Author: Scott Roberts

Albuquerque, NM – The 28th annual National Fiery Foods & Barbecue Show is drawing near as hundreds of exhibitors prepare their best gourmet foods, sauces, spices, sweet-heat treats and rubs to showcase at Sandia Resort and Casino March 4-6, 2016 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The event will feature more than 1,000 different products from the U.S. and around the world.

The Fiery Foods Show is the country’s largest gathering of fiery food products and barbecue sauces. The 2015 event welcomed a record number of attendees and organizers of the event expect even more for the 28th annual event. This year the Fiery Foods Show will host multi-media demonstrations and a margarita challenge for the first time. Its official mascot, Chile the Kid will return, greeting guests throughout the weekend.

Multimedia presentations Saturday and Sunday will include a Tequila Demonstration by mixologist Greg Mays; Kelly Urig on her book, New Mexico Chiles: History, Legend and Lore; Dave DeWitt on his book, The Field Guide to Peppers; and Tim Ziegler on Spices & Chiles in Regional and Ethnic Cuisines.

While many exhibitors will display their award-winning selections, others will showcase first-time products. Attendees can also enjoy select Scovie Award-winning products, recognized as the top fiery food products in the world. The annual competition organized by the producers of the Fiery Foods Show is one of the most competitive blind tasted food competitions in the U.S., and receives hundreds of entries each year.

About the National Fiery Foods & Barbecue Show
The 2016 National Fiery Foods & Barbecue Show will take place March 4-6, 2016 at Sandia Resort and Casino in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Vendors from across the country will be in attendance. The show is open to the general public and trade (wholesale) buyers. Hours of the show are:

Friday, March 4
• 11am-4pm: trade only
• 4pm-8pm: trade and general public
Saturday, March 5
• 9am-11am: trade only
• 11am-7pm: trade and general public
Sunday, March 6
• 9am-11am: trade only
• 11am-6pm: trade and general public

Tickets are $15 for adults and $5 for youth 18 and younger. Advanced tickets will be available through Ticketmaster for $12, and at the Sandia Resort and Casino box office. Parking is free. For more information visit www.fieryfoodsshow.com.

The Hot Sauce Hall of Fame Final Ballot Announcement

The Hot Sauce Hall of Fame is back and commissioner Steve Seabury of High River Sauces will conduct the induction ceremony live at the 4^th annual NYC Hot Sauce Expo in Brooklyn, NY on April 23^rd at 2 PM. This year the Hall of Fame will induct 5 people who have been very instrumental in the Hot Sauce industry. The inducted class of 2016 will receive a distinctive Red Jacket, Hall of Fame Ring and will be enshrined legendary of honors into the Hot Sauce Hall of Fame.

To be eligible for the nominating or voting process, a person must operate within the fiery foods industry for a minimum of 3 years. These people also known as the Selection Committee, consists of hot sauce companies, retailers, distributors, exporters, chile pepper growers, media and restaurateurs who specialize if spicy foods and hot sauce. The Selection Committee will be polled by email from the Hall of Fame’s Senators Board in which the board will eventually narrow the Selection Committee’s ballots down to the final list to 10.

After months of debating and voting from the  Selection Committee, the committee have narrowed down their final nominations to some of the biggest and brightest names in the industry.

The Final Ballot Nominations…

In the grand matters of life and love and dating, I’m definitely not a pick up artist. I’m not looking for “friends with benefits” or a “no strings attached” sexual relationship (quite frankly, that concept sickens me) or a one-night stand.

Instead, Scott Roberts is a regular, down-to-earth, single guy and a full-time dad to two teenage boys looking for for “the one”. I’m seeking a healthy, long term relationship with a women that will hopefully will lead me and this lucky lady down the church aisle one of these years.

I’m fairly confident, well-adjusted, doing well in my job, I love to laugh and be funny, and I’m decent-looking. But is that enough to traverse the pitfalls of dating and is it enough to keep women interested and happy? And come to think of it, what actually does make woman happy? Can anyone on planet earth really understand women?

Registration is now open for the world’s largest conference dedicated to chile peppers, the 2016 New Mexico Chile Conference. The event runs Feb. 1-2 at Hotel Encanto de Las Cruces and is hosted by New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute. Conference registration and additional details are available at

http://www.chilepepperinstitute.org/events.php.

This year’s conference will focus on the use of drones in agriculture, new regulations and research into food modernization safety, current chile marketing strategies and updates on mechanization as well as insect and weed control. There will also be updates from the New Mexico Chile Association and the Chile Pepper Institute Development Leadership Council.

“The New Mexico Chile Conference brings together growers, producers, processors and researchers from all over the world to learn about the latest innovations and research in the chile pepper industry,” said Danise Coon, senior research specialist at the Chile Pepper Institute. “This year’s guest speaker, Jerry Miller, from High Desert Consulting, will highlight opportunities in using drones in agriculture.”

Conference pre-registration is $110 for individuals and $450 for a vendor booth. Walk-ins are $120 for individuals and $475 for booths. For further information, contact the Chile Pepper Institute at 575-646-3028.

New York’s own High River Sauces proudly presents the 2016 4^th Annual New York City Hot Sauce Expo on April 23^rd & 24th. The NYC Expo will feature up to 50 artisanal hot sauce makers from all over the United States and as far as Canada, Mexico, Panama and New Zealand. The NYC Hot Sauce Expo has grown into an International Hot Sauce celebration. Witness the action packed event with hot sauce tastings from each vendor, eating challenges, spicy food vendors, crafts and plenty of odd ball entertainment for the whole family.

This year’s Expo’s poster artwork [to the right] was inspired by the inaugural class of the Hot Sauce Hall of Fame. The members are depicted as Ghost Pepper Busters saving the world of the scariest of all peppers. From left to right are the mighty Edmund McIIhenny, Chip Hearn, Dave Hirshkop, Dave DeWitt and John Hard.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas Season Deals

The big sale is back, and we will update it as we get new additions to our listings. It usually grows as we get closer to the holiday, so if you are shopping or curious of what will be offered, then keep coming back. If you are a company that would like to add your sale to our listing, then please either email me your whole sale as you wish it to be listed, and I will link to your website or sales page OR you can post below in the comments. We will also we sharing this listing with some other chile blogs and numerous Facebook groups.

It is very important to note that we only want to include companies that have met all the legal requirements to sell products online and ship across the US. I can not speak of international law, so companies wishing to ship outside the US are free to do so at their own discretion. We encourage our Chilehead friends to support these small market companies and the small market companies to support the Chilehead Community.

You only have to barely mouth the phrase “spicy snack”, and I’ll coming running. Along with a really awesome chile-laden dessert item, and munchies or snacks with fire rank way up there with what I think some of the best applications of hot peppers one can come up with. My love for them is so deep, in fact, that I’ve declared both a spicy caramel sauce and a fried cheddar jalapeno snack the prestigious honor of what I thought were Best Product of the Year, back-to-back, and have had other burning sweets and snack stuff near the top of the list.

Although I’ve sampled an exhaustively large number of variations on what is capable from the munchies side of the specialty food world, I always love it when I stumble upon an item that is slightly off the beaten path, whether it’s a sly little twist on a familiar recipe or an inclusion of an ingredient someone’s ever though of before.

Popcorn is starting to be a well-mined sub-genre of the snack category, although I don’t believe I’ve ever…

Veteran Barbecue Team from Overland Park, Kansas beats 1,100 Food Sport Competitors for Fortune and Food Fame.

KISSIMMEE, FLA. (Tuesday, Nov. 10) – A wife and husband barbecue competition team from Overland Park, Kansas earned $100,000 today, beating more than 1,100 competitive chefs, home cooks and food sport enthusiasts in a week-long battle for the World Food Championships title in central Florida.

Cheryl and Loren Hill, three-time qualifiers for the World Food Championships, also took home an additional $10,000 for winning the Barbeque qualifying category, as did the eight other finalists who won their qualifying category. More than $350,000 in cash and prizes was awarded through 38 competition rounds, making it one of the largest and richest food sport events in the world…

A Louisiana-based sitcom called Hot Sauce is in development, Deadline reports.

According to the site, Hot Sauce will be a half-hour comedy from Drunk Wedding filmmaker Nick Weiss, writer-actor Gary Lundy and ABC Studios. Co-written by Weiss and Lundy, Hot Sauce is said to follow “a high-powered, no-nonsense mom who relocates her family to small-town Louisiana to work for the most popular hot sauce company in the world. There she finds herself pitted against a culture and community she doesn’t want…

It’s that time of year again!

What I’m actually talking about is the end of the fiery foods festival season. Around mid-to-late-October all chile pepper events and hot sauce shows have all but pretty much ended through the remainder of the year, only to start back up a few weeks after the New Year.

So it being this time, it’s also the time in which I will update my Hot Sauce/Chilehead Events and Festivals Calendar page of hot sauce shows, spicy food festivals, and other chile pepper-related events occurring around the United States for the coming year…