Tabasco sauce is the brand name for a hot sauce produced by US-based McIlhenny Company of Avery Island, Louisiana.[1] Tabasco sauce is made from tabasco peppers (Capsicum frutescens var. tabasco), vinegar, and salt, and aged in white oak barrels for three years. It has a hot, spicy flavor. McIlhenny Company is in its fifth generation as a family business, and all 145 shareholders inherited their stock or were given it by a living family member.
McIlhenny Company is a family-owned and operated manufacturer of Tabasco brand pepper sauce. Tabasco, perhaps the most famous of 150 pepper sauces available, actually started the pepper sauce industry. The company remains a leader in domestic pepper sauce with more than a 34 percent share of the market in the 1990s, as well as a longstanding provider of pepper sauce across the globe. As Mark Robichaux explained in the Wall Street Journal, the McIlhenny Company "still profits every day from developing the first widely sold hot sauce and, in essence, creating the market."
The history of the McIlhenny Company should begin with a discussion of Avery Island, since the Tabasco sauce recipe depended on the island's salt and peppers. Located 140 miles west of New Orleans and 150 feet above sea level, Avery Island--a 2,300-acre tract located in the bayou country of Louisiana&mdashtually was the uppermost portion of a salt mountain. The largest of five such salt domes, Avery Island had rich soil, Cyprus-lined waterways, exotic flora, and ancient oaks. The earliest artifacts found on the island--stone weapons for hunting--dated back 12,000 years. Evidence of mastodons and mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and tiny three-toed horses also had been discovered there. If interpretations surrounding the basket fragments, stone implements, and Indian pottery found on the island are correct, a salt brining industry began there in 1300 A.D.
French explorers discovered the island sometime during the 18th century, and white settlers arrived in Avery Island by the century's end--when the Indians disappeared from the island. The salt brine springs, however, remained active, first distinguishing themselves during the War of 1812 when Andrew Jackson's troops used Avery Island salt in the Battle of New Orleans.
In 1818, Sarah Craig Marsh's father purchased some land on Avery Island, then known as Isle Petite Anse. Sarah Craig Marsh later married one Daniel Dudley Avery, and their descendants--through time and through marriage--came to control the whole island.
Tabasco sauce was invented in 1868 by Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker who had moved to Louisiana around 1840. Initially McIlhenny used discarded cologne bottles to distribute his sauce to family and friends, and in 1868 when he started to sell to the public he ordered thousands of new "cologne bottles" from a New Orleans glassworks. It was in these that the sauce was first commercially distributed. On his death in 1890, McIlhenny was succeeded by his eldest son, John Avery McIlhenny, who expanded and modernized the business, but resigned after a few years to join Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders volunteer cavalry regiment.
On John's departure, brother Edward Avery McIlhenny, a self-taught naturalist fresh from an arctic adventure, assumed control of the company, running it from 1898 to his death in 1949. Like his brother, Edward focused on expansion and modernization, as did war veteran Walter S. McIlhenny, who, after serving in the U.S. Marines at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, oversaw the company until his death in 1985.
Paul C. P. McIlhenny is the sixth in a line of McIlhenny men to run the business.
When Edmund McIlhenny died in 1890, his son John Avery McIlhenny assumed control of making the Tabasco sauce. Immediately upon taking his new position, John McIlhenny visited established commercial Tabasco customers throughout the United States. He intended to familiarize himself with existing accounts and to court new business. Some of his marketing efforts included bill posters; large wooden signs in fields near cities; drummers canvassing house-to-house in selected cities; exhibits at food expositions; circulars and folders; and free trial-size samples. (Ironically, the company's marketing strategies changed little since John McIlhenny's plans. The McIlhenny Company relied heavily on print ads in trade and consumer periodicals to market Tabasco sauce throughout its history. It was many years from its establishment before the McIlhenny Company's first television commercial in 1985, although both print and TV ads were used widely in the 1990s.)
John McIlhenny also commissioned an opera company to perform the "Burlesque Opera of Tabasco." When in 1893 Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club asked permission to use Tabasco in one of its reviews, John McIlhenny bought the rights to the review and staged it in New York. Samples of Tabasco sauce were given away during the show's matinee performances. Other early marketing efforts included promotions such as a grocery store contest with a $3,000 prize and offers for famous painting reproductions in exchange for a Tabasco coupon and a 10 cents handling charge.
In 1898, John Avery McIlhenny joined the First Volunteer Calvary of the U.S. Army, serving as a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. McIlhenny traveled extensively after the Spanish-American War. In 1906 he left Louisiana to work for his friend President Roosevelt at the U.S. Civil Service Commission, eventually becoming the U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Haiti in 1922. Under John Avery McIlhenny's direction, the family's Tabasco business grew tenfold.
Until recently, all peppers were grown on Avery Island. While a small portion of the crop is still grown there, the bulk of the crop is now grown in Central and South America, where the weather and the availability of farmland allow more predictable and larger year-round supply of peppers. This also helps to ensure the supply of peppers should something happen to the crop at a particular location (such as a hurricane). Regardless, all seeds are still grown on Avery Island.
Following company tradition, the peppers are handpicked. To determine ripeness, peppers are checked with a little red stick, or le petit bâton rouge, that each worker carries. Those peppers not matching the color of the stick are not harvested. Peppers are ground into "mash" the same day they are harvested, placed in white oak barrels (aging barrels previously used for bourbon whiskey) with salt, and sent to warehouses on Avery Island for a three-year aging process. At the end of the aging, the mash is drained to remove skins and seeds from the liquid. This liquid is mixed with vinegar and stirred intermittently for a month before being bottled as finished sauce.[3] Much of the salt used in Tabasco production is acquired locally from Avery Island's own salt mine, one of the largest in the U.S.
Avery Island was hit hard by tropical storms in 2005, especially Hurricane Rita. The factory barely escaped major damage. As a result of a long history of dodging tropical storms, the family constructed a 17-foot (5.2 m)-high levee and invested in back-up generators
McIlhenny Company produces Tabasco brand products that contain pepper seasoning, including popcorn, nuts, olives, mayonnaise, mustard, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, marinating sauce, barbecue sauce, chili sauce, pepper jelly, and Bloody Mary mix. McIlhenny Company also permits other brands to use and advertise Tabasco sauce as an ingredient in their products (a common marketing practice called "co-branding"), including Spam, Slim Jim beef sticks, Heinz ketchup, A1 steak sauce, Plochman's mustard, Cheez-It crackers, Lawry's salt, Zapp's potato chips and Vlasic pickles.
The original red Tabasco sauce has a shelf life of five years when stored in a cool and dry place; other Tabasco flavors have shorter shelf lives.
During the Vietnam War, BGen. McIlhenny issued The Charlie Ration Cookbook.[4] (Charlie ration was slang for the field meal given to troops.) This cookbook came wrapped around a two-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce in a camouflaged, water-resistant container. It included instructions on how to mix C-rations to make such meals as "Combat Canapés" or "Breast of Chicken under Bullets."[5]
During the 1980s, the U.S. military began to include miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce in its MREs. Eventually, miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce were included in two-thirds of all MRE menus. (These same miniature bottles are also included in vegetarian British rations, but are not included in the regular Operational Ration Pack.) During the same period, McIlhenny Company issued a new military-oriented cookbook using characters from the comic strip Beetle Bailey, titled The Unofficial MRE Cookbook, which it offered free of charge to U.S. troops
Tabasco appears on the menu of NASA's space shuttle program and has gone into orbit on the shuttles. It was on Skylab and on the International Space Station.
Like his predecessors, Edward McIlhenny Simmons, the company's next president and a great-grandson of Tabasco's inventor, remained personally involved in the growing of peppers and making of Tabasco sauce. He continued the tradition of selecting 1,200 pepper plants annually for 70 pounds of seeds for future crops. Simmons stored 20 pounds of the seeds in a bank vault in New Iberia and 50 pounds at the company's headquarters as a safeguard against crop loss.
So Tabasco sauce production continued as it had for more than 100 years. As Robichaux wrote: "The shape of the bottle has changed little, as has the process of making the sauce." Nevertheless, the McIlhenny Company expanded the Tabasco line over the years to include chili powder, seasoned salt, and popcorn seasonings. The company also created a Bloody Mary mix, a Seven-Spice Chili recipe, and a picante sauce for Tabasco consumers. "We've been a one-product company long enough," said Edward McIlhenny Simmons in Americana magazine in 1991.
The year 1991 also brought the first acquisition for the company. McIlhenny Company purchased Trappey's Fine Foods, manufacturer of Red Devil pepper sauce and other seasoning-related items. The McIlhenny Company marketed these recently acquired products under a new name: McIlhenny Farms. The acquisition allowed the company to offer a wider variety of merchandise, including pepper jelly, ketchup, and molasses.
The amount of Tabasco sauce manufactured daily of course grew with demand. During the 1990s millions of bottles of the sauce had been sold throughout the world, with production requiring labels to be printed in no less than 15 languages. In 1996, for example, more than 50 million bottles of Tabasco sauce were sold in at least 105 countries. Canada alone used 250,000 bottles in one year. Japan, the largest consumer of Tabasco sauce abroad, imported the sauce for sushi, spaghetti, and pizza recipes.
By 1997, the factory on Avery Island operated four production lines. In total, 450,000 two-ounce bottles could be manufactured daily with all lines in operation. (Each two-ounce bottle typically contained about 720 drops of Tabasco sauce, so the factory had the potential to manufacture about 324 million drops of Tabasco sauce each day in 1997.)
On the Web
The company also launched an interesting and unusual interactive web site--PepperFest--in 1996 to reach the multitude of Tabasco consumers. "With users of Tabasco products located all over the world," explained executive vice president Paul C. P. McIlhenny in a press release, "it just makes sense to offer accessible information via the World Wide Web. We want people to have fun visiting our PepperFest, and at the same time we welcome their feedback and suggestions."
The Sauce with Universal Appeal
Indeed, Tabasco might be a household word throughout the world. McIlhenny's pepper sauce "traveled to Khartoum with Lord Kitchener," revealed Pat Mandell in Americana, "and was carried on Himalayan expeditions, in the mess kits of World War I doughboys, and aboard Skylab. It is the quintessential ingredient in Bloody Marys. Its pungent flavor enlivens gumbos, eggs, steaks and stews, salads, chicken a la king, French onion soup, and jambalaya." The pepper sauce even was approved for Kosher cooking. As the first commercial hot sauce ever, the elixir, its founder, and his descendants became known in legend, lore, and fact for creating a new product and a market. As Cal Garrett, a manager with rival Durkee's Red Hot sauce, said: "They've built a great niche."
Statistics:
Private Company
Incorporated: c. 1907
Employees: 230
Sales: $105 million (1996)
SICs: 2035 Pickled Fruits & Vegetables, Etc.
Address:
Highway 29
Avery Island, Louisiana 70513
U.S.A.
McIlhenny Company is a family-owned and operated manufacturer of Tabasco brand pepper sauce. Tabasco, perhaps the most famous of 150 pepper sauces available, actually started the pepper sauce industry. The company remains a leader in domestic pepper sauce with more than a 34 percent share of the market in the 1990s, as well as a longstanding provider of pepper sauce across the globe. As Mark Robichaux explained in the Wall Street Journal, the McIlhenny Company "still profits every day from developing the first widely sold hot sauce and, in essence, creating the market."
The history of the McIlhenny Company should begin with a discussion of Avery Island, since the Tabasco sauce recipe depended on the island's salt and peppers. Located 140 miles west of New Orleans and 150 feet above sea level, Avery Island--a 2,300-acre tract located in the bayou country of Louisiana&mdashtually was the uppermost portion of a salt mountain. The largest of five such salt domes, Avery Island had rich soil, Cyprus-lined waterways, exotic flora, and ancient oaks. The earliest artifacts found on the island--stone weapons for hunting--dated back 12,000 years. Evidence of mastodons and mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and tiny three-toed horses also had been discovered there. If interpretations surrounding the basket fragments, stone implements, and Indian pottery found on the island are correct, a salt brining industry began there in 1300 A.D.
French explorers discovered the island sometime during the 18th century, and white settlers arrived in Avery Island by the century's end--when the Indians disappeared from the island. The salt brine springs, however, remained active, first distinguishing themselves during the War of 1812 when Andrew Jackson's troops used Avery Island salt in the Battle of New Orleans.
In 1818, Sarah Craig Marsh's father purchased some land on Avery Island, then known as Isle Petite Anse. Sarah Craig Marsh later married one Daniel Dudley Avery, and their descendants--through time and through marriage--came to control the whole island.
Tabasco sauce was invented in 1868 by Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker who had moved to Louisiana around 1840. Initially McIlhenny used discarded cologne bottles to distribute his sauce to family and friends, and in 1868 when he started to sell to the public he ordered thousands of new "cologne bottles" from a New Orleans glassworks. It was in these that the sauce was first commercially distributed. On his death in 1890, McIlhenny was succeeded by his eldest son, John Avery McIlhenny, who expanded and modernized the business, but resigned after a few years to join Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders volunteer cavalry regiment.
On John's departure, brother Edward Avery McIlhenny, a self-taught naturalist fresh from an arctic adventure, assumed control of the company, running it from 1898 to his death in 1949. Like his brother, Edward focused on expansion and modernization, as did war veteran Walter S. McIlhenny, who, after serving in the U.S. Marines at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, oversaw the company until his death in 1985.
Paul C. P. McIlhenny is the sixth in a line of McIlhenny men to run the business.
When Edmund McIlhenny died in 1890, his son John Avery McIlhenny assumed control of making the Tabasco sauce. Immediately upon taking his new position, John McIlhenny visited established commercial Tabasco customers throughout the United States. He intended to familiarize himself with existing accounts and to court new business. Some of his marketing efforts included bill posters; large wooden signs in fields near cities; drummers canvassing house-to-house in selected cities; exhibits at food expositions; circulars and folders; and free trial-size samples. (Ironically, the company's marketing strategies changed little since John McIlhenny's plans. The McIlhenny Company relied heavily on print ads in trade and consumer periodicals to market Tabasco sauce throughout its history. It was many years from its establishment before the McIlhenny Company's first television commercial in 1985, although both print and TV ads were used widely in the 1990s.)
John McIlhenny also commissioned an opera company to perform the "Burlesque Opera of Tabasco." When in 1893 Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club asked permission to use Tabasco in one of its reviews, John McIlhenny bought the rights to the review and staged it in New York. Samples of Tabasco sauce were given away during the show's matinee performances. Other early marketing efforts included promotions such as a grocery store contest with a $3,000 prize and offers for famous painting reproductions in exchange for a Tabasco coupon and a 10 cents handling charge.
In 1898, John Avery McIlhenny joined the First Volunteer Calvary of the U.S. Army, serving as a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. McIlhenny traveled extensively after the Spanish-American War. In 1906 he left Louisiana to work for his friend President Roosevelt at the U.S. Civil Service Commission, eventually becoming the U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Haiti in 1922. Under John Avery McIlhenny's direction, the family's Tabasco business grew tenfold.
Until recently, all peppers were grown on Avery Island. While a small portion of the crop is still grown there, the bulk of the crop is now grown in Central and South America, where the weather and the availability of farmland allow more predictable and larger year-round supply of peppers. This also helps to ensure the supply of peppers should something happen to the crop at a particular location (such as a hurricane). Regardless, all seeds are still grown on Avery Island.
Following company tradition, the peppers are handpicked. To determine ripeness, peppers are checked with a little red stick, or le petit bâton rouge, that each worker carries. Those peppers not matching the color of the stick are not harvested. Peppers are ground into "mash" the same day they are harvested, placed in white oak barrels (aging barrels previously used for bourbon whiskey) with salt, and sent to warehouses on Avery Island for a three-year aging process. At the end of the aging, the mash is drained to remove skins and seeds from the liquid. This liquid is mixed with vinegar and stirred intermittently for a month before being bottled as finished sauce.[3] Much of the salt used in Tabasco production is acquired locally from Avery Island's own salt mine, one of the largest in the U.S.
Avery Island was hit hard by tropical storms in 2005, especially Hurricane Rita. The factory barely escaped major damage. As a result of a long history of dodging tropical storms, the family constructed a 17-foot (5.2 m)-high levee and invested in back-up generators
McIlhenny Company produces Tabasco brand products that contain pepper seasoning, including popcorn, nuts, olives, mayonnaise, mustard, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, marinating sauce, barbecue sauce, chili sauce, pepper jelly, and Bloody Mary mix. McIlhenny Company also permits other brands to use and advertise Tabasco sauce as an ingredient in their products (a common marketing practice called "co-branding"), including Spam, Slim Jim beef sticks, Heinz ketchup, A1 steak sauce, Plochman's mustard, Cheez-It crackers, Lawry's salt, Zapp's potato chips and Vlasic pickles.
The original red Tabasco sauce has a shelf life of five years when stored in a cool and dry place; other Tabasco flavors have shorter shelf lives.
During the Vietnam War, BGen. McIlhenny issued The Charlie Ration Cookbook.[4] (Charlie ration was slang for the field meal given to troops.) This cookbook came wrapped around a two-ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce in a camouflaged, water-resistant container. It included instructions on how to mix C-rations to make such meals as "Combat Canapés" or "Breast of Chicken under Bullets."[5]
During the 1980s, the U.S. military began to include miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce in its MREs. Eventually, miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce were included in two-thirds of all MRE menus. (These same miniature bottles are also included in vegetarian British rations, but are not included in the regular Operational Ration Pack.) During the same period, McIlhenny Company issued a new military-oriented cookbook using characters from the comic strip Beetle Bailey, titled The Unofficial MRE Cookbook, which it offered free of charge to U.S. troops
Tabasco appears on the menu of NASA's space shuttle program and has gone into orbit on the shuttles. It was on Skylab and on the International Space Station.
Like his predecessors, Edward McIlhenny Simmons, the company's next president and a great-grandson of Tabasco's inventor, remained personally involved in the growing of peppers and making of Tabasco sauce. He continued the tradition of selecting 1,200 pepper plants annually for 70 pounds of seeds for future crops. Simmons stored 20 pounds of the seeds in a bank vault in New Iberia and 50 pounds at the company's headquarters as a safeguard against crop loss.
So Tabasco sauce production continued as it had for more than 100 years. As Robichaux wrote: "The shape of the bottle has changed little, as has the process of making the sauce." Nevertheless, the McIlhenny Company expanded the Tabasco line over the years to include chili powder, seasoned salt, and popcorn seasonings. The company also created a Bloody Mary mix, a Seven-Spice Chili recipe, and a picante sauce for Tabasco consumers. "We've been a one-product company long enough," said Edward McIlhenny Simmons in Americana magazine in 1991.
The year 1991 also brought the first acquisition for the company. McIlhenny Company purchased Trappey's Fine Foods, manufacturer of Red Devil pepper sauce and other seasoning-related items. The McIlhenny Company marketed these recently acquired products under a new name: McIlhenny Farms. The acquisition allowed the company to offer a wider variety of merchandise, including pepper jelly, ketchup, and molasses.
The amount of Tabasco sauce manufactured daily of course grew with demand. During the 1990s millions of bottles of the sauce had been sold throughout the world, with production requiring labels to be printed in no less than 15 languages. In 1996, for example, more than 50 million bottles of Tabasco sauce were sold in at least 105 countries. Canada alone used 250,000 bottles in one year. Japan, the largest consumer of Tabasco sauce abroad, imported the sauce for sushi, spaghetti, and pizza recipes.
By 1997, the factory on Avery Island operated four production lines. In total, 450,000 two-ounce bottles could be manufactured daily with all lines in operation. (Each two-ounce bottle typically contained about 720 drops of Tabasco sauce, so the factory had the potential to manufacture about 324 million drops of Tabasco sauce each day in 1997.)
On the Web
The company also launched an interesting and unusual interactive web site--PepperFest--in 1996 to reach the multitude of Tabasco consumers. "With users of Tabasco products located all over the world," explained executive vice president Paul C. P. McIlhenny in a press release, "it just makes sense to offer accessible information via the World Wide Web. We want people to have fun visiting our PepperFest, and at the same time we welcome their feedback and suggestions."
The Sauce with Universal Appeal
Indeed, Tabasco might be a household word throughout the world. McIlhenny's pepper sauce "traveled to Khartoum with Lord Kitchener," revealed Pat Mandell in Americana, "and was carried on Himalayan expeditions, in the mess kits of World War I doughboys, and aboard Skylab. It is the quintessential ingredient in Bloody Marys. Its pungent flavor enlivens gumbos, eggs, steaks and stews, salads, chicken a la king, French onion soup, and jambalaya." The pepper sauce even was approved for Kosher cooking. As the first commercial hot sauce ever, the elixir, its founder, and his descendants became known in legend, lore, and fact for creating a new product and a market. As Cal Garrett, a manager with rival Durkee's Red Hot sauce, said: "They've built a great niche."
Statistics:
Private Company
Incorporated: c. 1907
Employees: 230
Sales: $105 million (1996)
SICs: 2035 Pickled Fruits & Vegetables, Etc.
Address:
Highway 29
Avery Island, Louisiana 70513
U.S.A.
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