FireTalkers: Interview with Chip Hearn of Peppers
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Chip Hearn, along with his sister Randi and his father Luther, were all involved in the culinary world by being regionally-renown chefs and co-owning eateries in Delaware. Inside the the Hearns' Starboard Restaurant, their then-flagship business (they've since sold it to new owners), what began as an abnormally large hot sauce collection for their weekend Bloody Mary smorgasbord soon blossomed into one of the local draws. The growing number of hot sauces became so popular (patrons would request bottles to take home) that the Hearns decided to erect their own structure in which to store and sell their spicy wares - a building that was literally a metal shed planted outside in the Starboard's parking lot. This was the genesis of the Peppers shop.
Since then, the Peppers store has since been renovated and moved thrice. It is now located in roomier digs at Rehoboth Beach, just a short car drive from its original location. It houses one of the largest sauce collections on this little blue orb, and because of that fact it's turned into one of the true chilehead meccas in the United States.
An even larger hot sauce collection was accumulated over the years by Chip and family. The bottles started as the display at the Starboard, surpassed Chuck Evans' own previously-held record and twenty years later boasts far and away the most bottles of different pepper-based sauces owned by anyone in the world - over 9,000.
Chip has also entered the competition barbecue scene with the Cackalacky Cookout Crew and the Texas Rib Rangers, has done numerous local and national TV appearances, is a mainstay at spicy food trade shows, and...well, I go go on all night.
Without further ado, here is one of the most gregarious, entertaining, and overall cool personalities in the fiery foods business - Chip Hearn.
Scott: You originally started the Peppers hot sauce shop from one of your old restaurants, the Starboard.
Chip: It was created in the parking lot in front of the Starboard restaurant down at Dewey. At that point and time it became a giant tourist attraction where people came from the beach to see. Part of the thing with the beaches, they would say, "you have to come to this store in Dewey, all they do is sell is hot sauce!" And then from that we were making sauces in the restaurant; they were doing dipping sauces and things like that. We were also bringing weird peppers from foreign areas and we were growing them locally. In the restaurant, we were making strange and unusual sauces, and we figured why not start bottling it on our own.
So the first sauce we bottled was a simple sauce that was just a regular sauce that was vinegar, cayenne, salt and water. It was Baumer Foods who does Krystal that bottled Dewey Beach Fire; that was our first sauce ever, and was Krystal basically. Then we started doing our own recipes. We hired some factory to do them one thing led to another and now we do about 300 of our own labels.
Scott: How many of the old sauces you still have around?
Chip: Just about very sauce that we've ever made. Well, there were about 15 or 20 sauces that really didn't sell [that we ended up getting rid of]. There would be times where we've come up with sauces that we thought were really great sauces; we would test them in the store, and they didn't work. If they don't work in our own store, then we didn't want to go national with it. Once we see them in a room store.
One of the advantages of being located near the beach is the variety of people that would come into the store. There's a true cross-section of everything; we have customers from everywhere so you can tell what's going to happen all across the country by what's happening here. We can tell right away whether or not something is going to sell.
Scott: How long did you have the restaurant before you opened Peppers? What ultimately spurred on the idea of opening your own hot sauce store?
Chip: It was something that had to be done. The customers would say, "Hey, I want to buy that sauce" and the bartender would go back and get something stored under the counter. Eventually what was under the counter wasn't enough. We literally took a shed-type building, poured a concrete block in the parking lot and plopped a shed out. This shed was like 15 feet x 15 feet, and we sold hot sauces and T-shirts out of that shed.
Eventually we rented a warehouse. We started putting the sauces into the warehouse in holding. We would say, "Well, they cost you this many dollars to buy one case, cost this much money to buy five, and this money to buy 100." All of a sudden we were buying 100 so we went to the wholesale business without even knowing it. Other restaurants would say to us, "You know that sauce? I would like to have such and such sauce. Could you sell us a case?" We would say, "Yeah we could sell you a case!"( laughs).
Scott: And all of this this predated the Internet?
Chip: Oh yeah. Way predating the Internet. You can see from the name peppers.com that we were one of the first online. We bought domain names back then that would cost you a fortune by now. In the Internet business back then was kind of an afterthought.
And then our restaurants were closed during the winter, so it was a fun way to make money during Christmastime. One thing led to another, and we said, "We're having too much fun doing this. It's no fun working 3 million hours a week in the restaurant, so let's change." So we sold the restaurant.
Scott: Around what year was this?
Chip: We sold different things at different times. Our flagship place down at Dewey Beach, the world renown Starboard restaurant, I guess we've been out of there about nine years now. That was the last one that was the big boy. We kept a couple of other businesses just to have fun.
Scott: From the time you guys had the shed, how long was it until you moved into the facility you have now?
Chip: This facility we're in right now is only about two and a half years old, and it's twice the size of our outlet mall store which was about 4000 square-foot. This new one is about 8000 square feet.
Scott: How long did you have facility in between the first shed and the current store?
Chip: We had it for about seven years. And then we also had another in between. We took up about a third of the parking lot of the Starboard with the freestanding retail store. They got to the point where it was, we've had to move warehouses three times, too.
Scott: How many sauces you sell in your current shop?
Chip: At any given time, about 3000 SKUs. We tell everybody we could sell you out of the third or fourth biggest collection of hot sauces right from the store.
Scott: If you have about 3000 bottles inside of Peppers, how many do you have your famous personal collection?
Chip: A little over 9000 different sauces. And we stopped years ago directly collecting them. We still collect some, but we stopped a while back grabbing everything, because we ran out of space.
Scott: Now that could be a big problem (laughs).
Chip: Yeah. (laughs) In fact, when we sold the Starboard, we had about 4000 bottles on display. After we sold the restaurant, we had to take the collection with us, and we sold them a substitute collection, so the collection that's on display there even though it looks like the original collection, it's not.
Scott: Do you have your collection right now fully documented and photographed?
Chip: Yes and no. Everything for the past three years has gotten put into a box and stocked in a warehouse. We've had to jump through every hoop known to man, and it was really a pain in the butt and cost them too much money to do all that work. They wanted a picture of everything. And that was everything! That was before the days of easy Excel spreadsheets and databases. Nowadays it's simple to do; you can take your Blackberry and put in the data for everything. Back then computers as we know them today really didn't exist.
Scott: Have you ever thought about releasing photographs of the a lot of the sauces? I can imagine this would be chilehead "porn" to a lot a hot sauce freaks out there.
Chip: We did a TV show on the Travel Channel about 10 months ago, dealing with strange and unusual collections. They came and they took about 200 or 300 bottles that were strange or unusual, and was out of the box stuff that was in the warehouse and put them on display as not sellable collectibles. It was kind of neat chileheads had come in and they go, "Ah wow look at that, here's your original so-and-so!"
It's funny people collect certain collectibles, we have stuff in our collection that they'd want. Let me give you an example. In the restaurant, Jennifer Turner Thompson came out with those posters and then right next to it we would put up a display of the real stuff that was in the poster. Well you couldn't buy that nowadays. It doesn't exist. If you could buy that stuff, it cost you 10 grand. Well, we still had that ability to say, "Well, here's [the bottles that were in] poster number one or poster number two." We had a lot of fun with that because we sold a lot of those posters. We don't sell them now because a lot of those things that were in the posters aren't available any longer.
Scott: Going back to the sauces and their tastes, let's talk about your personal favorites. Have any stuck out in your mind, that you've liked over the years?
Chip: Well just the opposite happens. We get maybe 20 or 30 hot sauces sent to us every week, in hopes to get into our sales area, let alone the ones of our regular lines. It amazes me how a least one a week just floors me how good it is. And then 10 of us argue whether to bring it in or not. For a new one to sell it basically has to replace something else. There's only a finite amount of space. It's not about Chip's taste; it's about if it will sell nationally and why, what is its niche, what it's done, what awards has it won, what's the recipe situation, what new concept hasn't done that no one else is done. Almost on a weekly basis I find myself tasting something that blows me away.
Then there's those times of the year you just have different picks. For instance now that it's spring and summer I'm getting into the barbecue seasonings and rubs. In the in the off-season, I look for great Bloody Mary mixes. You never know what's in it. You know what else is amazing? When someone sends you what is considered by them to be the "best sauce in the world", and it's so basic and unoriginal you just want to cry! You don't want to tell them that you think someone else did that 30 years ago. Okay, you can make good hot sauce, but unless it matches foods spectacularly well and does new things, what the hell am I going to do with it?
Scott: Exactly.
Chip: It's got to match food. For example, what people are doing with the naga jolokia. Some of the jolokia sauces out right now are boring. Some of the sauces are fantastic. It's just a question of which ones you carry?
Scott: Are there any ones that stand out in your mind that are absolutely exceptional?
Chip: Yeah, the stuff that I used to use on a regular basis. I guess the stuff that's in my refrigerator. I'm constantly playing with wing sauces. I'm trying to see if there's a hot sauce I can make a wing sauce out of. A lot of times what you see in my fridge is something I could make something else out of. Lately I've been experimenting with bacon weaves and Cap'n Crunch cereal; so the stuff I'm using is sweeter, and there's some different mango and raspberry sauces. I just happen to be into what I'm doing right now. If you ask me the same question two months from now I'll probably be using something else.
Scott: I know how it is. I'm changing all the time myself.
How has the advent of the Internet changed they way you do your business?
Chip: It's totally changed. Now, the customer has the ability to to do things the way they couldn't before very easily. Through search engines, it's tougher to reach them. I will give you a recent example. A giant sale during Christmas season we would normally not worry if we ran out of things. This year we found out that the Internet is so prevalent now, that you better not make the same mistakes next year. We're going to have to hold heavier inventories next year then we had this year. You never know what's going to be the big seller, so you're just going to have to hold more dollars of inventory. I made a tactical decision that was wrong this past year; I just didn't hold enough items in inventory, so next year will (laughs). It's that simple.
It's like anything else that's seasonal, a lot of are businesses who do wholesale, and a lot of stores don't buy as much in January, February, and March. We sort of want to finish Christmas season without 5 million dollars in inventory. You would rather have it be 2 million in inventory. That's tough to do. The customers, they don't want to hear why you're out of something; they just want to get it. (laughs)
Scott: You currently sell more inventory online or in the retail store?
Chip: That kind of varies. During the slow winter months? Definitely more online. Now in the Summertime? It's a different ballgame, because I'm right down at the beach, with the built-in clientele who are having fun or vacationing. 10,000 people live here in the Fall and Winter, when the peak of Summertime hits there are 300,000 people here in the area. Different clients tell a different story. All you have to do is walk in and see my retail stores in July as opposed to walking through January.
We just had an article in a Norwegian magazine written in the Norwegian language on Monday. It was talking about some of Dave's [Insanity] Sauces. At the end of the article it said to go to peppers.com and buy it. And we've had some more along the lines of 60 or 70 individual orders from Norway in the past three days.
Scott: Wow, that's pretty good.
Chip: It's pretty good, except for spending a lot of time and effort e-mailing people back shipping info, costs and things like that, because Norway's a whole different ballgame. That's what happens with the internet nowadays. One article hits the net and all of sudden people flock to the links. In fact, we laugh about it because the phones will start ringing and we'll sell a lot something we shouldn't be selling, that we hadn't anticipated. It was because the article was written somewhere else in the country - or even another country - and at the search engines picked up on it. All of a sudden would get 30 orders for items that we didn't sell two cases of in the past month. And we can't be totally ready for that. It just happens. The minute the first five orders go, you have to say to yourself, "We have to copy this article and see what's going on!"
Scott: I know exactly what you mean. Just yesterday one of my website links, I think that was my Scoville Scale, was on some Russian website. I looked at the stats today, and I noticed there were more than 500 extra hits from this Russian website. All that had happened was that someone posted the link in the comments and people clicked on it from there. People pick up on this stuff. The internet could be very fluid.
Chip: And you better be able to react (laughs).
They were buying the very basic Dave's item. But the beauty of it is, when they go on my website and the one or two items they thought they were going to see, they'll see 30 more Dave's items they didn't even know existed. The theory of the Web is they go, "Whoa!" and they start doing some homework and see what else is there for them to buy besides the original item. Now we're going to get orders in for all kinds of products. They thought there were going to buy Dave's Insanity, but then they see all the cool stuff he gets from Costa Rica. It turns into a much different ballgame.
Scott: Changing gears here... One thing I was wanting to ask you was the competition team I'd heard about years ago. What's the origins of the Cackalacky Cookout Crew?
Chip: Our cooking team has morphed into different things over the years. About 10 years ago, we decided we didn't have the time to put into being full scale on the barbecue competition circuit. But we wanted to prove the regionality of flavors and regionality of sauces. We thought we could make a difference on the barbecue circuit. So we got together with one of the famous teams out there, the Texas Rib Rangers out of Detton, Texas.
Scott: I met them at the Weekend of Fire last year.
Chip: Yeah. We put together a group of us that worked pretty hard to win as many contests as we could to prove our theories. At that point in time, Page Skelton from Cacklacky, myself, Bill Royce, Craig Barton from Austin Spice, Dr. BBQ aka Ray Lampe down in Florida, Mary from Mary's Cherry, a bunch of different outfits got together and did some joint shows and did some cooking contests. We all had done some cooking before, so we said, "Okay let's all go out and win this whole damn thing." We spent a lot of time and effort figuring out what to do.
I'm a showman. Page is even crazier than me. A couple of TV shows were really really fun, because we're cooking against guys who were maybe better cooks than us, that we're better showmen than they are (laughs). So the TV shows turned out to be really fun.
Then Page decided he would pull out for a while and had a family. He's been out of it for about three or four years. He keeps inventing new things. Page is getting ready to go back national, and working on some new stuff; for instance, with bull riders. That one's going to be called Beerbecue. It's a rub with a beer. He sings all the songs we perform all these contests.
About the sauce itself, Cackalacky is an all-purpose sauce is based out of the Carolina area. You don't see too much of it other than there. It's a great sauce.
Scott: What about the Cackalacky Crew selling the "world's most expensive bottle of hot sauce" for $98,786 a few years back?
Chip: At one point he had what was called the world's most expensive bottle of hot sauce. In the package for the price and boldly giant cookoff and all kinds of crazy stuff.
I don't remember all the specifics, but the idea was that all of us would come to your area and do a whole cookout for you. It would be a barbecue with ribs, shoulder, brisket, chicken, and they would all use the Cackalacky Sauce and the Texas Rib Rangers sauce. And as the Cackalacky Crew, we would autographed the actual bottle that was the centerpiece of this package. It was all kind of this big publicity gimmick, because at that point in time the collectibles were at the very highest demand. Well, we thought we would take that to the next level. We would take it to where we could have the food brought to you cooked and served to you.
We got a lot of calls for it, no one wanted to spend that much money on it. But there was a lot of catering developed because of that. The team catered over the country. Basically you could have someone calling from anywhere and there were teams close to them and cater. It was kind of neat.
Scott: What happened to the Cackalacky Crew?
What we were doing was working, and it did work, and we said we are going to Memphis in May. We endeavored to head out to the American Royal BBQ in Kansas City to prove this could work. The first year at Memphis in May we did very poorly, and we didn't place. We figured it all out the second year; we got a perfect score for judging in-house, we got a real high score on blind, and ended up finishing 12th. That was pretty damn high. And we look at that and thought how cool we have done any better? There were the best ribs we ever made, we got a perfect score on in-house was a perfect 30. Could we get any better?
The same year at the Royal, we went and won pulled pork under the banner of the Texas Rib Rangers. We said, "Okay we've done it. We were in the world championships, what's next? What do you do after that?" (Laughs)
Those guys are on the road all the time, so they're constantly trying to win. But we had thought at that point in time, "Next! Let's do something else."
I still like to compete only to go out and have fun. In fact I like to catch up with some of those guys. People like the Texas Rib Rangers are on the road literally more than half the year. They stay on the road.
Scott: I had mentioned a few minutes ago about the Weekend of Fire. That's coming up soon. What's your take on trade shows in general?
Chip: Well, they cost a lot of money to be there. A trade show for us has to work on all levels or else it can't be done. The Albuquerque show [the National Fiery Foods and BBQ Show] was a different ballgame. First of all it can give you a lot of face time with a lot of your customers. That's important because you never see them other than these two days. But I can make more money at other shows. It just has to be one where you can expect a lot of people to talk who will be there. I used to say, in the old days before they moved to Fiery Foods Show, I made more money at night at the bar than I did during the entire show. While everybody was partying at the Doubletree, I made more money being there by being a mute. We just don't have that anymore because most of the big boys aren't there. The usually only come in and say "hi!"
Scott: So you're pretty much to bear just to meet your clientele, that can put your face out there?
Chip: Exactly. Face time is it. Only say hi to them. In fact if you come into my booth we'll be drinking Diet Pepsi, drinking beer and talking to customers. We won't even try to sell that much retail. When I write that one $20,000 order, that's more important than some bottle. On the other hand everybody is important.
Scott: Is there anything about trade shows that you would change if you could?
Chip: Oh yeah. Some of them are so... and I would never say anything bad about a union because they might shoot me (laughs), but the rules in some are so outrageously ridiculous. Dave DeWitt has learned, with Barbara Henderson and her people, to make his show easy. She does all the work, they do all the work. Then they blame all the Indians, but then they still get it done.
I'll give you an example. The first time vendor at the Fiery Foods Show, they may have a lot of trouble with the health department because they don't know the rules. We know there rules and we do with they say. And we don't try to fuck them. (Laughs)
If I was mainly trying to sell retail, I would be upset at the rules. It's a trade show, let me do it! And I would be fighting different concepts. But you can't. Everything is different.
But the positives... I like the attitude people have the Fiery Foods Show. They came for that specific reason and you know what they want.
Scott: Are you referring to the attendees?
Chip: Yeah. When they ask questions they are real specific. When we go to cooking shows, the questions were more general. The answers were more obvious. The questions and answers in Albuquerque are more technical more specific. They are a lot more fun to answer.
Scott: Well you have the "expert" crowd there, the true chilehead devotees...
Chip: ...and they're much much more fun to talk to. They're asking, "Okay, why did you put this pepper in the sauce, why did you do this, and what is the Mango supposed to do in the sauce?" There are some great questions and I love to trying to answer some of the challenging ones. Elsewhere the questions are more like, "What's hottest?" (Laughs)
Scott: No doubt you seen a lot of trends come and go in spicy food over the years. Do you see any big trends coming up over the horizon?
Chip: The obvious concept right now is the Ghost Pepper, the Naga Jolokia. It is something that stopped being just a super hot and started being used for a lot of tastes. The sauces coming out now are a lot of fun and not just tongue burner sauces.
The second thing you're seeing is more people willing to play with rubs and marinades than they were before. That could be as simple as a sauce marinade or as complex as something somebody makes themselves. I tell people, as an example of using chicken wings, I been on a lot of TV shows as "the King of Wings", now they're all over the place and not just from Buffalo anymore. I would say, let's talk about what your favorite tastes are and how you can make a wing from that taste. If it takes two different sauces and the rub and create a unique taste to bring it altogether, let's do it. Now we've got a "Scott wing" instead of a buffalo wing. It's something you could make yourself and your guests are going to go, "Awesome! How did you come up with this taste?.
Scott: Do you ever see a time where spicy foods will totally become the mainstream?
Chip: It already is. I firmly believe, that when you go into any group of restaurants in the large cities, not so much to rural areas, but the big cities are seen appetizers to take fusion to the next level. We no longer see a restaurant that is only this were only that. You're seeing a lot of restaurants that are trading concepts with one another, people might not be willing to spend $15, $20 or $30 on an entrée just to test it. But you're going to be more likely to spend $7 or $10 on appetizer. So if you walked into your favorite restaurant... you're in St. Louis, right?
Scott: Yes.
Chip: Well, I don't know a lot about St. Louis, but we did Kansas City a couple of times, so it's going to be the same basic customer. Kansas City has a lot of ethnic restaurants. You're starting to see instead of just one concept are starting to blossom into a couple things together. Ribs is an example. Kansas City ribs are all now all kinds of things mixed together. You're starting to see that on mainstream menus. When a mainstream restaurant like Applebee's starts talking about their sauces, now you know things have changed.
Scott: Do you think it might change to a point where you walk into any supermarket in America, and not see 50 jolokia sauces, but see two or three that touch on that level of heat?
Chip: It already has. In fact if you go in there now in any decent supermarket, you're going to see that in the "fresh" sections of the store they've branched out into different zesty concepts. So if you go to the deli section, the produce section, or in fresh seafood in those areas, you're going to see different sale concepts that you didn't see five years ago. You're also going to see the concept of meals "ready to eat" in the supermarkets were they put together all kinds of different things. I mean all kinds of different things they've never seen together before. Lots of people were buying them.
Scott: Any last words or anything you would like to plug about Peppers?
Our concept is if you e-mail us at peppers.com or call us at our 1-800 number, there are chefs here to answer your questions. I've won numerous chef awards, including a past Delaware Chef of the year, but there's one more than me, so to speak. And there are other chefs sitting here on the phones. The whole concept is you're just not talking to a sales person. It's a different game when you're talking to my people. They are trained to tell you how they feel, not as the company feels. So you ask four different employees what they think is their favorite chipotle sauce, you're going to get four different answers.
Scott: And not just try to sell you the latest sauce you're trying to push?
Chip: Exactly. They are going to tell you what they think. They're going to tell you what they believe and that's what I want them to tell you. I want them to tell you what they truly believe is the greatest for that circumstance, so they can give you six different recipes that they personally have had fun with, and in turn hopefully you're going to have more fun with your cooking.
Photograph of Chip courtesy of Brian Meagher of Hot Sauce Daily
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Comments
2010-06-29 05:52:09
2010-06-29 06:29:11
2010-06-29 06:38:06
2010-06-29 07:15:20
Mark, what other questions do you think should be asked?
2010-06-29 15:39:21
2010-06-30 08:35:54
2010-07-04 01:33:18
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