Every week at the Crystal Hot Sauce factory, just north of New Orleans in Reserve, Louisiana, two train cars full of mashed cayenne peppers arrive on the tracks just outside the plant’s back door. The peppers are then pumped into four 20,000-gallon mixing tanks where the mash ferments under the sweltering Louisiana sun into a slurry. After water and salt are introduced, the slurry is ground into hot sauce that’s poured into glass at 125 bottles per minute.

“We are New Orleans in a bottle,” says Alvin Adam “Pepper” Baumer, the third-generation owner and CEO of Baumer Foods, maker of Crystal, from the floor of his plant where the scent of capsaicin (the chemical compound that makes peppers spicy) lingers in the air.

Wearing a red and white checkered blazer with a pin of his hot sauce fastened on his lapel, he continues, “My name's Pepper,” Baumer says. “I'm a walking billboard. This is what I was born to do.”

Baumer Foods was founded by his namesake grandfather in 1923, and 37-year-old Baumer has been at the helm of his family’s company since 2019. He has grown the 103-year-old maker of Crystal—as well as a Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, liquid smoke, wing sauce, teriyaki, steak sauce and more condiments—into a $50 million (annual sales) business, up 5% since last year. Today, Crystal is sold at thousands of retailers nationwide including at Kroger, Publix, Safeway-Albertsons, Walmart, Wegmans. And there’s ample room to grow outwards to the East and West coasts.

“Even though our bread and butter is Crystal Hot Sauce, we have to go out and push to the world that we're more than just a hot sauce company,” says Baumer. “We're a meat and sauce condiment company that's here to stay.”

Crystal’s loyal customer base in the South helps the business compete with brands that are multiples of its size. Across New Orleans’ finest restaurants and local po’boy joints, Crystal is a staple ingredient in many iconic creole recipes.

Trey Smith, co-chef and co-owner of New Orleans' Saint-Germain restaurant, which has one Michelin star, says Crystal is his favorite hot sauce to add “to food I am personally eating.”

“I have Crystal in my home cabinet,” Smith says.

“We like to be the most well-balanced product that a consumer can grab off the shelf,” adds Baumer. “We're not going to overpower your palette. We're not going to overpower the chef's creation on the plate. We’re going to enhance all the flavors.”

Just two hours west of Crystal’s home in New Orleans, on Avery Island, Louisiana, one of America’s best-selling hot sauces, Tabasco, is estimated to be roughly four times Crystal’s size. But Baumer doesn’t see Tabasco as a core competitor. For one thing, it’s made with Tabasco peppers, not cayenne. The key ingredient in Crystal is also what is........

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