Chattanooga-based hot sauce makers Aaron “Hoff” and Michelle “Pepper” Hoffman know a thing or two about turning up the heat.
They’ve found a way into countless kitchens through their small-batch offerings of handmade Hoff & Pepper sauces.
What started as two hot sauce connoisseurs making home recipes grew into one of the hottest clients coming through the Hamilton County Business Development Center’s (BDC) INCubator program.
Since joining the INCubator, the company has gone from one to 20 full-time employees supplying eight mouth-watering products across 4,000 stores. They’ve been listed as one of Chrissy Teigen’s “10 best hot sauces of all time” and tested the taste buds of stars including, David Chang, Derrick Lewis and Jimmy Kimmel in recent seasons of the hit YouTube show, Hot Ones.
As they prepare to graduate from the INCubator program and move production into a new facility, the hot sauce entrepreneurs sat down to discuss how the INCubator and the BDC helped scale their business.
Watch Hoff & Pepper talk all things INCubator and BDC below.
Learn more about the company’s success story, here.
Think INC is a series of success stories from INCubator companies past and present. Chattanooga’s INCubator — the largest business incubator in the state of Tennessee and the third largest in the United States, with 127,000 square feet of space for entrepreneurs — is located in the Hamilton County Business Development Center (BDC) in Downtown Chattanooga, TN.
