Co-Op Sauces Flavor Ambition

By Lorrie Baumann

Co-Op Sauce has just launched five sugar-free hot sauces onto the market. They include The Barrel, Carrot Habanero, ChChCherry Bomb, Chi-Racha and Jalapeno Lime and are intended to appeal particularly to consumers pursuing a keto diet regimen as well as other adventurous eaters looking for a unique condiment.

“We are excited to make our ‘OG’ sauces with new sugar-free formulations for long-time fans, and to introduce new converts to our small-batch, wild-fermented style of hot sauce,” said Mike Bancroft, Co-Op Sauce’s Founder. “They’re built for flavor – not for pain.” All five sauces are vegan. They start with probiotic bases and non-GMO produce sourced from small farms in Illinois and Michigan.

They’re the latest releases from a company that got its start as a fundraiser for a Chicago, Illinois, non-profit youth program that taught high-risk youth how to apply their talents in entrepreneurship to a business that could lead to a career. Bancroft had originally enlisted with the program to share his skills in video production with the youth. In the course of teaching video production, he and the students decided that they’d produce a cooking show for broadcast on a local public-access station. That project evolved into a take-over of a plot in the community garden next to the art center where they were making their cooking show so they could grow the produce they needed for their recipes. Once they had crops coming in, the teens started selling the produce at farmers markets to raise money to continue their program. Once they figured out that they were having a hard time competing on the open market with the other farmers who were bringing produce to the market, they came up with a solution that a lot of other farmers have also come up with – they were going to need to make a value-added product. “It just sort of happened very much organically,” Bancroft said.

It was Bancroft who brought hot sauces to the table. He’d been making hot sauces at home as a hobby, so he already had some successes – and a few failures – in product development. “I also had some recipes that I was testing on friends and family,” Bancroft said. “Some of our friends and family were dreading it by the time that we came up with our first SKU that we started off with.”

Altogether, the evolution from visual arts program to hot sauce manufacture took about 15 years. The hot sauce company split off from the non-profit youth program about eight years ago and is now a for-profit venture that directs a portion of its revenue into the youth program and continues to employ graduates of the youth program in the cafe that shares its manufacturing facility. “We still employ kids who were part of the program, but for the most part, we’re just a funder of great stuff,” Bancroft said. In 2018, the company donated more than $20,000 to organizations including ArtReach Chicago, Project FIRE, Girl Forward, Centro Romero and the Marjorie Kovler Center.
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The hot sauces are all wild-fermented – when Bancroft and the teens he was working with started making them, they didn’t have refrigeration, so they needed to find another way of preserving the peppers that tended to ripen all at once. “We started fermenting in whiskey barrels just out of necessity,” Bancroft said.

Some of Co-Op Sauces are still fermented in whiskey barrels, although now it’s done more for flavor than out of necessity. That has led to collaborations with local craft distillers and brewers. “Goose Island is one of our larger collaborators,” Bancroft said. “We do something with them every year with one of their barrel-aged beers.”

All of the new sauces are sugar free, created by tweaking the ingredients – adding a little more of the sweeter ingredients or substituting one pepper variety for another, sweeter variety – to sweeten the sauces just a bit without adding sugar, Bancroft said. “There’s no compromise in flavor in that,” he added. “No compromise, but also not something that overpowers what you’re eating.”

The Barrel is a classic, all-purpose sauce that derives its name from the Koval Whiskey barrel that’s used to age the sauce, which is finished with Dark Matter roasted Harrar and Nicaragua coffee. Carrot Habanero is a sauce with what Bancroft calls an “eye-popping glow.” On the milder side, ChChCherry Bomb features cherry bomb chiles done three ways – the sauce combines fresh, fermented and roasted peppers along with a touch of smoke from morita chiles. Jalapeno Lime is also a milder sauce, combining both fresh and roasted jalapeno for a sauce that’s simple and sweet. Chi-Racha is just a little spicier and combines fermented jalapeno and garlic for an Asian twist that pairs well with noodle and rice dishes.

The sauces are packaged in 5-fluid ounce bottles that feature gold foil-trimmed labels and bold graphics. They retail for $4.99. For more information, visit www.coopsauce.com.