Written by Sweet Heat Gourmet Owner Shellie

How we started in Hot Sauce

My husband and I have been chileheads for years. After purchasing a few sauces that we didn't care for, I decided to try making my own. I had graduated culinary school at the age of 43 after being a stay at home mom for years and knew I didn't want to work 90 hours in a hot kitchen. So I was using local ingredients from the farmers markets to make hot sauces and BBQ sauces and had fun creating new combinations. I was giving them to family and friends and kept hearing "you should sell these!" So we started looking into it and well, 4 years later, here I am!

Our Operation and Most Popular Sauces

We make all our sauces by hand, bottle them by hand, label, etc. We rent a certified community kitchen in a little town in Central PA called Spring Mills. Our most popular hot sauce is still our Pineapple & Ghost Pepper Hot Sauce, it won a Golden Chile for Best Fruit Based Hot Sauce in 2015. But we have a new sauce that's been selling extremely well, our Key Lime Pear Hot Sauce. It's low in heat but full of flavor, it's unique from anything else out there and can be used for sweet or savory foods.

The Story Behind Fatalii Hot Sauce

We get asked a lot why our fatalii sauce is called Sinclair's Fatalii Hot Sauce. People wonder if it's a certain type of fatalii etc. It's actually named after one of our young customers. Our first year in business a young boy said he was growing fataliis and I said bring some to me when they're ready and I'll make a hot sauce. Sure enough, a few months later he brought me his peppers. We made sauce and people liked it so much, we asked his parents if we could name the sauce after him and the rest is history!  

End of an Era

At the end of 2017, Sweet Heat Gourmet closed their doors and Shellie left a message of thanks below: 

Well fellow chile heads, they say all good things must come to an end, and so it is for Sweet Heat. We have greatly enjoyed bringing you tasty products these last 6 years, but time has come for this journey to end. We hope that we can return some time in the future. Thanks to each and every one of you for letting us be part of your chile head journey! Peace, LOVE and chiles! Shellie