Passion for hot sauce

Blend the rich culinary history of Mexico, Ireland and Italy, and what do you get?

Hot sauce made by a fast-growing Petaluma startup that has cracked into the vast empire of Safeway stores.

On March 11, Chuck Ross and his uncle Frank Ross trekked from their tiny Petaluma production kitchen to Safeway headquarters in Pleasanton for a meeting with the North Bay regional buyer that could propel their four-year-old hot sauce company to rapidly accelerating profits. If its products continue to sell briskly in Safeway, the F.A. Nino’s company will land dozens of new store outlets just in northern California and add tens of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.

Ross, 36, experimented with food early in life. The passion persists. “I have been working in the food industry since I was 12,” he said. “That’s 24 years. I come from a huge Mexican-Irish family. I remember being five years old and making roasted peppers with my grandmother. I was obsessed with cooking, loved it. There’s fire. There are knives. It smells good. It’s dangerous. Dude, it’s awesome! And I get to eat it,” he said.

F.A. Nino’s has 10 products with hot sauce varieties such as fire-roasted red, mango habanero and smokin’-green, as well as Jamaican dry-rub and beer-BQ sauce made with Lagunitas Brewing Company ales. The company already sells in about 75 stores including Oliver’s Market and Pacific Market in Sonoma County, Mill Valley Market in Marin, and Safeway markets in Petaluma, Sonoma, San Rafael, Napa, St. Helena and Oakland. At least eight restaurants use the products. Already, annual sales have reached $70,000 and are on track to nearly triple in a year. Hot sauce bottles sell for about $4.99; rubs go for about $8.50, depending on product and store.

A rapid Safeway rollout will require the Rosses to expand production facilities and adopt more mechanized processing, bottling and labeling, all of which are now done laboriously by hand using mostly local products. The March meeting with Safeway led to additions of three new stores: Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park and Sebastopol. The same week, the manager of the Antioch Safeway requested F.A. Nino’s products, adding another store for a total of 10.

“We didn’t walk away with 100 stores,” said Frank Ross, manager and the uncle of founder Chuck Ross. The Safeway buyer “wanted to feel us out and see who we were before they make any kind of a major corporate commitment.” The meeting went well.

“My sense is there’s some movement,” Ross said. “They’re going from a large corporate system nationally to breaking it back down to (be) more localized. The message was, they want us long-term and widespread.” But the wise business expansion might be a little at a time.

F.A. Nino’s has a quirky naming history. In Spanish, “nino’s” is slang for “godfather’s” (“niño” with tilde mark means “boy”). Chuck Ross had a jocular and affectionate relationship with his late godfather Anthony Ferraro, he said. “It was an inside joke between my godfather and my dad,” Ross said. “It literally means ‘fat-assed godfather’s’” hot sauce. Godfather Ferraro “was a big Italian guy” who served as monsignor in a diocese in southern California.

The figure on the company logo is a silhouette of his godfather. “He passed away a few months before I started doing this,” Ross said. “He was an important part of my family life. ‘Godfather of sauce’ is our slogan.” Ross’s father died about a year and a half after he started the business.

Chuck Ross, who technically owns the business in his name as a sole proprietor, has agreed informally to hold 51 percent of the company, and uncle Frank will own 49 percent, according to Frank Ross. “He gets 51,” Ross said. “He started with the name, came up with all the sauces and ideas.” Frank Ross previously taught religion and Hebrew at a Catholic high school in San Francisco, as well as in Hawaii.

“I was there the night he was born,” Frank Ross said of his nephew Chuck. They both were born in the same San Bernardino hospital.

“We have done this all bare bones,” the older Ross said, with no capital. When Chuck first started at farmers’ markets, “he was printing labels on our home printer,” Ross said. “We were filling bottles with a funnel.”

The Safeway buyer looked for sales track records of at least a case of 12 bottles per week for any product from F.A. Nino’s. “That tells them it’s a mover,” Ross said. “We’re doing seven to eight cases a month. We’re way past what they want us to do. That movement got us into that meeting.”

“We do not want to co-pack,” Ross said, in order to scale up production quickly for a huge order. “You lose who you are and you lose your flavor, all that quality. We make it all ourselves, bottle it ourselves, pick the chile stems, cook it all, put the labels on.”

Of his nephew, Ross said, “he’s the artist and I’m the spokesmodel.” He chuckles, noting that his impressive girth and height make a mockery of modeling. A friend who works in the kitchen at Lagunitas, Ryan Rommel, helps out every week with production.

Chuck Ross started F.A. Ninos four years ago after being laid off from a job as sous-chef at a restaurant. He subsisted on unemployment and started cooking hot sauces. “I stopped drinking, stopped smoking,” he said, “saved all my money and developed a small line of four products, got my business license, my labels. I started with nothing, no capital, no financial backing whatsoever.

“We were not wealthy. We did not go out. Grandma made dinner. Mom made dinner,” he said. “Everyone came over and ate. The kids were always helping, peeling carrots and potatoes, pressing tortillas. I enjoyed it. I kept practicing. My parents were very supportive” of his early cooking exploits and offered constructive criticism.

Oliver’s Market was the first store to carry F.A. Nino’s sauces. “One of the meat guys, the butcher, came by the tent” at a farmers’ market, Ross said. “He loved the dry rub. I immediately jumped on it,” selling bottles to the store’s meat department. Within the first summer, Petaluma Market and G & G Market picked up his product line, followed by Molsberry Market, Fircrest, Andy’s Produce, Pacific Market. Marinwood Market stocked his products in Marin County. “I started the farmers’ market with zero stores, zero sales. No one knew who I was,” he said. “Within three months, I was in a dozen stores.”

A few months later he contracted with Falcon Trading Company, the distribution arm of SunRidge Farms based in Pajaro, near Monterey, to move F.A. Nino’s products into more stores, such as United Market in Marin, a Walgreens in Santa Cruz, “a ton of mom-and-pop stores in the Santa Cruz hills,” he said. The distributor takes 32 percent of gross sales for products it delivers.

Whole Foods stores in Petaluma and Folsom also sell the line.

Nationwide, Safeway has more than 1,330 stores. In January, Safeway merged with Albertsons owner AB Acquisition, controlled by investor group Cerberus Capital Management, in a deal estimated at $7.5 billion. Safeway’s CEO Robert Edwards became CEO and president of the combined company, which has about 2,230 stores and some 250,000 employees in 34 states plus the District of Columbia, and is the second-largest grocery chain in the country after the Kroger Company.

If Safeway were to carry F.A. Nino’s products in nearly all of its more than 250 stores in northern California, “it would change the game for us,” Chuck Ross said. “I am extremely excited. They are heavy hitters. They are fast and efficient and supportive” of local producers.

For now he makes small batches of about 25 gallons, ensuring freshness. Production in Petaluma takes place one night a week, generating 100 or 200 cases. The production kitchen is rented at about $20 an hour. “We get the order and we make it and deliver it,” he said. He plans to rent a warehouse starting in April to establish some inventory. “The goal is to get our own facility and work every day,” he said.

Thickening of the sauces comes from several hours of reduction by cooking, not from added xanthum gum or pectin. “It’s handcrafted, locally sourced,” he said, “the best spices you can find. We’re using produce that comes from the area. You don’t want to muck it up. Good food. Regular people. Enjoy.” The ingredient he buys in the largest quantities is peppers. He smokes and dries jalapeños to make chipotle.

F.A. Ninos has doubled or tripled sales each year since its inception, he said. “The last month of last year, we made more money than we did” in the previous three months of 2014.

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