From my kitchen to the world: How I grew Mad Dog 357 into one of the hottest brands.

When you choose a bottle of hot sauce, you’re looking for something that not only tastes great but also adds a bit of a kick. Sure, there are all kinds of commercially produced brands out there, but when I first started making Mad Dog 357, it wasn’t because I wanted to replicate something already on the market. I wanted to make the perfect hot sauce. For me, that meant using natural ingredients and crafting something that tasted great and gave people something unexpected to look forward to.

Creating Mad Dog 357

These days, Ashley Food Company makes some of the hottest products on the planet. Not only are Mad Dog 357 hot sauces and pepper products extremely popular, but they’re also packed with some of the world’s hottest peppers. The original Mad Dog 357 hot sauce contains 357,000 SHU. To put it in perspective, that’s extremely hot! To reach such a fiery level on the heat scale, we combined cayenne peppers, habanero peppers, and pepper extract into one extremely hot sauce. We’ve also added other combinations, like Mad Dog 357 Silver Edition Hot Sauce, Mad Dog 357 Ghost Hot Sauce, and Mad Dog 357 Reaper Sriracha Hot Sauce.

We took it to the extreme with Mad Dog 357 Gold Edition Hot Sauce. We combined Carolina Reapers, Scorpion, and Ghost Peppers then added plutonium. Mad Dog 357 Gold Edition Hot Sauce has a whopping one million SHU and is packed with nine million Scoville Plutonium Extract. Our Mad Dog 357 Plutonium No. 9 is nine million Scoville and one of the planet’s purest and hottest pepper extracts! Just one bottle uses 1,000 ounces of raw peppers.

Additionally, we now sell pepper pods, and for those who like to take it to the extreme no matter where they go, there’s our Mad Dog 357 Pain on a Chain. Whether you’re searching for hot sauce, pepper extracts, pepper powder, or pepper purees, Mad Dog 357 specializes in some hottest hot sauces and pepper products.

Some of our favorite flavors and combinations have picked up countless awards in recent years. Cook’s Illustrated Mad Dog BBQ Sauce the “Original Best in the USA.” In the early 2000s, Southern Living called Mad Dog the “Best Bottled BBQ Sauce” they had ever tried. One of our most popular flavors, Mad Dog Inferno Hot Sauce, was the first hot sauce ever to be named the World’s Hottest Sauce. Mad Cat Hot Sauce took first place in the Habanero Hot Sauce category during Fiery Foods & Barbecue Magazine’s Scovie Awards.

Starting Ashley Food Company and making Mad Dog 357 hot sauce wasn’t just another business venture. Making a hot sauce I knew I’d enjoy, and my friends would enjoy too, is something that grew into a real passion that’s only increased over the years. Hot sauce is something I’ve been perfecting for nearly 40 years. I learned some of the keys to success well before I first started experimenting with new hot sauce flavors.

In the beginning…

Mad Dog 357 may be well known among hot sauce fans today, but it took a lot of hard work to get here. I credit some of the success of Ashley Food Company to a job I first took around the mid-1970s. I worked as General Manager of Alice’s Restaurant in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The town is hardly what you’d call large, it had about 2,000 people in entire town today, but I managed more than 90 people as General Manager of Alice’s. There, I learned how to multi-task and, perhaps more importantly, to always use high-quality ingredients. That’s something that’s stuck with me in the years since.

Fast forward about a decade, I started experimenting with my version of the perfect barbeque sauce at home. I didn’t have a big factory, so I founded what turned into Ashley Food Company out of my own Brighton, Massachusetts kitchen. About five years in, I was so busy filling Mad Dog orders for my friends that my wife encouraged me to move operations out of our tiny kitchen and into commercial production. Ashley Food Company was officially born in the quest for the perfect barbeque sauce. I started a new business with credit cards, hard work, and the desire to bring something to the market that I was sure other hot sauce lovers would enjoy.

The Challenges Along The Way

When I first started, I still had another job. My wife and I did a lot of press and gave out a lot of samples for the first few years, including probably about 70 shows and demos a year. Looking back, you’d probably never be able to start as I did all those years ago. The FDA has new rules, too. One needs to have a food lab, and you must track all the ingredients from the point of receiving them to the point they go into a product; this is time-consuming.

The last couple of years has also brought about some other challenges for most business, including Ashley foods. Most businesses are dealing with supply chain issues right now, as well as increased freight and other costs. Since last year extracts have seen a price jump of 50-100%.

Other challenges are directly tied to things like the weather, which are beyond human control. We rely on quality peppers. In 2013, we worked with UMASS Amherst to grow some of the best seeds from Trinidad. Our test crop yielded around 2,500 pounds of Trinidad Moruga Scorpion peppers, which we used to make Mad Dog 357 Scorpion Pepper Hot Sauce. Until a couple of years ago, we used JP Bartlett Co in Sudbury. Unfortunately, the weather doesn’t always want to cooperate. In seven years of growing peppers, I remember a frost one year that almost wiped out our crop.

As a food production company, we’ve learned a lot over the years; for example, we’ve grown peppers locally and in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In fact, at one point, we used the same seed stock in both locations, but when we dried and tested them, the Massachusetts peppers tested 50% hotter than the peppers grown in New Mexico. Perhaps the cold nights and warm days stressed the northern peppers, creating an even hotter pepper. To prove it, in our last year of growing in Sudbury, we almost beat the true heat record in the testing lab. The good news is that we now have enough peppers in the freezer to last for years, and we use an overseas source, too. As the company grew, I never lost sight of what initially made Mad Dog such a success. That’s why, even today, we rely on the best ingredients.

The Opportunities

For years, we sold large pallets to distributors, but we became a retail company about 26 years into the process. Now, we have three web stores, we sell on Amazon, and we’re selling to the EU. Whereas just five years ago only about 10% of our business was retail, it’s now 70% retail and the rest wholesale. We deal directly with plants in India, and we sell to manufacturers and restaurants. It seems like we’re getting inquiries for large orders all the time. We’ve even been supplying large bird seed companies.

Ashley Food Company is one of a kind, and I’ve been fortunate to meet a few famous faces and make some great connections over the years, especially those in the Rock and Roll biz. I’ve had business partnerships with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. Perry approached me a while back to create a new sauce. We called it Joe Perry’s Rock Your World Boneyard Brew Hot Sauce. I also partnered with Weir and his line of Wok Sauces.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to have some of my Mad Dog products appear on national television. You may have seen a glimpse or two on shows like “Everyone Loves Raymond,” “The Drew Carey Show,” “King of Queens,” and “Friends.” On “Friends” alone, we were featured on more than 30 episodes. Next time it comes on, watch for a scene in Chandler’s office. That’s my favorite because we had three bottles of my hot sauce out on the set.

We’ve also been shown in the past on “The Today Show,” “Regis & Kathie Lee,” and in such publications and magazines as The Wall Street Journal, Cook’s Illustrated, Southern Living, and Playboy, as well as some closer to home, like the Boston Globe. More recently, Mad Dog 357 was featured in several episodes of YouTube’s “Hot Ones,” where celebrities challenge themselves to answer questions while sampling hotter and hotter chicken wings. At last count, all the fan videos on YouTube and elsewhere have topped at least 200 million views!

My advice to other entrepreneurs

When it comes to starting your own business, I’ve learned a few things over the years. I think my biggest recommendation is probably costing out your product. When most people think about starting up a business, they don’t include things like overhead or their labor. You need money to make it work, but don’t always listen to the experts.

My advice is to believe in your product. It took me a while to figure it out, but I’d probably say don’t try and give customers what YOU think they want. You need to give customers what THEY want.

I started Ashley Food Company as a business, but since then, I’ve also figured out you need to do some other things to get your product noticed. For example, to get people to come to your website, you need to either learn about SEO or hire someone who does. You also need to be willing to go the extra mile. Sometimes it takes multiple phone calls and letters to get a new account. If you’re going to make it, you need thick skin.

I had my wife’s help, and support from the beginning, and my son has also helped the business through the years. Ashley Food Company may have started small in my kitchen, but it’s grown into something unique and special. Of course, we’re still tied to Massachusetts, but I’m now able to share our products all over the world.