Foodpreneur

I have been in the Motion Picture Industry for 27 years. I am a First Assistant Director and a member of the Directors Guild of America. While working on TV commercials in Mexico I was introduced to the Habanero pepper. My neighbor and best friend Joel Godbey was familiar with the pepper and suggested that we grow a garden of them. The were more prolific than we imagined. We decided to use up all the peppers by making a hot sauce to give away as Christmas gifts. It was a long and colon-burning experience to come up with the recipe that we liked.

I took one of the bottles to the set of a commercial production and placed it on the Craft Services table. Crew members started asking for bottles and said that they would be willing to buy it.

Joel and I borrowed a food styling kitchen from my friend Doug Smith, who owns Production Consultants and Equipment in Atlanta. We began at 6pm on Friday and finished at 8pm on Sunday...and we only bottled 200 bottles. That's when we decided that was not the way we were going to spend our weekends.

I did some research and found out who was buying the most bottles from the local bottle distributor. I then talked to Robert Mitchum at Hillside Orchard Farms in Tiger, GA. Robert was extremely help in helping us get started.

Then I began the process of becoming legal. I was too cheap to hire a lawyer so it was "one step forward ...two steps back" for quite some time...but eventually all the areas were covered....The trademark, the insurance, the federal & state taxes, business license,...and much, much more.

Our friend Chuck Stiles, an excellent artist and very much into the Mayan culture, designed our label. I took our sauce to the Food Science Department at the University of Georgia and had the Nutritional Analysis done for a fraction of the cost in the commercial market.

The sauce is a perfect example of network marketing. I offer the sauce on sale on every movie set that I work....and I work from coast to coast.

Cast and Crew will buy a bottle...return to the city in which they live...and eventually I will get a phone call from them ordering a case...or from one of their friends or neighbors wanting to know how to order our sauce.

Because of this process..our sauce is scattered all across the country in little Mom & Pop stores. This type of initial marketing it made it easier for us to approach a distributor and show them that our product will be recognized in many markets and we will not be starting cold. We have given away lot of samples over the years and have not taken any money out of the company.

The distributor that we are now using is Global Specialty Foods in Atlanta.

J&J Enterprises
PO Box 6482
Douglasville, GA 30154
800.461.4699
Website:  JJ Hot Sauce