Today we’d like to introduce you to Jon Sheldon. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Freaky Ferments Food & Beverage is a Fort Worth, Texas-based company founded in 2019 by a group of close friends who have a passion for getting together, brewing beer, and eating hot peppers.
They took their love of fermentation and hot peppers and developed an array of handcrafted fermented pepper sauces as well as other fermented foods and beverages. Freaky Ferments was originally founded by Chad McClintock, Matt Pierson, and Taylor Segovia. Justin Phillips joined as an owner in 2020 as well as Jon Sheldon in 2022.
Ghost, Freaky Ferments original sauce, started off as a fermented jerky paste. Freaky Ferments’s ghost pepper and reaper pepper sauce was a breakout success. Its success spurred the development of two other flavors – Verde and Mango Pineapple Habanero. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Freaky Ferments continued to expand the sauce lineup from three to ten and expanded to other fermented products including sauerkraut and kombucha. Freaky Ferments now has twelve different handcrafted fermented pepper sauces.
2022 has been an exciting year for fans of fermented pepper sauces. Freaky Ferments has expanded in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex with attendance at more local vendor and farmer markets. With growth comes more opportunities. Fuego Box featured Ginger Cayenne Lemon, Freaky Ferments’s third sauce featured in the monthly subscription service. Most excitedly, Freaky Ferments is now in Kroger! Jalapeno, Ginger Cayenne Lemon, Verde, Mango Pineapple Habanero, and Ghost are all now available in local Krogers across the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
Freaky Ferments has recently won two awards from Zest Fest’s 2022 Fiery Food Challenge competition. Ghost earned third place in the Ghost Pepper hot sauce category. Verde earned third place in the Latin Mild/Medium hot sauce category.
Humble beginnings drive steady and thoughtful growth. As Freaky Ferments continue to grow and become more available across North Texas, flavor, quality, and variety will continue to be our top priority.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting a small business is incredibly challenging – especially when you are balancing a full life with work, family, and other commitments.
Freaky Ferments started with three friends who had a passion for brewing beer and eating hot peppers. Chad, Taylor, and Matt were home brewers who regularly crafted varying types of beers, ciders, and wines. Originally, our goal was to start a brewery. Unfortunately, it became clear early on that we needed a lot of money to see Freaky Ferments beer taps in local bars across the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.
The first real challenge was the transition to hot sauce. Chad, Taylor, and Matt knew a lot about beer and fermenting beer – they needed to apply that knowledge to their second passion, hot peppers. A lot of research and testing went into our first hot sauce, Ghost. There were batches that molded, exploded, and just tasted bad.
While developing Ghost, we worked tirelessly on developing a very simple business plan – it was basically an outline of what we wanted to do and how we were going to get there. We met with friends, family, lawyers, and really anyone that would listen and offer advice on what to do and how to grow. From there, we established ourselves as an LLC.
In early 2020, Justin Phillips joined Freaky Ferments as an equal part co-owner.
Our second challenge was to fulfill an order of Ghost for Fuego Box, a hot sauce subscription company. This was right after Justin joined Freaky Ferments. We had recently transitioned from making our sauces in small batches in our kitchens to making larger batches in a rented commercial kitchen in Fort Worth. We had to make 1,200 bottles of our Ghost sauce and ship them to their fulfillment center in New York.
Making our sauces is a multi-week process and comes in two phases. First, all fermentation vessels must be cleaned and inspected – if they are dirty or have leaks, the ferment will fail. Then all ingredients must be washed, chopped, salted, and added to our fermentation vessels. Roughly two to four weeks later, the second phase begins. Ingredients are blended, milled, heated, and bottled, and labeled. Completing the Ghost order took about ten hours with the first phase and over fourteen with the second. When chopping the ingredients, which included ghost and Carolina reaper peppers, the skin burns and becomes irritated, when heating the milled sauce for bottling, the pepper oil gets in the air causing you to cough and wheeze. It’s not very fun. That being said, we completed the order on time and with sauce to spare. Everyone worked together, gritted through the burning air, and helped make sure Ghost sauce was sent out on time.
In early 2022, Jon Sheldon joined Freaky Ferments as an equal part co-owner.
Our third major challenge was getting ready for Kroger. In late 2021, Freaky Ferments had an opportunity to participate in a Go Texan event in Austin, Texas where producers could meet grocery stores and distributors. Kroger decided to pick us up as a product in an effort to promote Texas-made items in their stores. All of 2022 has been devoted to getting ready. We had a rough idea of how many bottles we needed of our five original flavors – Ghost, Mango Pineapple Habanero, Verde, Ginger Cayenne Lemon, and Jalapeno. We just needed to figure out how to make it happen. We did a lot of research looking at how fermented hot sauce companies older than us were able to solve this challenge. We focused on becoming more efficient. We started tracking our process and were able to identify areas where we would slow down. We updated a lot of our equipment, assessed and changed how we lay out the kitchen when prepping sauces and bottling, and added more fermentation vessels.
Only a few weeks ago, late September, we shipped our first two pallets off to Kroger’s distributor. We will be in roughly 40 Krogers across the metroplex. Our process still needs work and we could be more efficient, so we continue to track and work to improve our operation each week.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Freaky Ferments Food and Beverage’s vision is to be Texas’s premiere handcrafted fermented pepper sauce; to develop flavor-focused products that encourage customers to try something new; to make our products easier to access through new and expanded opportunities; to never cut corners on quality and flavor.
Our handcrafted fermented pepper sauces are a curated blend of delicious, locally sourced ingredients. We work tirelessly to create unique, flavorful hot sauces that bring a fermented twist to any meal. When you put flavor first, you ensure ingredients are ripe, fresh, and perfectly blended for flavor and heat. We know that people want hot sauces that taste good and add spice to their life, and we ensure it with each bottle.
We manufacture our sauces. We do not pay another company to make our products and slap our labels on bottles. Because we make our sauces, we control quality. And I take pride in the quality of our products. We do not use any artificial colors or flavors, preservatives, or additives and fillers. Our sauces do not have any added water – the water comes from the raw ingredients themselves. Although we add vinegar to our sauces, we add very, very little – much less than our competitors. Our quality is what sets us apart from others and is what our customers love about us.
How do you define success?
It sounds cheesy, but success is knowing that our sauces make someone’s day better – whether that be through taking a plate of nachos at a game night to the next level or elevating a classic cocktail with a spicy fermented twist at a dinner with family and friends.
We want Freaky Ferments to be the go-to craft hot sauce not only across Texas but across the nation. But that does not happen overnight. Success for us is overcoming all of the little and big challenges along the way. We continue to grow our customer base through local markets, online shopping, and distribution to grocery stores. Success is knowing that anyone can easily locate and purchase our sauces.
Success is building and nurturing relationships with other companies. The hot sauce industry is really different compared to others. Hot sauce is the primary condiment in most households, and there is enough room for everyone. Success is learning from and imparting knowledge and experience. The hot sauce industry really is filled with brotherly love and encouragement.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.freakyferments.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freakyfermentsbrewing/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/freakyferments/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/fferments
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCngHZMbzv20dRTd0Prr1Ezw
Image Credits
Matt Pierson
Taylor Segovia
Chad McClintock
