Steve Olds has earned a spot for his hot pepper sauce on hundreds of store shelves throughout the Midwest—but he has plans for many more. Photos by Janna Goerdt.

GRAND RAPIDS — The air was thick with the smell of onions, garlic, and peppers— lots of peppers.

Steve Olds had just finished cooking and bottling a batch of his beloved Steve’s Onion and Garlic Pepper Sauce, and his small commercial kitchen was still aromatic with the potent brew of vegetables and ghost peppers that go into the “XXX” version of the hot sauce.

Employee Shari Swanson had to wear a respirator to handle the pepper fumes as she scrubbed the giant simmering pot clean, but to Olds, the smell was one of success.

“I knew it was a product that people really liked,” Olds said of his sauce. “People get a little fanatical about it. I get emails at 2:30 a.m. from people telling me, ‘Oh my God, this is the best hot sauce I’ve had in my life, don’t you ever stop making it.’”

Olds, who has long loved a good bottle of hot sauce, started tinkering with a homemade recipe more than a decade ago. As detailed in a September 23, 2011, Hometown Focus story, Olds kept working with the sauce, using peppers and vegetables out of his own garden, until he hit upon the perfect formula.

A roll of hot sauce labels ready to be rolled onto 5-ounce bottles. Olds is in the midst of upgrading his bottling and labeling equipment to prepare for an expected surge in demand.

He knew he found it when people kept asking for more. In fact, he heard the phrase “it just tastes great” so often from hot sauce fans that he adopted it as the product’s tagline. And after placing his product in local markets, the challenge became reaching out state and nation-wide. But how to do it?

He started by making phone calls—a lot of them. While it was easy enough to set up a hot sauce tasting at a local grocery store, connect with local customers and prove the quality of his hot sauce then and there, it was harder to connect with grocers in Chicago, Kansas City, and everywhere in between.

So Olds simply called, called, and called back. He generally sent a grocery buyer a free bottle of his hot sauce, waited a month or so, and then checked in to see if they had a new customer.

Once they had a new client in a new state, the next challenge was getting the small cases of 5-ounce bottles there at a reasonable rate.

“Spee-Dee Delivery was our saving grace,” Olds said. With the shipping costs more manageable, Olds and his employees could concentrate on expanding their market within Spee-Dee Delivery’s territory.

Today, boxes of Olds’ spicy concoction travel across the Midwest—to Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Illinois, and Missouri. Deliveries are shipped out of his Grand Rapids factory just about every day, Olds said, and he mixes up a 600-bottle batch of hot sauce once or twice a week, or as needed. When the summer grilling season begins, he really ramps up production.

While it is a hot sauce, not all of the flavors are as potent as that ghost-pepper “XXX” brew. Olds also has a mild (the most popular), medium, hot, and new smoked jalapeno flavor. After Swanson removed her respirator when she was done scrubbing out the simmering pot, she said she prefers the mild sauce.

“I usually don’t eat condiments of any kind,” Swanson said. “But the flavor is so good.”

When former HTF editor Jean Cole interviewed Steve Olds for our September 23, 2011, edition, Steve’s Onion and Garlic Pepper Sauce was mostly available in the Iron Range area. Today, the popular concoction is distributed all the way to central Missouri.

Recently Olds introduced his hot sauce to the Hy-Vee chain of supermarkets in the Midwest, earning shelf space at 43 of the stores.

He also plans to work with grocery distributors to streamline the shipping process. If he can ship more hot sauce to a distributor and less to individual stores, he can spend more time and energy getting his hot sauce on more grocery store shelves.

Olds said he has no current plans to expand beyond stores in the Midwest, though, because “there’s plenty of room here. There’s plenty of business out there, and my goal is to concentrate on that.”

Olds is gradually upgrading his production capabilities. On order is a new automatic bottle labeler that should free up some employee time on production days. He still adds personal touches to each individual order, though—Olds writes a short, personal thank you note on each one before Spee-Dee sends it on its way.

“Before I croak, I’m going to sell a million bottles,” Olds said.

He is turning his attention to stores in the Twin Cities area. Olds is working on some large grocery connections in the metro area, and if they pan out as he expects, he should triple his business.

“We can handle that much,” he said.

The sauce continues to sell well at local butcher shops, grocery stores both large and small, liquor stores, and local bars.

One of those is Mike’s Pub in Hibbing. Bartender Toni Morrison said people ask for Steve’s hot pepper sauce by name. The pub always has a yellow bottle of the medium blend on its shelf, ready to be shaken and stirred into a Bloody Mary.

You can find the 5-ounce bottle with the yellow label at RJ’s Meat Market in Hillman, Minnesota, and Cattlemen’s Meat Market in East Moline, Illinois. It’s on the shelves at butcher shops and on the tables at diners and restaurants across the country.

These days the ingredients for Steve’s hot pepper sauce are sourced from Ben Clayton’s farm fields, just 10 miles from the hot sauce headquarters in Grand Rapids. And Clayton, who owns and operates Clayton’s Produce, counts himself as “Steve’s number-one fan,” he said.

Clayton grows the hot peppers—the exact mix and variety are a trade secret that we won’t reveal—and onions for Olds, spending hours every Tuesday during the harvesting season stooping over the plants, picking the peppers at their peak of ripeness. It’s a tough job, Clayton said, but he does it partly because he love’s Steve’s hot pepper sauce.

“I love the guy to death,” Clayton said, “and I really enjoy his hot sauce.”

Clayton said he likes the mild, medium, hot and “XXX” hot version, on eggs, in soup, on pizza, and, what the heck, straight out of the bottle. Clayton even helped inspire the new hot sauce flavor that Olds thinks is going to take off.

The farmer had a batch of red-hot jalapeno peppers one week, and he urged Olds to get creative with them. After a bit of urging, Olds came up with a smoked jalapeno hot pepper sauce, and it’s dynamite. Olds expects it to become his biggest seller.

“People are crazy about it,” Olds said. “It’s got the heat, and the flavor of the regular sauce, plus that smoky flavor.”

Check out the recipe section in this week’s edition to see how you can add Steve’s Pepper Sauce to your favorite dishes.

Janna Goerdt lives and runs a farm near Embarrass. When she isn’t working on the farm, mothering her twin boys, or writing, she likes to prowl the new non-fiction shelf at the Virginia Public Library. She can be reached at janna@htfnews.us.

Where can I find Steve’s Onion and Garlic Pepper Sauce?

Available through his website, www.stevestastesgreat.com, on the shelf at these locations around the Range:

• Super One Foods (regional locations)

• F&D Meats, Virginia

• Silver Creek Liquor, Mountain Iron

• Zup’s Food Market, Tower and Ely

• Bloomberg’s Convenience Store, Babbitt

• Bob’s Country Market, Bovey

• Rainbow Bottle Shop, Grand Rapids

• S&S Meats, Grand Rapids

• Rapids West End Marketplace, Grand Rapids

• Orty’s Custom Meats, Deer River

Distributed by Fraboni’s Wholesale and Sandstrom’s

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