Meet ‘Pepper’ Baumer, The Man With Hot Sauce In His Blood
Key takeaways
- The peppers are then pumped into four 20,000-gallon mixing tanks where the mash ferments under the sweltering Louisiana sun into a slurry.
- aaron kotowski for forbesWearing a red and white checkered blazer with a pin of his hot sauce fastened on his lapel, he continues, “My name's Pepper,” Baumer says. “I'm a walking billboard.
- Baumer Foods was founded by his namesake grandfather in 1923, and 37-year-old Baumer has been at the helm of his family’s company since 2019.
Hot sauce has been one of the hottest sectors of the food industry and third-generation owner ‘Pepper’ Baumer has built Crystal, his family’s century-old business, into a $50 million Southern staple. “I’m a walking billboard.”Every week at the Crystal Hot Sauce factory, just north of New Orleans in Reserve, Louisiana, two train cars full of mashed cayenne peppers arrive on the tracks just outside the plant’s back door. The peppers are then pumped into four 20,000-gallon mixing tanks where the mash ferments under the sweltering Louisiana sun into a slurry. After water and salt are introduced, the slurry is ground into hot sauce that’s poured into glass at 125 bottles per minute.
“We are New Orleans in a bottle,” says Alvin Adam “Pepper” Baumer, the third-generation owner and CEO of Baumer Foods, maker of Crystal, from the floor of his plant where the scent of capsaicin (the chemical compound that makes peppers spicy) lingers in the air.
aaron kotowski for forbesWearing a red and white checkered blazer with a pin of his hot sauce fastened on his lapel, he continues, “My name's Pepper,” Baumer says. “I'm a walking billboard. This is what I was born to do.”