Hot sauce in perfume bottles: Tabasco on Avery Island
These days, brett, lacto and pedio are the feted Three Musketeers among US craft brewers and so it is easily forgotten that other famous American foods are fermented, too. If spicy food is your thing, then Tabasco sauce should immediately come to mind.
Incidentally, the company, which goes by the name of McIlhenny and invented Tabasco sauce, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Which makes its founding year 1868 – shortly after the end of the American Civil War. But don’t mention the war or who won it to folks down in Louisiana. It is still a bit of a sore issue.
From what I had read about Tabasco – it is among the oldest family-owned food companies in the US – I had gained the impression that it is to US craft food what Yuengling beer is to craft brewing: a heritage company that takes great pride in its independence and time-honoured processes.
Fortunately, the opportunity to check out Tabasco arose when I was in New Orleans in early May. On a very hot day our car’s aircon beckoned and we drove over to Avery Island, three hours to the west of New Orleans. If you have watched the crime drama “True Detective: Season 1” (2014) which was written by Nic Pizzolatto and stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as two homicide detectives, you will remember its spectacular aerial views of southern Louisiana: marshlands of salted, dead cypress trees alternating with sugarcane fields and the odd refinery shrouded in a sickly yellow fog.
Driving across Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor”, where more than 140 industrial plants spew pollution into the air and water, can be an eye-opener into what reckless industrialisation and merciless nature can do to the environment. The Gulf Coast region is regularly battered by hurricanes and flooding (Katrina in August 2005 flooded 80 percent of New Orleans) while suffering from past and present disasters. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the subsequent carpet-bombing of the Gulf with chemical dispersants made thousands ill.
Taking in the sights and remembering the shocking headlines can give even the most impervious tourist the sensation of being lost. The comfort zone provided by the gentrified American metropolis with its avocado on toast, beard oil and cappuccinos, suddenly seems light-years away.
Once you turn on to Avery Island, you feel like you are entering into a sanctuary. Quite literally so as the son of the Tabasco sauce inventor set up a wildlife refuge and botanical garden there. But even here, amongst the manicured lawns and tropical shrubberies, disasters loom. After Hurricane Rita in September 2005 flooded most of the Tabasco production plant, the company erected a five metre earth levee, complete with pump system, to protect the red brick factory from future onslaughts.
Actually, Avery Island is not really an island. Although it is surrounded by the southern Louisiana wetlands that are as flat as the back of your hand, it is, geologically speaking, a salt dome surrounded by marshes that rises to a height of 50 metres above sea level. Salt is still mined on the island, nowadays by Cargill. Reportedly, they have drilled shafts to 600 metres below ground.
How the Mexican red pepper seeds arrived from the area of Tabasco, Mexico, and ended up in the former plantation on Avery Island will forever remain hidden in the mist of history. And how Edmund McIlhenny and his wife Mary Eliza, nee Avery, who first settled on Avery Island in 1859, came to produce their hot sauce will also remain a mystery. One of the stories goes that originally he made some money from selling salt which was in short supply during the Civil War. His entire operation was ransacked by the Union army, but funnily or not some pepper plants survived.
When people complained about the bland food they were forced to eat after the war, he took to planting tabasco peppers all over the island and started selling his hot sauce, made with those peppers and Avery Island salt, in 1868. Due to shortages of glass bottles he had to fill his sauce into old perfume bottles with sprinkler fitments, which he then corked and sealed in green wax. Hence the small bottles Tabasco sauce is still sold in today.
Although Tabasco makes much of its peppers, you cannot visit the area where they grow them. What they tell you in the museum is that the seeds for all the peppers used in the sauce originate on the island. They are then sent to various Latin American and African countries for cultivation. After harvest, the peppers are ground and mixed with salt before undergoing fermentation for a month. Only then are they shipped to Avery Island to undergo the final fermentation.
Upon arrival the pepper mash, as they call it, is put into whisky barrels whose steel hoops have been replaced by stainless ones to prevent corrosion. More salt is put on the lids of the barrels, which have valves to release the carbon dioxide from the fermenting peppers. When the fermentation is finished after about three years, the salt forms a hard shell, helping to seal the valves. Allegedly – because I did not count them – there are 50,000 barrels on Avery Island at all times. Many are stacked six barrels high in a smelly, cobwebbed warehouse that resembles a domed airplane hangar that is open to the elements on both sides.
To make the sauce, the pulp is next transferred to large vats, fitted with stirrers, where 100 percent grain distilled vinegar is added to dilute the heat of Tabasco’s flagship “Original Red Sauce” to a more palatable 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville heat units from an original 40,000 to 50,000 units. This final mixture is stirred daily and, after three weeks, is strained to remove any solids. Now the sauce is ready for bottling and shipping.
Tabasco sauce production obviously does not require lots of workers milling around throughout the year. When we came in the middle of the week the place was eerily quiet, despite reportedly drawing 100,000 visitors per year.
The only people at work were those in the gift shop and adjacent restaurant. And, of course, those staffing the bottling line. The company says it employs around 200 people, half of whom live on the island in company-owned quarters known as The Tango, which were built back when most employees did not have cars and crossing marsh and bayou was difficult. Like the plantation, The Tango is off bounds to visitors. Staff was friendly but reserved, which is probably typical of small, tightly knit communities in far-flung places (you cannot get a pizza delivered on Avery Island) … and of family-owned companies, too, come to think of it.
With Tabasco being a closely held private company, little is known about it except that Anthony “Tony” Simmons, the current President and CEO, is the seventh McIlhenny family member in a chain of direct descendants, who samples the hot sauce every day to ensure that quality is high and consistent. If Mr Simmons is not at the factory his younger cousin Harold Osborn will be on hand to approve the 180 barrels going into production that day. The factory can churn out 750,000 bottles per day. This was revealed by Mr Simmons during a rare TV programme produced by CBS four years ago.
However, when pressed for the company’s turnover, the CEO’s lips remained sealed. The US hot sauce industry is estimated to turn over USD one billion per year according to IBISWorld. Tabasco’s market share, at 18 percent in 2014, makes it the top US hot sauce, with its closest competitor Reckitt Benckiser, maker of Frank’s RedHot, at ten percent, again according to IBISWorld. If the market share figure is correct, Tabasco’s US sales are probably USD 200 million. International sales must be sizeable too as Tabasco is exported to over 180 countries. Non-US sales projections for the next decade are estimated to grow from 40 percent of total sales (2015) to a full half.
Given the family’s notorious reticence, it came as a surprise that it chose the company’s anniversary to talk to the media – not about heritage, tradition and other lofty stuff usually extolled on such occasions, but about its fights against storms and rising seas. The family thus brought the invisible, idiosyncratic South – that folks from New York and Los Angeles condescendingly call “flyover country” – back to Northerners’ attention.
There is no doubt: Avery Island is disappearing as its land washes away with the sea. Despite its relatively high elevation, it is losing nine metres of wetland per year due to saltwater encroaching via channels dug by the oil and gas industry. Meanwhile, subsidence is dropping the Louisiana coast by 0.02 metre each year.
As reported The Times-Picayune newspaper in January 2018 from an interview with Harold Osborn, Executive Vice President of McIlhenny Company, “it won’t be long before Avery is a true island surrounded by an increasingly turbulent sea.”
Under a worst-case scenario, the company would have to move to a safer location. Mr Osborn admitted that day may come. But first the family will put up a fight. It has resorted to reclaim land in the marshes by having grasses planted. It is also behind a broad effort to re-engineer the flow of water in and out of the surrounding bayous.
Of course, the company could afford to relocate. As Mr Osborn said: “We could make Tabasco somewhere else. But this is more than a business: this is our home.”
Many Northern cynics will have winced at Mr Osborn’s sentimentality, thus revealing their own ignorance of the South (aka “the land that time forgot”). In the interview, Mr Osborn could have given an avalanche of buzz words that Americans associate with craft beer and which would have summed up Tabasco’s reason for staying put, too: Loyalty. Relationships. Relevance. Authenticity. Instead, he merely said: “This is our home”.
Next time you douse your BBQ in Tabasco sauce, remember what you are getting: a sauce with a story, produced by an independent family-owned company that for generations has deeply cared about its home. Hot sauce cannot get more craft than that.
