Serious Foodie Sauce Connects with a Culture
By Lorrie Baumann
Serious Foodie, which started out five years ago as a maker of pepper-based sauces, has transformed into a company whose focus is on global, regional, flavorful ingredients. That peppers are still part of the journey is evidenced by its latest sofi Award-winning product, Serious Foodie Brazilian Grill Sauce.
Brazilian Grill Sauce won a silver award this year in the barbecue and hot sauce category. This was Serious Foodie’s third sofi Award, following awards in 2016 for its Blood Orange & Aji Panca Cooking Sauce and in 2018 for Serious Foodie Tamarillo New Zealand Marinade and Dressing.
The new product that won this year’s sofi Award represented a departure from Serious Food’s usual product development process, in that it started at home in Florida rather than during the international travels of Founder Jim Pachence and his family. Most of its products, including the Blood Orange & Aji Panca sauce that won the award in the company’s first year of selling products, are born when Pachence travels to a country that has a cuisine he or his family members admire. He tastes the food, talks about the food, learns about the local ingredients and then he comes home to make a product that uses similar ingredients to demonstrate his new understanding of the culture he visited. “Our travels to Peru taught us quite a bit about the diverse culture – and how Peru became a fusion cuisine culture before chefs in the U.S. ever dreamed about combining Asian with European with native foods,” he said as he described how the Blood Orange & Aji Panca sauce came about. As he learned about Peruvian cuisine during a visit to the country, Pachence came across a sauce that depended on local ingredients that were unfamiliar to him: aji panca, a pepper that’s sweet and smoky as well as spicy, and huacatay, a black mint that’s frequently blended into cream sauces to dress a variety of Peruvian dishes. “We came across a sauce in Lima that used both ingredients, in addition to a native sour orange. The sour orange reminded us of blood orange, which is much easier to obtain,” Pachence said. “We now import both aji panca and huacatay from Peru for this sauce.”
“We tend to do things that are a little bit unusual and a little cutting edge,” he added. “We literally have gone around the world looking at what people eat… and, most importantly, how people share meals. That’s represented in the products, and the recipes. We really try to make this connection of people – that is our mission.”
Development of the Brazilian Grill Sauce that won this year’s sofi Award took a very different path. “We had a bucket of red jalapenos and were trying to figure out what to do with a bucket of jalapenos that’s a little bit different,” he said. “We didn’t want to make chipotle.”
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For Brazilian churrasco, meat is salted but not usually sauced before it’s skewered and placed on the grill, and then it’s served with condiments. “My friends who are Brazilian live by their grill. There is no meal that doesn’t use the grill,” Pachence said. “Those Brazilian steakhouses are often very reminiscent of the style of eating that is done – you’re taking a big slab of meat and cut it into pieces and then hand it around. The meat is unadorned; it’s just the meat as the star. The sauce is for an extra kick of flavor for those interested.”
The Serious Foodie sauce can be used as a condiment sauce for that style of cooking, but it’s also suitable for use as a marinade or a dipping sauce, Pachence said. “It works with any of those techniques. Sugar and salt are kept as low as possible, so it doesn’t burn; it caramelizes,” he said. “We do get a nice depth of flavor when it’s cooked on the grill.”
Although the Brazilian sauce is intended to use as a condiment with meats, Pachence has found other uses for the sauce in his own home. “My wife and I slather it on eggs. We love scrambled eggs with that sauce. It’s a substitute for the generic red sauce,” he said. The Brazilian Grill Sauce is also good on meaty fish, he added. “We’ve tried it on swordfish on the grill – we used it as a grill sauce, and that seemed to work.”
The Brazilian Grill Sauce is also finding its way onto the shelves of specialty food retailers through a route that’s different from that taken by its Serious Foodie predecessors, Pachence said. “We are transitioning a bit where some of these special sauces will be spending a lot of time online before they hit the stores,” he said. “One of the things we’ve learned about our products is that we’ve gained a big cult following. The best way we’ve found to connect with these folks is with online stories…. Most of the people who buy it from us are asking about where they can find it in a store near them. Online is making people search it out.”
The online launch is supported by a strong social media effort and a website buttressed with recipe ideas that let customers know what they do with the sauce,” Pachence said. His plan is that a delayed launch into brick and mortar stores will mean that when the product does arrive on grocers’ shelves, it will already have a following: “We’re building an audience,” he said.
Brazilian Grill Sauce is packaged in 6-ounce jar that’s sold as a six-pack for retailers. The label features bold imagery on the front of the jar and suggestions for use on the back. The suggested retail price for a jar of the sauce is $5.95.
