‘Pain in the Hole’: Meet NI businessman turning up the heat in hot sauce market

A “chilli fanatic” is celebrating 10 years of his condiment, oil and spice-mix business.

Tim McCarthy established Blackfire Food in 2014 as a side hustle for himself and friends when they couldn’t acquire hot sauce to their liking.

The former BBC employee, who travelled a lot through his job, observed that different national cuisines frequently involved chillis or spice to some extent.

“Coming back here and you’re met with chicken nuggets and williks and pig’s feet — it just wasn’t the same,” he says.

“I decided years and years ago I would make my own hot sauce and then it morphed into people wanting it.

“People wanted to give me money for it and friends and family were lining up, saying: ‘You really have got to turn this into a business.’

“I had no interest, because I ran a street-art company. But last year, just last Christmas, I actually decided to give up a career in street art and just do this because I couldn’t wear two hats.”

The move from a side business to full-time has been difficult, not least because the language of food differs significantly from the language of art.

“When you’re talking about B2B and SMEs, it’s completely different,” says Tim.

“Then obviously there’s legislation, there’s all the stuff to do with moving food across borders. There are food standards, there are food hygiene legislation certificates, and you’re basically starting from scratch, which I found very difficult.

“I’ve always been very passionate about food. I’ve always cooked. I’ve always developed recipes domestically at home because we’re all vegetarians in our house.

“Getting into the food business, sometimes, certainly in the early days, I thought: ‘What in the name of God am I doing here?’

“From what started as a very fun side hustle, standing in the kitchen, experimenting with ingredients, turned into eight, ten hours a day staring at a computer screen, filling in forms.

“If you want to do a market, you’ve got to be fully insured for a start — risk assessments, all that.”

Tim remembers standing in his kitchen at home trying to process “30 kilos of mangoes” for the sauces, knowing he couldn’t make a profit at that time because the capacity wasn’t achievable.

“I had to bite the bullet basically when I went ‘Right, I’m going to do this properly.’ I really needed to outsource the production of the sauces because I started winning awards, started building up on social media, got a really loyal following of repeat customers, built up the Instagram profile.

“That’s when I just decided if I don’t do this now, I’m going to be old and bitter, so better do it now.”

Tim has created seven sauces, which are made by Craic Foods, a company owned by Peter Hannan.

“This year we won three stars at the Great Taste Awards for my Ghost Pepper and Black Lime Ketchup, and I was shortlisted, funny enough, against Peter Hannan for the Great Taste Golden Forks in London,” says Tim.

“I was unsuccessful, because he won the Golden Forks, but to get that far, out of 14,000 products submitted from all over the world, down to the last couple of people, was just an incredible experience.”

The Blackfire range is vegan-friendly and allergen-free, with most products also gluten-free.

“It was kind of twofold. My daughters are obviously vegetarian, but one of them is coeliac as well and she finds it very difficult to eat out or get takeaways, so that’s one of the reasons we do a lot of cooking,” Tim explains.

“The other [reason] was having met so many people at food events and meeting people who are allergic to pineapples, which isn’t one of your main allergens, but you just go: ‘My God, people are sensitive to everything.’ I think it’s a by-product of modern living and environmental reasons, by and large.

“You find people who are allergic to the strangest things, and I just thought I’m going to make these as clean as possible, keep as few ingredients in them as possible.

“Because if you look at my competitors, sometimes they’ve got 25 different ingredients in a hot sauce, when you only need six, because your palate can only discern three flavours at once. So loading them with all these other things is just an absolute waste of time.

“I thought, if I’m going to cut out all these extraneous ingredients, let’s cut out allergens, let’s make them vegan-friendly and kind of put them out to as many people as possible.”

As ‘chief alchemist’ for the brand, Tim adheres to a flavour-first philosophy.

“The market is absolutely saturated with hot sauces especially, where people are just chasing the heat, the Scovilles [a measurement of pungency].

“They want to get the heat up as much as possible, so they’re compromising on flavour. They’re using cheap white wine vinegar and they’re using capsaicin chilli extract just to make a hot novelty sauce.

“I was never into that. I was always into flavour first. So when I come up with a recipe, I don’t bother with any chillis or anything in it. The ingredients have to taste lovely, then I’ll decide what to introduce to it, heat-wise, and what variety of chilli.

“It’s very important that, you know, you don’t produce a chilli sauce which is tasted once, is super hot, ends up in the back of the cupboard in the fridge and the customer’s never going to eat it again. There’s no reason to come back to it because it’s just heat.

“My whole business model — flavour first — has really worked for me because, obviously, it’s winning so many awards and the [products] are based on my feel, flavour and smell, and the customers just absolutely love them.”

Tim’s subsequent products, such infused chilli oil, spice bags, chilli jam, ghost pepper ketchup and garlic chilli crunch, are all based on flavour and then the heat is introduced afterwards.”

And speaking of the ‘chief alchemist’ name, he says creating the hot sauce is an art form.

“Some chilli varieties hit you straight away; some of them creep up on you. Some of them hit your palate; some of them hit the tip of your tongue. Some of them make your ears tingle.

“It is very much experimenting with all the different layers and bringing them together. For every successful recipe I come up with, there are maybe 15 that go in the bin that just don’t work for maybe some sort of minor, little reason. It is alchemy.”

When originally creating the hot sauces, Tim wanted to name them appropriately, devising multiple Belfast-associated monikers. The Samson sauce, with mango and dulse, is named in honour of the city’s famous crane, while there’s the Belfastard (roasted peppers with Caroline Reapers) and the Bonfire Chipotle (Mexican peppers and chipotle).

“A woman came up to me the day that I launched it at a food event downtown and she said: ‘Oh, a bonfire chipotle, what does that taste like?’

“I says: ‘Oh, it tastes of burning tyres and effigies of the Pope.’ She looked at me as if to say, whoa, and I started laughing and then she started laughing. So I thought a bit of humour goes a long way here, so I just kept going with the Belfast names.

“We’ve got the Hot House, which is named after the Hothouse Botanic Gardens, because it’s got a very tropical flavour with pear and ginger. The Botanic is the green sauce, [after] Botanic Gardens in Belfast.

“When I was starting out, I was determined not to make super-hot novelty sauces, because the hotter you make something, the more you compromise on flavour.”

He then received an email from a group of customers requesting “something really hot” for Christmas gifting.

“One night I had a couple of gins, too many, and I came up with this idea: ‘Let’s make a hot sauce called Pain in the Hole,’” laughs Tim.

“I made a batch of it and it tasted absolutely lovely, but extremely hot.”

Coupled with a gift box containing a small tub of Sudocrem, the limited-edition gift was gone within minutes from his site.

The next month, Tim received a call from restaurant reviewer and writer Jay Rayner, who had heard about the Pain in the Hole sauce and wanted Tim to appear on his show, The Kitchen Cabinet.

“They recorded it on a Tuesday night in the Lyric Theatre.

“It went out on Saturday on Radio 4 and my phone didn’t stop pinging with sales — and it was mostly people in England,” says Tim.

“It has just been going [since then] and people absolutely love it. And it won a Great Taste award, because, again, it’s all about the flavour.”

With the likes of luxury labels knocking on Blackfire Foods’ door interested in its products, Tim’s working on future-proofing his brand, offering a look that makes it “contemporary” and “sexy” when on a shelf against other hot sauces.

For more information on Blackfire Food, see blackfirefood.com