The Awards

I never really set out to win awards making my sauces. I made what I thought tasted good, had a nice kick to it, and had unique flavours.

Every year during Urban Agriculture Week, the GrowTO team puts on a fair at Regent Park. In 2018, they held a contest for the best products to come out of your urban garden. Curious to see what strangers thought of my sauces, I entered Death by Chocolate into the Best Salsa and Sauce category and won 1st place. The judges loved the taste and the originality of the recipe — this was the first external validation that I was on to something. That year, I decided to start bottling in a commercial kitchen and make a go of it.

After getting further encouragement from sales at a few markets in late 2019 and early 2020, I was intrigued at the prospect of entering the first-ever Canadian Hot Sauce Awards in the summer of 2020. I could only enter 3 categories, so I selected Hot Ginger Fuzz into the Best Fruit Flavoured category and Death by Chocolate into the Best Extreme category.

As the results were slowly posted over the course of a week or so, I was ecstatic that both had placed: Hot Ginger Fuzz took 1st place Best Fruit Flavoured Hot Sauce, and Death by Chocolate took 1st place Best Extreme Hot Sauce.

Entering these types of competitions is always a bit of a gamble, but as the new guy in the industry, I was thrilled to have received these awards — and the sauces have kept picking up wins since, from the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair to the YOW! Awards.