sort of the happy hormones.”
If you’re a fan of hot and spicy, datil peppers have another way of making you happy: they range from 100,000 to 300,000 SHUs (Scoville Heat Units) on the Scoville scale, which is as hot as or hotter than a habañero pepper. That’s not to say that each and every Old St. Augustine Gourmet product is going to have you reaching for the nearest cold drink. The Datil Zest Spice Blend, a mix of spicy datil peppers, natural lemon, orange and lime combined with onion, garlic, smoked paprika, salt and black peppers has a heat level of two out of ten, Angela said. Snake Bite Datil Pepper Hot Sauce, Angela’s number one selling product, comes in at five out of ten on Old St. Augustine Gourmet’s informal heat level gauge while Angela doesn’t even feel the need to rate her Jalapeño Honey Mustard: “It’s not too spicy and it’s not too sweet.” “Every Old St. Augustine Gourmet product started as an at-home kitchen creation.” “I love spicy food and I love to experiment with flavor com- binations and food – that’s how this business got started. Every Old St. Augustine Gourmet product started as an at-home kitchen creation. We used to travel from Tennes- see to Florida every year on vacation – we lived in the Nash- ville area – and we became enamored with datil pepper products. (The datil pepper actually thrives naturally in St. Augustine like nowhere else in the world.) So I started taking peppers home and experimenting. The first product I created was actually a spicy salsa with datil peppers – I even bottled it myself. Before long my kids were hauling it out the back door and giving it away to their friends and taking it back to college and that kind of thing. One of them finally looked at me and said, ‘Mom, why aren’t you selling this stuff? You could make money.’ Up until then, it had never even occurred to me that this could be a business. I was so focused on being a nurse and being an administra- tive nurse I just didn’t even think about it; it was just some- thing I did for fun. So Old St. Augustine Gourmet actually started in our home kitchen and it just grew from there. The next thing we knew we were in business, literally.” For Angela, a self-professed lifelong learner, there is nothing more important than the “we” side of the Old St. Augustine Gourmet equation. “I am constantly learning and growing – it’s who I’ve always been – and I am appre- ciative of all the help I have received from my family,” she said. “On the entrepreneurship side of things I first looked to my husband – and I still rely on him a lot. He has over 40 years’ experience in wholesale and retail as a manufacturer. And two of my sons and one of my nephews are also in this with me. They’ve used their education in graphic design, business, and entrepreneurship to help market our brand – so I’ve got a lot of support and I’m learning something new every day.”
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • DECEMBER 2018
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