It's Our 7th Birthday!
As part of Sauce Shop’s 7th birthday, I have been going through our behind-the-scenes photos, trying to select my favourites for a collage to hang downstairs at HQ. It’s difficult to choose the best ones, but here are a few that stand out!
Nathan (our Supply Chain Lead) and my brother Al sleeping on pallet racking during the first cook we did for Sainsbury’s (a few all-nighters were pulled!), James’ Skoda Octavia estate bursting at the seams with surplus green chillies we rescued after a local food manufacturer had rejected them and an exploded barrel of chilli ferment which took a day to clear up, are a few that spring to mind.
The memory I was most happy to find buried in the archives was this video of James cooking sauce in our home kitchen right at the start of the Sauce Shop journey! I didn’t even know this video existed and don’t remember taking it but I showed it to a few team members in the office and the reactions made me so happy. Nothing tells our story better than seeing how it all started. Literally James and I cooking sauce on our hob in a Nottingham suburb in our spare time.
Me and James started making sauce in our home kitchen in 2014 while still working in our full-time food industry jobs. We spent hours cooking, bottling, labelling, and packing sauce when we weren’t at work, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. At times, we wondered if we were crazy (and a few people said we were – especially when we packed our careers in to go full-time Sauce Shop).
Sometimes I don’t know how we did it, but 7 years on we have an amazing team of 34 people, and all of our sauces are still cooked, bottled, labelled and packed right here in Nottingham (just on a much larger scale!). I think people are always surprised by how hands-on Sauce Shop is when they visit... it’s a bunch of people who love food, cooking sauce and eating it daily! We get the BBQs out and cook in the yard as much as possible, have desk (and take-home for the factory) beers on Fridays, and laugh a lot! It’s still really tough – growing a business is never easy, but we have some exciting plans for the next few years! The best bit of that is taking you (flavour fans) and our team on the journey with us! If you keep eating, we’ll keep cooking.
Pam x
