How Tabasco Fills Up To 700,000 Hot Sauce Bottles A Day | Big Business | Insider Business

[Music] foreign this is what tabasco's original red sauce looks like years before it arrives at grocery stores It Starts Here aging inside these barrels in Southern Louisiana bottle of Tabasco sauce it's a long time and the recipe inside hasn't changed since 1868. red peppers vinegar and salt [Music] and even as the company's grown it's managed to keep much of the production inside its headquarters on Avery Island but tabasco's storied home is now under threat the factory is surrounded by shrinking marshes making it vulnerable to hurricanes and the company has spent Millions on storm protection it changes drastic from Storm to storm you can see the marsh deteriorating what you do is you get out there and you plant again you try and hold what you got we head to Southern Louisiana to see how the sixth generation of the mcelhenney family is fighting for the survival of its hot sauce and home [Music] Tabasco grows Peppers just for seeds inside this greenhouse [Music] we're also looking for the plants that produce the richest color red peppers that perfect size and then flavor too Christian Brown is the great great grandson of founder Edmund mcelhenney in the company's agriculture manager yeah everything's looking good no signs of aphids he sends Only the strongest seeds to over a thousand Tabasco farms around the world Tabasco says their Peppers originate from the Amazon in South America there are about six times hotter than a jalapeno and they're tiny only one to one and a half inches long and weighing a gram each because the peppers are so small and easily damaged machines don't do the harvesting they're all hand-picked Tabasco harvests 10 million pounds of peppers a year this footage is from Louisiana but the process looks similar abroad they sprinkle salt on the peppers and use a giant machine to mash them into a paste Farms ship the pace back to Avery Island through the port of New Orleans this Mash is actually from Peru we have 50 000 pounds of Tabasco Mash inside that container bulked in this pump siphons the paste into white oak barrels summer 60 years old most of these barrels in here are essentially a used Bourbon Barrel I don't really have the answer I know it works and we've been doing 150 plus years so I'm not changing it a team works together to fill and seal each one [Music] one truckload will fill up to 110 barrels but they can't overfill them because if you have too much pressure sometimes those caps blow off sometimes the lids will pop off overnight it's a really simple fix just kind of move it to the barrel next to it yeah it can take 30 minutes to finish one row since they're old the barrels don't have a perfect seal so workers pour salt on top it lets gases Escape while limiting oxidation salt on top is just an extra protective layer there is an imperfection that will help the team Stacks each Barrel by Mash origin so this whole Bay here going as far back to as you can to get to the walls is about 1100 barrels of Columbia 2022 the mesh releases lots of gases during fermentation so a tiny valve on top helps relieve the pressure you have to have some ventilation process or it's going to explode and that happens sometimes it's like a Tabasco ghost they come in here at night and they pop the lids off and we come back and there's six or seven we have to fix after three years the mash inside will stabilize shrink and darken in color we can see that it was built about this level here and you can start to see rings on side of that Barrel where the mesh is going down even though it Shrunk the Aged Mash is still really spicy not yet not yet but it is hot so let's remember this is 10 times more hot than actual sauce [Music] next up the age Mash is pumped into the blending room here the pepper smell will hit you right in the back of the throat I could see like getting Mist I guess every day it really hits you all right as I put my kids to college so I'm good with that I love it Morris Montgomery oversees blending but he goes by nothing the Army veteran ensures all the sauce tastes the same even though it's coming from around the world I try to do three or four different countries and put them together so it could be like a little Colombia Peru and a little Ecuador and Honduras he pumps in vinegar and blends it all for up to 28 days 72 tanks mix at the same time strainers remove pepper pulp and seeds Nook will take a sample for the lab to test for pH and then this is finished Tabasco sauce and this is ready to go uh next step to the bottle in Kalua [Music] that's where John Simmons comes in and I'm also a member of the sixth generation of the macalani family to make Tabasco sauce foreign John's Factory fills up to 700 000 bottles every day for minis to the iconic five ounce one it also pumps out nine different flavors from original red to habanero Sriracha is the Company's fastest growing one today machines do most of the filling capping and labeling so a bottle is going to go through in about 13 minutes they gather the bottles and package them into cardboard boxes we're doing it really really the shipping room [Music] so we've got product for Germany Japan Sweden Taiwan the Canary Island South Africa typically all these newly packaged products leave the warehouse within three weeks while the sauce is definitively global Avery Island has always been home this was where founder and former Banker Edmund mcelhenney first grew the tiny red peppers he bottled his first hot sauce in 1868 sealed it with wax and sold just under 700 bottles around the Gulf Coast each one cost a dollar he named the brand Tabasco after the Mexican state known for spice production and exports Edmund got a patent for it and by the early 1870s was selling his bottles across the U.S and even in Europe and then it kind of started to take a little steam and get bigger and bigger when one 24-hour period we're gonna double and then some more of what Edmund did in his entire life [Music] Edmund lived on Avery Island which is a natural salt Dome Rising 163 feet above sea level as the highest point along the U.S Gulf Coast it's been a respite from raging hurricanes for The mcelhenney Descendants that still called the island home but it's now at risk Louisiana's Coast sinks by an average of a third of an inch per year on average between 1985 and 2010 the State lost roughly a football field of wetlands every hour when land sinks it's more vulnerable to storm damage it changes drastic from Storm to storm depending where it makes landfall at you can you can see the the marsh deteriorate Heath Romero is Avery Island's land manager he said when Hurricane Rita hit in 2005 it turned this island into a lake and parts of the marsh were destroyed after Rita the company built an 18-foot Levee with a pump system around the factory if we put in a water control structures to stop the salt water from getting to the cypress trees they also planted tall grasses for protection and you can see we recovered all this Marsh that was open water at one time but it's a slow-moving process especially as the home of Tabasco enters another hurricane season we can't wait for for somebody else to help you you have to take action in your own self and try and try and protect what you have foreign [Music] Tabasco habanero you got to put it on vanilla ice cream use a drop per spoon fill it's perfectly okay to eat it out of the carton I know that's discouraged but eat it out of the carton one drop of habanero per spoon full of vanilla ice cream it's amazing Tabasco and peanut butter is the sneaky great thing that most people don't know about

Channel: Insider Business

Views: 1,408,400

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Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023