Conversations with Jared Beauchamp

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jared Beauchamp.

Hi Jared, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, let’s briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
It was 2018; it was Season 5 of the now massively popular YouTube show Hot Ones with the one and only Sean Evans. As a wing connoisseur, I was immediately hooked! My favorite tech YouTube creator, MKBHD, and comedian, Tom Segura, were climbing spice mountain in the season. As I dug into the niche culture, I found that the palette-destroying race to the top was insane. After binge-watching past seasons of Hot Ones, I wanted to know if you could have flavor and heat. This concept is what Salce was born from.

Like any good idea, we started small. We started by making a few bottles for ourselves and co-workers to try. We finally premiered our first three recipes as ‘thank you’ gifts to family and friends who attended our son’s first birthday in February 2019. We continued making, tweaking, bottling, and giving away Salce throughout 2019. Salce was a massive hit with everyone who tried it! As we entered early 2020, though, everything changed with the pandemic. Long-standing established businesses were closing every single day. Like many others at this time, we had to shift our priorities and focus on other things for the time being. We shelved Salce without knowing if we’d ever get the chance to come back to it. Fast forward two years later to the middle of 2022. The same co-workers and friends who taste-tested Salce in 2019 began to ask almost in unison what ever happened to Salce and if we’d ever make it again. With those chants pushing us, we found a way to put all the necessary pieces together and began selling Salce online and at farmers’ markets in October of 2022.

As of April 2023, we completed our first “season,” or 6 months of the farmers market circuit. This allowed us to get familiar with all the processes of running a business, managing inventory, pivoting to meet customer needs, social media, paying taxes, and everything in between. With these critical experiences under our belt, we want to make some changes in the second half of 2023. The biggest change is moving our operations from a shared kitchen to a private kitchen provided by CloudKitchens. This will provide us a dedicated space to expand our flavor offerings, try new product lines like spicy jams, and, most importantly, leverage their platform to sell on Uber Eats and Doordash. This should increase our exposure and bring Salce to more people throughout the Phoenix area.

Alright, let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
If at any point it is a smooth road, I am forgetting something or didn’t do something correctly. There is always some bump, challenge, or unknown keeping you from moving forward when starting and running your own business. For Salce, the initial struggles all surround the testing and certification of our recipes. When you are dealing with producing shelf-stable food such as hot sauce, there are numerous local, state, and federal regulations to ensure your process for cooking, producing, and bottling are safe for the public. The problem is there needs to be a clear set of things you need to do to achieve those certifications. We ended up completing one step, which would lead to three other things, and one of those things would be something completely new that you’ve never heard of before. One of these steps led us to register with NC State University to complete and receive a certification in their Acidified Food Manufacturing School. Catching this at, what we thought was the end of our certification process, added a few unexpected months to our initial timeline.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The hot sauce business is a wild place. You have sauces that are so hot that you lose all feeling in your face to those that replicate Everything Gagel’s flavor profile. This provides a lot of creative freedom in the space to develop a brand that fits what you enjoy and the ability to bring it to life.

Salce is not your traditional hot sauce. Although the typical “gift shop” hot sauces can be useful, they tend to overwhelm your palette with an explosion of heat and not much else. Salce elevates meals with flavor and heat. It is unique in that it sits between being a hot sauce and a salsa. Hot sauces generally deliver heat with the sole purpose of overwhelming the palette in various ways, while salsas are typically served on a tortilla chip of some sort and are generally tomato based in flavor. Salce’s flavor-first profile blends peppers with the sweetness of fruit or honey to create an enjoyable meal enhancement experience. Salce can be used as a dip, cook or prepare various meat and proteins, as a marinade, or top your favorite steak or taco—a true combination of hot sauce and salsas. Salce is made in small batches with natural, farm-fresh ingredients to provide that premium homemade taste. Salce wakes up with what would be considered bland food.

• Scrambling eggs before heading to work? Salce it.
• Grilled chicken for that post-workout protein? Salce it.
• Marinating some flat steaks for a neighborhood block party? Salce it.
• Cooking wings for the big game this weekend? Salce it.

How do you define success?
From the business perspective, success is defined as whether we are bringing in more money than we are spending. For us and Salce, this adventure is a bit deeper for us. While ensuring the business is financially stable, we want this business to be something we can pass on to our two boys as a family business. We also want the business to be rooted in our local community here in Queen Creek. So success for us is measured against those goals as well.

Pricing:

• $12 per 8oz bottle

Contact Info:

• Website: https://getsalce.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getsalce
• TikTok: @getSalce