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.”