Slam Sauce starting out in Sherbrooke
Believe it or not, Cameron Macdonald says that when he was younger he didn’t like spicy food. The man behind Lennoxville’s own brand of hot sauce was once a self-described “spice wimp.”
“I couldn’t handle it at all,” Macdonald said, explaining that his father would bring spicy food into the family home all the time. It was only with time and experimentation that he was able to turn his tastes around.
“A couple of years ago my dad brought home this bottle of Nando’s piri piri hot sauce and it was the best tasting hot sauce I had ever had in my life,” he said. “This stuff was awesome, it tasted good on everything. I couldn’t get enough.
Inspired by a new understanding of what hot sauce could be, Macdonald started playing around with recipes he found on the internet and, late last summer, he took the next step.
Macdonald’s family home is now the base of operations for Gustum Foods, the company Macdonald founded in order to create Slam Sauce, his very own brand of hot sauce. Although still in its early stages as a company, Gustum has already made its public debut and just recently launched a website that its creator hopes will help carry the business through the winter between market seasons.
Although Macdonald is working out of his home kitchen, he explained that his process is more complex than just whipping up a batch here and there. While anyone is free to cook up whatever they want for their own consumption, the sauce maker explained that as soon as you want to start selling your products to others there are a large number of rules you need to follow.
“If you’re just selling produce, it’s something that you grew and it is just being sold, that is totally fine,” Macdonald said. “As soon as you start transforming the food, then it has to be traceable in case of some health outbreak.”
The Slam Sauce creator explained that he had to take an extensive course on kitchen hygiene and risk management, and pointed out that one batch of sauce can take him as much as four hours to complete when one factors in the cleaning time before and after preparations.
“I’m quite certain that there are a lot of people who are not following the rules,” he said, noting that after having seen how extensive the rules are with regard to the “cottage food industry” it would be easy for someone to miss a step here or there.
But why hot sauce? For Macdonald, it was all about challenging himself to do something new.
“If you’d told me a few month before I started doing this that I would be doing this, I would have been, like, no,” he said. “Life has a weird way of taking you places you don’t expect.”
Reflecting on the road that led him from experimenting with recipes to starting his own business, Macdonald said that he was motivated by the idea of being his own boss.
“I’d been toying for a long time with the idea of just doing something else,” he continued “I wanted to work for myself and try to make something on my own.”
Although the going is slow as he works to start out, Macdonald said that he is finding his way and making progress at getting established. After a launch at the Lennoxville street festival with four different kinds of sauce, the Slam sauce creator said that he is getting a feel for what people want and where he can get the peppers he needs.
“It’s the hot ones that people like,” he said, explaining that he now has products at several locations in Lennoxville and is working on getting more presence in Sherbrooke as a whole.
“The smaller stores have been nice,” Macdonald said, emphasizing that he is taking small steps in order to keep the work manageable.
At the same time as he works on the business model, the Gustum founder is also cooking up new batches and experimenting with new ingredients.
“The basic essence is hot peppers, vinegar, and salt,” Macdonald said, noting that everything else is just an extra. “If you don’t have those three things, you don’t have a hot sauce.”
More information about Gustum Foods is available at www.gustumfoods.com