By David MacDonald S ince he was a teenager, Drew Stevens has had a green thumb. He and his brother grew hot peppers in their backyard just as “ghost peppers came on the scene about 20 years ago,” he recalled. “Ghost peppers really got us into the more super-hot peppers. As time went on there were always new, hotter peppers – but we had a problem.” Even though Drew resided in Oshawa, part of Ontario’s fruitful Greater Golden Horseshoe, he was reliant on online vendors in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.A. for non-generic pepper seeds. “After we grew some of the more rare varieties, we decided to build a modest website and sell seeds over the internet. We started off growing about 50 plants. In the fall we harvested all the peppers and took out the seeds, dried them, packaged them, and sold them. It didn’t take long before we got bigger.” Their next harvest was 200 plants. Then 300. “It was after one of the bigger harvests years later that my wife Ana and I decided to experiment with hot sauces. Our first hot sauce was our No Joke “Original Recipe with Ghost Peppers” hot sauce, which is still my favourite. We really experimented with it a lot at first, tested it on friends and family, switched-up the ingredients, and used different quantities of vinegars,” he said. “It was after one of the bigger harvests years later that my wife Ana and I decided to experiment with hot sauces.” “Once we had a recipe that everyone seemed to like,” Drew continued, “we started doing local farmers markets in 2013 to rave reviews from cus- tomers and fellow hot sauce lovers. I remember the first farmers market we did our first daughter was about one years old and people really loved seeing a young family giving it a go.” The family-run aspect of Pepper North is very important to Drew. “We are still a family business five years later; there’s me and my wife, we’re the owners. I do more of the creative and production side and she handles more of the business side, so contacting customers, promoting the business, maintaining current accounts, account- ing, all that.” “My brother actually does all our labels, which is really cool because we get to brainstorm together,” Drew said. “We’ll sit down and shoot names and design concepts back and forth. It’s really cool that he does that for us because it saves us a ton on labeling. Whenever we’re setup at a trade show, we get huge feedback on our labels. People really like them and we are super lucky to have him. Again, it’s all done in the family. When we do trade shows
we often get help from parents, brothers, and sisters – they all come out and give us a hand, too. We are totally a family-run business, 100 percent. We still hand-bottle all our products.” Before the trade show days, before local shops started stocking No Joke on their shelves, and before Sobeys, Foodland, and Urban Fresh locations throughout Southern Ontario began carrying Pepper North products, there were the church kitchen days. “As we were starting out we were cooking our hot sauce in a local church kitchen we’d rented. We’d cook batches every couple of weeks and perform inventories as our market grew. We sold directly to cus- tomers basically that whole first year.” As the demand grew, so did their batch sizes. “We didn’t just start making more; we also added our second and third products that year: After- glow Hot Pepper Jelly and Hive Mind Hot Honey Mustard.” It wasn’t long until Pepper North “evolved from the church,” Drew said. “We now have a large bottling facility that we use here in Oshawa, but it is still all hand-blend- ed and hand-bottled. There’s no doubt that we’re producing a lot more sauce now.” If “medium to pretty extreme” isn’t in the gas- tronomic cards for you, don’t fret. While Drew’s speciality is undoubtedly “on the hotter end,” Pepper North’s milder condiments are not to be dismissed. Tastingtheheat.com gave Hive Mind Hot Honey Mustard 10 out of 10 for taste and a six out of 10 for heat – and the judges at the annual Hot Pepper Awards in Brooklyn, New York con- curred. They gave Hive Mind 1 st Place in the Sandwich Condiment category in 2017. “For that one we use only local Canadian honey, which is produced literally 15 minutes from where we live,” Drew explained. “We go to the beekeeper and we get the honey fresh – it is wildflower honey. The mustard seed we use is all- Canadian, which is big for a lot of people. Most mustards use Chinese mustard, which is in my opinion not as good as Canadian-grown mustard. We use the Carolina Reaper pepper in the mustard, which is actually the current hottest pepper in the world but we use a lesser quantity. It’s really good on burgers and sausages – and it’s really good with chicken fingers. A lot of people use it when they’re doing hams and cottage rolls and things like that because it can kind of be smeared on top before you cook it. That one has been really well-received. We have won three awards at
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FEBRUARY 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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