Prototype Club Box 04

This is part of a series of posts covering the contents of each Prototype Club box dating back to November 2022. An overview of the thinking and circumstances around each prototype hot sauce.

HOPPED UP BRAMBLES WITH APRICOTS AND GHOST CHILLIES

Our 7 Pot Bramble won “Best New Product” at North East Scotland Food & Drink Awards in 2023. Ever since, we’ve opened up a whole rabbit hole of “what ifs” around it. This is a slightly more unusual take on it. Firstly, the lovely judge for the awards said “it took the face off me”, which we took as a compliment at the time. So we made this version with ghost chillies. Just to delay the onset of the burn a little. It’ll get you later. But then we wondered if we should promote those fine Scottish brambles a bit more. So we horsed in loads more of them.

But why stop there?

We added a glug of apricot juice in there. Then we had a bit of a meltdown about maybe making it too sweet. So we added a dose of Nelson Sauvin hops to the party. It’s the first time we’ve added hops but something tells us we’ll be doing more of that.

Heat: 3/5

CHEAP SAUCE

This is the first sauce we’ve ever designed on a spreadsheet. We did a bit of market research around the hot sauces found on supermarket shelves. We looked at all sorts of things and ultimately the price point. We calculated the average cost of a bottle of hot sauce on a supermarket shelf to be £2.50 for 150ml. We set that as our budget and got to work. Our aim was to make the best sauce possible within those most tiny of margins. Once we factored in the cost of glass and labels etc, we were left with a tiny ingredients budget. This was very illuminating about what goes into a supermarket hot sauce. The first version of a sauce which directly competes on cost with a supermarket. And we learned a hell of a lot here. We’re definitely not calling it “sauced of living” though. Nope, that would be silly

And if you’re interested, the cost per 100ml of Tabasco is higher than the cost of 100ml of our Het Sass. We calculated an average of £4.08/100ml for Tabasco vs £4.05/100ml for Het Sass. That little bottle hides a truth that it’s not as cheap as you think it is…

Heat: 3/5

FIRE SEED 01

We’ve made mustard for ages and we plan on doing more of that.

So we’ve cracked on and started flexing our skills in utilising mustard in more exciting ways. Our aim is to forge some new and contemporary condiments. This is the first of those.

Heat: 2/5