THUNDER BAY - After igniting dishes across the city and the world, one local company is spicing things up by more than doubling production of an already hot local product.
“We’ve taken a lot of pride in figuring out how to do this and we want to maintain that,” said Al Bourbouhakis, co-founder and owner of Heartbeat Hot Sauce. “We have just been going that way and it seemed like, why stop, we will keep growing and keep it here.”
Heartbeat Hot Sauce is expanding its business with a new space that will help expand production to meet growing demand.
The company that started in 2015 as just a hobby opened a local manufacturing location on May Street in 2016.
However, demand in the last several years has grown so much that the local company has outgrown its space and is now relocating to a larger facility on the corner of Vickers Street and Miles Street.
“I’d say the primary reason is space,” Bourbouhakis said. “We’ve seen a lot of growth in the last year. We are doing a lot of work outside of Canada now, we are shipping a lot of product to the U.S. and we are now starting to work internationally as well.”
Heartbeat Hot Sauce originally began appearing in local restaurants and then local retailers, but it has since gained a national and international following thanks to social media and appearances on the popular Youtube channel, Hot Ones.
The channel features celebrities eating chicken wings with hot sauce while doing an interview. Actor Nick Offerman made specific reference to Thunder Bay while participating.
“You can almost set your watch to it,” Bourbouhaksi said of his product’s appearance on Youtube. “The reveal happens and then there is a big wave of sales. It gets that many more people thinking about it and talking about it.”
Bourbouhakis said what started as a simple hobby quickly expanded into a profitable business after word started to spread about their product.
“Things kind of snowballed in a really good way and we found ourselves trying to fill a demand for a product that we had yet to complete and ready to go to market,” he said.
And with the popularity of their product, Bourbouhaski said it was time for the business to expand in order to meet a growing demand.
“The manufacturing process consumes a lot of space and we need more room to produce,” he said. “We are working with much bigger volumes of everything now than we used to.”
Heartbeat Hot Sauce produces approximately 10,000 bottles a week, but the new space will allow the company to produce 20,000 bottles per day.
The new space still needs a lot of work in order to get it ready for production, but Bourbouhaski said he expects the company to complete the move by May 2020.
Heart Beat Hot Sauce currently employs nine people and there are plans to add more with the new space.
According to Bourbouhaski, it was important to keep production here in Thunder Bay to create local jobs and keep the product in the city where it all started.
“We take a lot of pride in that and we want to keep on that trajectory and scale rather than pass it along to somebody else,” he said.
