brimstone Rimjob. With the combination of the creation of these two unique and delicious flavors, the shaking of the foundations of society by the pandemic, and my general malaise from trying to push through college courses with no real direction, I took what remains the biggest and scariest leap of my life. Drop out, throw away everything I’d been working toward for the last several years, and start a gourmet hot sauce company. It sounds like a bad call of epic proportions on paper, but I could finally wake up and know I was living the life I chose instead of the one I was raised to believe I wanted. Now, at the helm of a gourmet hot sauce company, I am proud to have built from the ground up with the support of those I am lucky to call friends, I’m excited to bring my passion for great flavor to as many people as I can from coast to coast!
It wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
As just about anyone who has started a business is familiar with, the road to success is almost always rocky. Entrepreneurship is chock full of endless, unique problems, small and large. As a business owner, one needs to be prepared to find solutions to every issue that arises, ideally as quickly as possible, before they have the opportunity to grow into a cascade of often expensive setbacks. The largest problem for the average small business will always be in the form of capital. While starting a business can be done with a relatively small amount of startup cash, running, growing, and maintaining a business takes an incredible amount of money, and it’s a constant challenge to allocate the few free dollars that are earned in the early years toward the right needs to keep you ahead.
When I began Harmacy Hot Sauce Co., I was a broke engineering student disillusioned with my chosen path. I barely had two pennies to rub together. Spending a few hundred dollars on ingredients, glass jars, and boxes to ship sauce represented nearly all the money I had at my disposal and a huge risk if there was an early hiccup for whatever reason. As sauces began to sell more reliably, I could focus on creating larger batches and earning more each time I turned over my stock. Larger cooks would now require a larger upfront investment in materials and more care when manufacturing since the process changes when figuring out how to scale up small batches to larger ones.
The biggest challenge for my business has been the choice to keep all manufacturing in-house. Most hot sauce startups will use a co-packing company to help handle the manufacturing process. A co-packer will have specialized equipment, all the necessary permits, licenses, and a crew of employees to turn out a consistent product for a small fee. My product is *very* labor intensive, and each flavor has a unique set of processes that must be honored to maintain their integrity. How can a third party producing many other products properly account for the nuances in the taste of fresh ingredients for a specific brand? Fruits are often only available seasonally, and their ripeness at purchase can vary wildly. Availability of other packaged goods can also be spotty, and when a lineup of flavors comprises nearly a hundred different ingredients, who is to choose a replacement when one is suddenly unavailable?
For a complex product, every little detail matters. There is no telling what will have a noticeable effect, and not until it is tested; maintaining control over as much of the manufacturing process as possible is a huge endeavor, but to ensure the creation of the best possible product every single time, it is the only choice. This means that expansion is a tricky and challenging process. It will require the sourcing of specialized equipment at every stage, as well as the hiring and training of staff for specific tasks. This takes time and money well ahead of any profit those investments generate. It also represents a significant time sink to devote myself to these tasks as the sole employee in my business. Growth is challenging when I am busy operating the machinery of the business instead of fostering new connections and partnerships. I can only sell the sauce that I have cooked! The manual approach is fraught with risk and hidden pitfalls; growth is slow and painful, but it results in a business with a strong base and a knowledgeable head that can weather the storm of difficult times.
As you know, we’re big fans of Harmacy Hot Sauce Co. What can you tell our readers who might need to be more familiar with the brand?
Harmacy Hot Sauce is a gourmet hot sauce manufacturing company. Its purpose is to create incredibly delicious sauces with unique flavor profiles using ingredients worldwide. Each flavor showcases a slice of some part of the Earth, honoring the flavorful beauty of the culture. The company is built on three tenets: Flavor First, Unique Taste, and Balanced Heat. All three of these are required to create what I consider to be a standout sauce. Hot sauce has become a hot commodity in recent years, resulting in a deluge of products that race to be the hottest thing on the market. The result has been a sacrifice of flavor, which I aim to correct. I don’t make the hottest sauces; I make the tastiest sauces that I can and tune the heat to match. I am proud to showcase a lineup of flavors that excel in different uses. The finesse of hot sauce has been lost in the rush to be the next best thing, leaving the door open for a new approach to walk through. It’s been an incredible experience to test the waters for my product and discover the underlying hunger for something better that I am happy to fulfill!
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
The most important lesson I have learned is that a business must be stable at every level of its development. My business was shaped during the height of the pandemic, so I will always understand the weight of the poor conditions in which it started. It was able to take shape and still grow during the hardest of times, which bodes well for a brighter future. Still, if a similar economic setback were to occur, there would be a roadmap to at least sustainable operation in unfavorable conditions. What most consider to be the worst time to start a business could be considered the best time to discover if a business idea can stand the test of time and adversity.
Pricing:
- Core Flavors – $15/ea
- Super Hot Flavors – $25/ea
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.harmacyhotsauce.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harmacyhotsauce/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/HarmacyHotSauce/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@harmacyhotsauce
