“They kept asking for more and that’s when I went to Ryan and said ‘Hey, Ryan, maybe we have something here,’” Greg Stitzel said.
Ryan Stitzel said because he and his father love spicy food and love to garden, they “started tinkering around” with several different items and recipes. The two men said some hot sauces for which they shopped lacked flavor and other flavorful sauces lacked heat, so they created a hot sauce of their own. The result, Taste Bud Annihilator, boasts two of the hottest peppers they could grow: ghost and reaper peppers, along with habanero peppers.
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They brought samples in ball jars to VIP Night at Jungle Jim’s International Market’s Weekend of Fire in 2016 and got noticed.
“We had people who had been in the hot sauce industry try it, and they were just in awe of it,” Ryan Stitzel said. “They were (saying) ‘That’s so good. You get all of the flavor and then the heat comes from the back of your throat. We’ve never had that before.’
“That was the confirmation that (made us say) ‘Hey, let’s do this.’”
Instrumental to their success was Greg Stitzel’s 46 years in the grocery industry and Ryan Stitzel’s business and logistics experience. That helped Uncle Snorey know which channels it needed to go through for retail certification before its products officially launched in September 2017. The business received it first shipment of packaged product two days before the first official stint as Weekend of Fire vendors in 2017.
“It was a pretty spectacular way the stars actually aligned, because I was pretty nervous,” Ryan Stitzel said.
Greg Stitzel said that many of the salsas he saw in the vast array of offerings at Jungle Jim’s employed a tomato base, something he wanted to avoid for Uncle Snorey’s first foray into salsa. As a result, the father-son team created Mango Tango Salsa, a fruity pineapple-mango-habanero concoction that made its debut last July during a Saturday morning at the Hamilton Flea, selling out by noon.
The newly created salsa also bested 87 others to win third place in Weekend of Fire’s Best Salsa competition during last October’s installment.
They both said Jungle Jim’s gets “a ton of credit” and gratitude for giving them their start and helping them gain even more exposure by naming Uncle Snorey’s Taste Bud Annihilator its Hot Sauce of the Month and featuring it in store advertisements.
Uncle Snorey products also are available for purchase at Dave's Quality Meats and Butcher Bill's Meats & Deli in West Chester Twp., La Cazuela Mexican Grill & Bar in Fairfield and Dorothy Lane Market locations in the Dayton area. The business also fill orders online at www.unclesnorey.com or by emailing unclesnorey@gmail.com.
The next likely new project will involve heat-level variations of Uncle Snorey salsa before they introduce any of the items now in the research-and-development phase.
“It’s a really tight-knit community out there, the hot sauce people … and we’ve heard from a lot of people, ‘Don’t get too big, too fast because that’s what gets you into trouble financially,’” Ryan Stitzel said.
The hot sauce industry helped Uncle Snorey get its name.
“I’m on the go all the time, but if I sit down, I almost always go to sleep and start snoring,” Greg Stitzel said. “My buddy started calling me ‘Uncle Snorey.’ Everyone would get a kick out of taking pictures of me and sending them to each other. They would say, “He’s Uncle Snorey again.’”
At Weekend of Fire’s VIP night in 2016, the Stitzels met numerous hot sauce business owners, one of whom talked about falling asleep all the time when he sat down.
“I told him I had the same issue and people got a laugh out of it at my expense,” Greg Stitzel said. “He said ‘There you go. That’s your name.’ Then we ran with it (and) the rest is history.”
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