About Us

My fascination with hot peppers started when I was about four years old growing up on my family's Texas cattle ranch. When I would occasionally sass my mom back, she would put some Tabasco hotsauce in my mouth as punishment.

Well, little did she know that she was starting me on the road to hotsauce perdition, and she must have scratched her head more than once when I became sassier than ever just to get more hot sauce. Of course, I never told her I liked the hot stuff.

I guess she finally caught on because she switched to washing my mouth out with soap instead of hotsauce, but continued using hotsauce on my brothers. Meanwhile I had developed quite a taste for pepper fire. Fortunately, we had a garden, and each of my brothers and I had a plot in the garden that was our own responsibility. I grew as many hot peppers as I could get away with, and by the time I was six, was avidly experimenting with fiery concoctions made from the different hot peppers I grew. This trend has never stopped.

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I was lucky because my mother was eager to have her kids learn to cook (AND wash the dishes, scrub the floor, etc.), so I had a fairly free hand in the kitchen between meals and ranch chores. Of course, this was aided by a little blackmail on my part: I would hint that I wouldn't be such a smart ass if she let me make hotsauce in her kitchen.

From then on, most of the Christmas and birthday presents I gave were one form or another of my hotsauces. Nobody seemed to mind though. In fact, everyone loved the nefarious brews I concocted. Fast forward through high school and college to current day Vermont. Now a lot of things can be said of Vermont, both good and bad, but one thing is true: It is a great place to start a specialty food business, and that is just what I did.

I started testing some of my fiery brews on the unsuspecting people who frequented the farmer's markets in Vermont, and contrary to my expectations in this cold land, most of them LOVED the flavors I fed them. I knew I had a good thing going.

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After months of researching and cutting the red tape that tries to strangle the food industry, I started Greene's Gourmet Hotsauce Company in mid-July, 2004. It has been a huge hit in Vermont, and keeps growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, I have the whole of Vermont pretty well covered in hot sauce. That could be why we keep getting really warm days that melt the snow in the middle of winter. Maybe highway department will start mixing my hotsauce in with the salt to melt the ice on the roads...

I attribute the success of my hotsauces to several factors. They taste really good--most hotsauces I have tried don't taste very good, just a lot of heat and vinegar and salt. Most of them use poor quality ingredients that are cheap, such as pepper mash instead of whole fresh peppers, and other preprocessed ingredients that don't have nearly the flavor of fresh ones. My sauces don't have dyes, capsaicin extract, any artificial preservatives or ingredients that taste bad and are bad for you. They are all natural. The color and heat in each sauce is from the whole fresh peppers.

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Sure, it is a lot more work and a lot more expensive to make than the standard kind of hotsauce, but the results are well worth it. I know you will agree when you try them. One taste and you'll be hooked.

BON APETITE!

Chris Greene

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