Bottling - the biggest hurdle of all

It is illegal in most states to produce a food in your home kitchen, label it and sell it. Plenty of people do it, but I'd rather go the legit route so I don't have lawyers knocking on my door someday. Sure, I could make a dozen or so bottles of hot sauce each weekend, label them, shrink wrap them and sell them to family and friends, but what is the fun in that? I'd rather do it right and sell it right.

And that is the toughest part we'll encounter as we try to get our hot sauces on the shelf. Finding a bottler is not so hard, even the pricing is not bad, as you'd typically pay $1.50-$2.00 per bottle to have the ingredients cooked, mixed, bottled labeled and in most cases that cost even covers your testing, FDA approval, and nutritional content evaluation. Great, where do I sign?

Not so fast, as the minimums for most places I have contacted run between 3000-4800 bottles. And that is per flavor Do the math and you'll see a first run batch isn't as easy as it sounds.

So where do we go next? You can rent a commercial kitchen and produce and bottle and label your sauces and sell in retail stores. Ok, sounds easy enough. But your cost per bottle rises as you have to pay kitchen rent, buy all ingredients, spend time producing, plus pay normal -non-bulk pricing on empty bottles, caps, shrink bands, etc.

I believe I can still get my cost to around $2.00 a bottle this way, but that doesn't cover nutritional guidelines, pH  testing and FDA approval. I am still hunting for a place that will do these as an off shoot.

The bonus to bottling your own is you can make as many different sauces as you want and whatever quantity you desire. I have some emails out to some small time hot sauce companies to get more information and see how they go to where they are.

In the meantime, if you want to bottle yourself, I suggest you check out the following sites:

Bottles, caps, shrink bands, etc - SKS Bottles
Barcodes for your labels - Nation Wide Barcodes
Design of your logo and label for cheap - MY COMPANY! Jay Gray Graphic Design

If you have money you need to burn and do not mind a first run of 3000+ bottles, I highly recommend these companies. While I may not run my sauces through them, they were extremely helpful on the phone and I do know of two companies who use them for bottling:

Endorphin Farms
Stage Coach Sauces

If you know of any small batch companies that bottle, please let me know!

- Jay -