22 Years Without Investors, Earned Media & Picking Partners with Stacy Moritz

My name is Stacy Moritz. I’m the owner of Secret Aardvark. We’re a hot sauce and marinade company, and occasionally I come up with another nutty idea or two, but that’s our primary product. I’ve been a part of this business since the very beginning, and we’re now 22 years old. So I was about four when I started in this business, obviously not. My late husband and I started this. He was a chef and restaurant owner, and he was the creative genius behind the hot sauce. I just did the stuff that wasn’t as fun: labels, boxes, accounting.

When we started this company, we had a lot of conversation about how serious food is, and how good food didn’t need to be serious. It could be fun. We’ve always worked really hard to stay with that ethos. There are too many hard, serious things in this world, so let’s keep it light and fun. At the same time, we’re not a joke hot sauce. We’re not like some of those where it’s all about the funny name. We really want you to eat what’s inside that bottle.

Unlearning is a funny question, so I’ll do the easy one first. Food is science. There’s a lot of science behind it, and I have a strong science background. I’m a nurse, and oncology was my clinical area. After that I ran state and federal contracts, so I know a lot about data and science. Understanding what acidified means and how foods interact with other foods was the easy part for me.
As for what to unlearn, wow, that’s a good one. My background is also in healthcare quality, which is a lot of influencing people to behave differently or do something different for their health. That’s not that different from marketing. What I had to unlearn is that, because we’re food, and because we’re a blue aardvark and we’re fun, our message needed to be less clinical. We lean into being informative, but also, and I’m going to use that word one more time, fun. We try to have a really good time in our daily work, and we certainly try to have a really good time in the products we put out.

Exactly. I think people are embracing that what they put on their plate can be good for them, can be made from clean, quality ingredients, but should also make their food taste better and make them look forward to eating it. If you’re using hot sauce to cover up your food, you need different food to start with. I think people really embrace that, and they embrace the idea that you can take this anywhere. We’re not in a pretty glass bottle. I have nothing against pretty glass bottles, but that’s not who we are. Throw us in your backpack, take us on a hike, and put us on your sandwich. We lean hard into that idea, and I think it’s very relevant to people. They want something that can be part of their daily life, instead of something used only for special occasions or set on the shelf because it’s pretty.

It’s probably twenty-five to thirty-five-year-old men, but it’s not. That’s the interesting thing. We don’t do a lot of traditional marketing, but when I look at our social media and marketing data, we see almost as many women as men, and a range from fourteen-year-olds to eighty-year-olds. Hot sauce is often vinegar-based, salty and made from dried peppers. We use vegetables and real food, and because of that I think our audience is wider than for somebody who’s just water, salt and vinegar.

I’m not going to underplay it. We didn’t expect Jimmy Fallon to shout us out, of course, and the next morning we opened our web store and had a bucket load of orders. We thought, okay, what happened? We had to search that out. People like that are the beginning of influencers, before influencers were even really a thing. Hot Ones for sure. Chef Michael Symon is still a favorite of ours. All of those impact our following. They get our name out there, people try it, and you don’t usually forget it once you hear the name, or see the blue aardvark and wonder, is it an aardvark or an anteater? That’s the eternal question, by the way.
It certainly helps, because we’re not a big company. We’ve never taken venture capital. I don’t have investors. When we say we’re a woman-owned business, we mean one woman, and that’s me. We do very little traditional advertising, and even on social media we don’t buy fans and we don’t buy reviews. We’ve grown because people love the product. I’m not going to tell you they don’t come to the product because of some of those things. They certainly do. I’ve bought products the same way, when somebody I like talked about them and I went and looked. As for how you turn that into something, I think it does itself naturally. We remind people that Jimmy Fallon called us out. It’s on our sales sheet.

They usually come to us, and I talk to them to see if they’re a company or organization I want my name associated with, because this is my company. I’m pretty picky and careful about that, because it lives on for eternity. People still ask me about Taco Bell, just like you did, which is great. They turned out to be a great company to work with, and I loved my experience with them. A lot of times others want us to brand a product under their name, and I say no, I can’t. That’s not a bad business model for some, it’s just not something I’ve chosen to do.
You just have to be careful and really vet them. They’ve already vetted us if they come to us, but you have to vet them too. Portland Pickles, for example, is again fun. They have a mascot named Dillon, and that’s a lot of fun. That’s exactly who we are.

It’s easier to tell you what I’m not in. We’re in most of the major chains, though not across the board at places like Kroger, Albertsons and Safeway, but in regions. We tend to be really heavy regionally in the West and Northwest, and we’re growing on the East Coast all the time. We do some Costco runs, which tend to be in our local region as well, and some larger ones. We’re international as well.

I don’t find that we use AI as a routine. We just had a conversation about this the other day: when you’re doing label work, which is tedious by the way, AI is helpful. We put a label out and then run it through AI to see if it catches anything we missed. That’s really helpful, and that’s how we tend to use AI.

I think it’s two very different roads. In the grocery store, we’re competing against a lot of other products. You look at the shelf, and we aren’t inexpensive. We’re a premium sauce, we’re non-GMO, and, as I like to say, we’re not just water, salt and vinegar. Ingredients are expensive, and for some people that’s a barrier. But our fans are loud. They ship sauce to their family for Christmas, and when people love us, they love us and they tell people.
So people will see us, say “my cousin gave me this for Christmas,” and then buy us on the shelf as well. But retail is much harder, because unless we’re known, somebody’s probably not going to take us off the shelf unless they’ve somehow heard about us. Online is almost easier. We have an Amazon presence that drives a lot of reviews, and we have our own website for people who don’t want to shop on Amazon or who prefer buying that way. I think that’s an easier way to reach customers, because you can use social media to drive so much of it.

It’s not fair to ask me which is my favorite. It’s like asking for a favorite child. Although I only have one child, so I can tell you who my favorite is. I love the Reaper. I love the smokiness and the heat of the Reaper. I’m not a chili head, and I wouldn’t have told you that five years ago. I think it’s exposure. I eat enough of it that when I’m reaching into my vast hot sauce selection in the refrigerator, both Aardvark and non-Aardvark, I tend to reach for the Reaper. Our best seller is the habanero, by far.

We do give back to our community. It’s important to us to support the people around us who support us, both geographically and nationally. We support a lot of charities. I hate the idea of people having food difficulties reaching into the grocery store, so we tend to focus mostly on feeding people one way or another.
What’s next for us? I don’t know. I keep wondering what I’m going to be when I grow up. It’s hard, as a company like us. I don’t own my own plant, so I have four or five new sauce flavors I’d love to put out, but I have to rely on my copackers, and every copacker has a minimum, which is okay, but the minimum is a thousand cases of sauce. I can’t come out with five new products at a thousand cases each, because they aren’t going into retail right away. It takes years to get a product on a shelf. So where do you sell that? I can sell it on Amazon and my website, but we’re a little company and I don’t have the traffic to sell a thousand cases of new products. I’d love to say I have a plan to put out five new products. What I can tell you is that I have five new products I’d love to put out, and I’m trying to figure out how to make that happen.

I always say this and people hate it, but it’s the truth: do the math, and then do the math again. You have to figure out whether it works financially. If you don’t like that math, then figure out how to change the math, and that might be the hard part. That’s where I’m at with the five new sauces.

Thank you so much.