About the maker
Fifty-two years in kitchens. One Food Manager's Certification. Zero committees. Every bottle passes the taco test before it ever leaves my kitchen — because I'm the first customer of every single one.
Before the code was cracked
Taste outweighed reading labels. That worked fine until I got older and unhealthier, and started getting jolted awake from a dead sleep by acid reflux.
That's when I started reading labels — and reading a label turned into a research project, every unpronounceable word its own investigation. Eventually it hit me: making my own sauce would be less work than decoding theirs. Fed up, I started looking up recipes so I could make a sauce with real food ingredients instead of the industry-standard loopholes that let companies add chemicals they don't even have to put on the label.
I started making my own sauces in small batches. Sharing them never even occurred to me at first. But I like breakfast tacos, lunch tacos, and dinner tacos, so naturally there were occasions where I'd bring my sauces so people could have something made with real ingredients. People loved them. I still didn't think much of it.
Then three words on a bag of organic sugar changed everything: “Bone-char free.” I remember thinking, what the hell does that mean? I looked it up — and I never went back to blindly trusting companies again.
The eureka
I'd already been experimenting for a while — making real-food sauces in small batches, tweaking ingredients, chasing healthier and tastier at the same time. But I was still working by instinct, one variable at a time, and I assumed like everyone does that health and flavor were a tradeoff. Push one, lose the other.
Then a simple evidence-based question about the healthiest way to prepare real food stopped me cold — because when I tried it, it wasn't just the healthiest version. It was the tastiest version I'd ever made. Of anything.
That was the whole breakthrough: the gentlest way to treat real food turns out to preserve the most of both — nutrition and flavor. There was never a tradeoff. Everyone was just cooking the good stuff out.
I went straight to the kitchen and rebuilt my process around that principle. The result passed the taco test immediately, and every sauce since has been built on that foundation. That's the moment Spicy Situation® stopped being a hobby and became a method.
I don't name the method publicly — not because it's a secret handshake, but because the internet loves shortcuts and this one only works when you commit to the whole thing. The full transfer is available under NDA.
The credentials that count
I started around five, when my mother told my older brother and me: learn to cook or eat out every night. We learned. My grandmother had seven sisters — family gatherings had all the women in the kitchen and all the guys watching football, and I was far more interested in what was happening in the kitchen. Been there ever since.
Eight years ago at 48, I was winded tying my shoes. I switched how I eat, and two weeks later I felt like I did in my twenties. I've eaten that way ever since — not because you need to, but so that when I say “made from real food, no exceptions,” you can ask if I hold myself to that standard when nobody's watching. I do. My sauces go on whatever's on your plate — brisket, taco, grain bowl, whatever — because I've personally been the person eating each one.
Hundreds of taste testers across every walk of life. Weekly gallon delivered to one food trailer, proving the standard holds up under real commercial demand week after week. One custom signature sauce created from scratch for a Moroccan panini trailer — the seed of everything I now offer to food businesses.
Between a substance you choose and one that's been designed to choose for you. That distinction matters here more than you'd think — and it's the reason a hot sauce brand has a whole page called The Bliss Point.
Why it exists
She struggled with her weight and with food addiction her whole life, and it ended in stage 4 heart disease. I moved in with her to care for her as her health declined, and I watched something that changed me: a person who was fully conscious of what these foods were doing to her — and still couldn't overcome them. That's not a failure of willpower. These products are engineered for exactly that outcome. The food industry has spent decades scientifically optimizing its products for maximum craving — it even has a name in the industry: the “bliss point.” My mother spent her life on the losing end of that engineering.
I understand addiction from the inside. So I know the difference between a substance you choose and one that's been designed to choose for you.
But I'm not bitter. Bitterness doesn't feed anyone. I just want to create an option: real food, made with methods that make it healthier, with taste that's on par with or better than the chemical concoctions on the shelf. Because an alternative only works if it wins on flavor — nobody switches to the sauce that tastes like a compromise.
That's why there are over 50 sauces now, and why the standard never bends. Every bottle is the option I wish had existed for her.
If It's Not Real Food Then What Is It?™
The standard, unmoved
The maker eats every sauce on his own breakfast tacos that day. If it doesn't pass, it doesn't leave the kitchen. Full stop. That's a standard I'd keep even if no one was buying, because I'm the first customer of every single bottle.
If It's Not Real Food Then What Is It?™
Come put a taste to the story. Free Chips And Salsa at the door. Come find me — the calendar has where and when.