2024 - Our Best Year Ever

TL;DR

• Launched a collaboration BBQ sauce with Big Peat Whisky by Douglas Laing
• Won an International award and a local award. Made the finals twice in national awards
• Launched our fastest selling new product ever
• Made 14000 bottles of sauce with one pair of hands
• Smashed all projections for Prototype Club and got a bloody nose along the way
• Made our 500th batch of hot sauce
• Oh and we very quietly passed 5 years in business

The directors cut…in somewhat of a chronological order

We did well at the international hot sauce competition out in California in 2023. We didn’t win any trophies but there are other not so obvious wins to be had. We were definitely entering it again in 2024. We got our entries away and waited until the big day in June to find out how we did. We’ll return to that in a minute.

Because it was January at the time. And January is the first month our annual 3 month quiet period. And we hate it.

Every year since the beginning, the first three months of the year have almost broken us. Every year we try and do something about it ahead of time to make things easier than the previous year. We’re not alone in this. Speak to other small businesses in food & drink and they’ll tell you the same story.

We’d stashed some money away to help level out those expected 3 quiet months. But 2024 hadn’t shown its full hand yet. It was about to test our resilience in new and cruel ways. It was shit. Really shit. The expected 3 months turned out to be a devastating 5 quiet months instead. This put almost every new project we had planned for, in the bin immediately. We had to postpone all but one of the collaborations we had planned. We had to forget our plans for more equipment. We watched many other small businesses close and wondered if we would be next. By the and of April, we were struggling to see any future without some radical change.

There was only one thing to do that made sense to us. And that was to grow. Increase our output, increase our direct sales and secure at least one wholesaler. So we planned a three prong attack and got busy.

Let’s pause a minute. If you turned up to read a hyper positive review, i’m afraid you’re going to find more honesty than that. We will cover the positives but context is important. Sweeping the bad parts under the rug helps nobody to improve.

Onward…

Having that 5 month financial black hole on our hands meant cashflow was in the bin. And it costs a lot to hire people. So we did a lot of thinking about the type of role we need to fill. We then ran the numbers. We arrived at a figure that would allow us to hire one person into that role without delay. And it was a larger number than we thought it might have been. We decided to run a crowdfunder to raise the total amount. Securing that would immediately allow us to get the right person in and get moving. We even had that right person in mind. But things don’t always work. We didn't hit the target. In fact, we weren't even close. Please don't think we're in any way ungrateful or resentful about that. We are hugely thankful to everyone who stepped right in and backed us. Things are tough all over. Peoples priorities don't start at small batch hot sauce from Aberdeen. We ended up short of our target and filling this role will have to wait to later down the road. We'll do it the long way but we will do it.

So, no new equipment and now a temporary hold on recruitment. That meant not being able to increase production by any meaningful amount. That all but ended the option of working with a wholesaler at that point. We were running out of options, so we went sideways. We focussed in on direct customers and we made it our mission to grow Prototype Club. Nobody believed that would work and that’s why we believed that it would…probably.

In case you’re wondering what prototype club is, it's our quarterly hot sauce subscription. A box of 3 unique, experimental and/or unhinged hot sauce, delivered to your door. Here’s the full juice on the most innovative hot sauce subscription on the planet.

We made some moves to increase the numbers in Prototype Club ahead of box 07 scheduled for May 2024. This gave us a lot of work to grow our subscription but we set a target and went after it. We now had a bit more insight into how we could grow this even more and decided we’d try and double it ahead the next box. If that worked out, we’d do the same again to double it once more before the end of 2024.

Sometime about now, we impressed a very nice man from Waitrose with our Buffalo Hot sauce. That lead to us winning the local North East Food & Drink Awards for best new product (That’s two years in a row bby). That put a wee smile on our miserable faces for a while.

June appeared and with it, a sudden burst of optimism. Like a light had gone on and once again, we were slingin sauce like we’d wanted to be doing all year. This was in no small way influenced by what happened in that competition out in California. Because we flipped on the live show on YouTube from Old Boney Mountain and we watched the results come in. 575 different sauces from 21 different countries all came down to this moment. And then… the largest and most important award we have ever won came our way. We won a division at one of the most famous hot sauce competitions in the USA. We took 1st place in the wing division for our Buffalo Hot Sauce.

I still can’t get that to sink in. A hot sauce competion in America decided that we make the best Buffalo sauce in the world. Yep, the world's best wing sauce is made by our daft wee sauce company in Aberdeen, Scotland. We’ll take it :)

And now we were making more friends in the US. Helped along by our new pals at the Talking Tacos Podcast out of New Jersey. Things moved from there, opportunities arose, introductions happened, conversations are ongoing. And we’re just getting started.

In July we dropped the only new collaboration sauce we’d managed to do in 2024. It was something of a secret. We'd been working with Douglas Laing behind the scenes since late 2023. Working together to create a BBQ sauce which paid tribute to the sweet and smoky notes of their Big Peat whisky. We made several versions of the BBQ sauce. Each version tasted, discussed and improved on. One version even made its way through Box 06 of our Prototype Club. It was dressed in a poorly veiled disguise ;). We had plenty of feedback from our gang by the end of February. In the end, we dropped chilli from the ingredients list. The first time we’ve made a sauce without chilli in it. We have decided to investigate that choice a little more in future.

Ahead of the new Hockey season, we got our boy STALLAN down to see the Aberdeen Lynx play. So he could soak in some inspiration. Because we were going to continue our sponsorship of the Lynx. We decided that everything was going to look a little bit more badass. And you can see the results on this seasons official warm up shirts and the labels for Holy Puck.

August Prototype club box 08 had double the subscribers from the box before

It was now very much markets/events season. We attended the same events as last year and added the Turrif Show to our calendar. We had big days out all over Aberdeenshire and Moray. Grateful to meet curious, excited and generally pleasant people all over. More people than ever have heard of us. It feels like the hot sauce market we’ve been helping to shape for 5 years now, is growing faster than ever.

In September, we succumbed to the threats of violence coming our way. In May, we’d created a prototype sauce called “Hot Curry Ketchup”. Almost immediately after shipping that box, we were being pursued for more. Our gang members wanted it for real “or else”. So we put it all in play, decided we’d better put it in larger, squeezie bottles and we launched it. It sold out in days. We made SHIT LOADS MORE and it all sold out too. Hot Curry Ketchup is our fastest selling new product of all time.

Into October and the discussions we’d been having with a wholesaler came to fruition with a first order. I must single out the course I took part in through Scotland Food & Drink and Opportunity North East. Introduction to Wholesale was the catalyst to get this over the line. Those two organisations were the only ones that I can honestly level praise at. They proactively helped us make the moves we so needed to. The course we found ourselves on was the single best business course we’ve undertaken. It was intense but it was excellent. And the result? A regular order from a national wholesaler. This gives us far broader reach, less admin and stabilises cashflow. After the first months of the year, that’s music to our ears. It will help us plan around the beginning of 2025 with more optimism.

Readers will note the mood has picked up around here, so…

…and then there was Prototype Club box 09.

Scheduled for November, we once more had twice as many members than the previous box. But that’s where the good times ended. Our suppliers struck a savage blow down on us. Well actually, two suppliers dealt several blows. This time with our shipping boxes. Cardboard has never given me so much anxiety. It has never caused so much disappointment. I'm certain it's never been responsible for so many customer support emails. And then there were the perpetual social media messages. It made our lives an absolute misery. We did everything we could to get our hands on as many boxes as possible. I'm sorry to say that at the time of writing this, there are still some 50 people without their box. Those former suppliers of ours, still haven’t made good on the boxes we ordered and paid for back in October.

Into the final months of the year where we once again spent the final 6 weeks at Aberdeen Christmas Market. We achieved more than double the sales we did at the end of 2023 and that was our best year ever. Around this time, the results of the Sauce Awards came in and we ended 2024 by making the final 5 in two categories. Our Hot Curry Ketchup and Fuego De Cerveza keeping some of the best sauces in the UK company. In November, we clicked past 5 years in business. But we’d had such a draining year that we didn’t feel like celebrating. See you for a party some other year where our anxiety isn’t through the roof.

We also made our 500th batch of hot sauce. That felt like a real milestone. In fact, with only one pair of hands, we made 14000 bottles of hot sauce in 2024.

You want to know what was popular this year? Because last year we knew our Buffalo Hot Sauce was going to own. And it did. We’ll leave Hot Curry Ketchup out of this because it didn’t appear until September. Our most popular sauce of the year was…Everyday Hot Sauce. And we were just as surprised as you are right now. Buffalo Hot sauce was a very close second. Miso Hot Sauce and Our Hottest Sauce making up the rest of our core line up. Looking at the pattern and demand toward the end of 2024, we reckon Buffalo will take the crown in 2025. Unless we launch something beyond awesome (no spoilers). Given how well Hot Curry Ketchup sells, that one might just make a play for second or third place in 2025. We’re keen to find out.

And so, to sum up. The first half of 2024 was our worst period in business ever. I can’t begin to explain the anxiety. It felt like at any moment, everything would just have to end. That was a horrendous and upsetting situation to endure. But endure we did. And we’re in better shape now than we were at any point throughout 2024.

There is much to be positive about.

Our first wholesale partner means we're positioned to work an efficient production schedule. Our Prototype Club, will level out cashflow in those first tricky months of 2025. We’ve got all sorts of new ideas too. We have collaborations lined up of course. We even have our second transatlantic collab primed to happen. We’ve got some frankly, mind boggling ideas for Prototype Club in 2025. Fingers crossed we can make that all important hire next year to push on. Oh and we’ll be extending our manufacturing. Offering white label services to more small batch sauce makers from further afield. We’ll have more on that service in the coming months. If you’re reading this and it’s something you’d like to investigate, give us a shout now before we get booked out.

And just a note on the title of this post. More than any other year, I’ve really struggled to continue using it. You may have noticed that the title has been the same for every yearly write up…or you may not have noticed. It’s more to amuse myself than to convey anything useful. With the financial void the first half of the year gave us, it would have been easy to consider “2024 - Our worst year ever” or even “2024 - Our last year ever?”. Even when things were difficult and distressing, we’ve found our way through. We found positives and we found new directions to travel and grow.

We have now spent 5 years building the Singularity brand. So many people believe in us, back us, buy from us, big us up and entertain all the hot sauce lunacy we throw out into the world.

And you keep us going.

We are nothing without you.