(dramatic music)
- [Daniel] For over 150 years,
Tabasco's famous red pepper sauce has come from one place:
Avery Island, a small area of land surrounded by bayous
in Southern Louisiana.
It was first made by Edmund McIlhenny,
and the company has stayed in family control ever since.
Every single CEO has been a descendant of McIlhenny.
Nowadays, hot sauce is everywhere
and although Tabasco is seen as a fixture in the industry,
it's important to remember that when Tabasco was created,
we were still over 100 years away from the buffalo wing.
Hot sauce just wasn't a thing back then,
and Tabasco laid the foundation for this whole movement
that we're finally having now.
Tabasco as a sauce really revolutionized America's idea
of standardization, manufacturing, and distribution.
I think a lot of people take for granted how hard it is
to keep a product consistent with changes in weather
and the growth of automation.
There are just so many opportunities that companies have
to take shortcuts on their ingredients.
I'm out at Avery Island to see how the descendants
of McIlhenny have been making
the same exact product for 150 years
and meet the people responsible for creating
one of America's most popular sauces of all time.
(hot sauce pouring)
- It's the capiscum fruitessence variety Tabasco.
From right here, it's five years from the time this pepper
is essentially made into a bottle of Tabasco's.
This is the original plant that E. McIlhenny,
my great-great-grandfather got,
and then started making the sauce
and pickling it with vinegar to let it sit for three years,
but that was all by accident how he came to three years.
It took him a little while to actually get the final recipe,
but the process itself, as you'll see, hasn't changed much.
There's a few more pieces of equipment, but that's it.
Everything used to be grown until the 60s
right here on Avery Island,
then we started growing around Louisiana
and then into Mexico and Venezuela and then all over.
- [Daniel] The main purpose of the growing operations
on Avery Island is to grow huge fields of peppers
and to choose only the top 1% of seeds
to send away to be grown elsewhere.
- We look for the right plants, we mark them, we pick them,
and those seeds are used to send to Latin America, mostly,
where we do the majority of our harvesting.
- Are these financially the most efficient pepper
for you to work with?
- Absolutely not. - Really?
- It's a more attractive looking pepper than a lot of them,
but it's very inefficient.
- [Daniel] Why?
- They're very small, it's hard to get off.
- Are they all picked by hand or do you guys have machinery?
- No, they're all picked by hand.
We've been trying to develop a machine that would do it,
but it's just not very efficient.
- I'm gonna have a bite.
- What you'll feel is it starts working
mostly on the front of your tongue,
then it'll start going back.
(coughs) It'll stop you from talking.
That was great.
You ate the whole thing.
- Thanks, just wanted to show my commitment to the brand.
- I appreciate that. - It's also pretty cold
outside and now I feel like I'm a little bit warmer.
I think we both look a little more red.
- Yeah, definitely.
- [Daniel] Once the peppers have been picked,
the seeds are extracted
and sent all over South America
and Africa to be grown from seed to pepper.
At that point, the peppers are combined
with a little but of salt and ground into a pepper paste,
which is then shipped back to Avery Island for processing
in these large containers.
- All right, ready to go!
Woo! (laughs)
- How many barrels do you fill up a day?
- 100 barrels. - 100 barrels.
k- Average.
- Is this a one person job? - Mm-hm.
- You can do it all on your own?
- Mm-hm. - All right.
You needed me a little bit, right?
- (laughs) Moral support.
- Ah, it's so f****** cool.
I'm going.
- Now.
There you go.
That's it.
What separates us from everybody else is what we do,
'cause they age it for three years with this.
This whole process.
There's a lotta people who are Tabasco fans,
love Tabasco, that have no idea the pepper sauce
is aged for three years.
- Now we filled a bunch of barrels
and we're gonna put the lid on
and get them ready for aging.
All right.
- This is its natural state.
All this is, is ground Tabasco pepper,
the day it's picked, with salt added to it.
Doesn't take much, it is spicy.
Very fresh, grassy notes through it.
Like a fresh chile.
- Definitely get some grass.
♪ Ah ♪
(hammer banging)
- Could you explain the reasoning
for the salt lid that goes on here?
- The salt that you're seeing here
is not actually touching mash at all.
There's a lid here, obviously a solid top.
Maybe if there's a small imperfection in that lid
that we don't see, that salt jams itself in there
and acts as a seal. - Cool.
- It's an extra protective layer.
- [Daniel] Now the barrels are sealed
and sent to the aging warehouse for over three years.
I can't stress this enough:
all of the world's future Tabasco is in this room.
- [Harold] There's about 55,000 in here
of these barrels. - Jesus.
This is all the future Tabasco?
- All the future Tabasco.
Each barrel makes approximately
10,000 2-ounce bottles of Tabasco.
- Oh my god. - There's a lot in here.
You can look down that one.
- What?
Do you like the cobwebs a little bit?
- Yes, it's a natural way of keeping the insects down.
- This is so crazy 'cause the barrels
are like a living entity
and obviously it would be so much easier
to just put everything in a giant bin,
like a controlled plastic or stainless bin.
It's just such a human stage of this process.
Now I got to see what the three year old mash tasted like
after spending all that time in the warehouse.
Right here, we have three years from now.
We're time traveling.
- Correct.
(hammer banging)
- So this is the same?
- Absolutely. - It's lost all this water?
- All this moisture.
That's part of the fermentation process.
You have evaporation and things like that.
- Does it lose some of the spice?
- No.
- You almost get a miso vibe.
You get that fermentation.
It's not just straight salt, it's one cohesive unit now.
Not just a bunch of lone rangers
in a barrel over there. - That's it.
- This is the blending department.
This is where we take the three year old aged mash
and we make it into Tabasco red pepper sauce.
- The three year old mash then makes its way
into the mixing room where it's combined with vinegar
at a measure of 70-30
and mixed for approximately three weeks.
Is this hot sauce heaven?
- Hot sauce heaven, right there.
I call it Sauceville.
- Sauceville.
Are you the mayor? - Sauceville, Louisiana.
I'm the mayor.
Come see me anytime.
These are my vinegar tanks.
I get about two truckloads of vinegar every day.
12,000 gallons go really, really fast.
- This is the three year old mash.
- That's three year old aged mash ready to go.
- From here what happens is the three year old mash
gets sucked into one of those machines
and then mixed with vinegar.
- To the mixing tank upstairs. - Gotcha.
One of the ways Tabasco keeps the product consistent
is by blending all of the peppers
from the different countries together in each batch.
- We use 12 barrels.
A mixture of different countries together.
I might put three to four countries together.
That's how we get the 96 barrels that we use every day.
- The nose in here is quite pungent.
It smells like...you get a little bit of the hot sauce,
but it's just a lot of vinegar.
How is it?
You get used to it?
- Oh yeah, you get used to it.
After a few years of working over here,
you get used to the smell.
I don't smell anything.
- Even when you walk in first thing in the morning?
- First thing in the morning.
- You think it smells like everything else?
- Smells like go time to me.
- From the storage tanks down there,
they get pumped up into here.
- And constantly stirred 14-28 days.
It's the 12 barrels of mash, vinegar, all mixed together.
- So from here it gets strained.
- Every tank you gonna get anywhere from 1,000
to 1,500 pounds of seed, and pepper pulp,
you're gonna get about 30-40 pounds of pepper pulp.
- After everything comes out, then you get this,
which is finally what we know of
as Tabasco. - Tabasco sauce.
That's ready to go.
Only thing I gotta do here is take a sample to the lab,
let them test it for me.
They test the salt, the pH, the acidity, the pungency,
and they tell me if it's good or not.
We only make good stuff over here so it's gonna be good.
- So what keeps you interested
and excited is making something that is as close as possible
to the thing that's been done for 150 years.
- Yeah, so knowing that, it's tradition for me.
When I go in the store,
I get to see Tabasco brand pepper sauce on the shelf.
I had my hands in making this
and it's known all over the world
so I'm just proud to be a part of it.
The tradition that keeps going and going
and going and going.
It don't get much better than that.
I like it, I can do it another 40 years.
If I come to your house
and you don't have Tabasco brand pepper sauce,
it'll be a quick visit.
(laughs) Just make sure you have it on the table
ready to go.
- You'll leave a restaurant
if they don't-- - I'll leave a restaurant.
- [Daniel] Once Tabasco sauce is finished and approved,
it makes its way to the bottling facility,
which is literally next door.
Just a reminder that everything Tabasco
happens on this island.
So what goes on in there?
- It's really, really pretty simple.
The sauce comes down into a filler.
You'll see the bottles go around.
They get filled.
They get labels put on them.
They go in a carton and then they go in a box.
Really, really simple, but it's moving really fast
and it's really pretty cool to see how dynamic it is.
- And how many bottles do you guys get through a day?
- So on a good day. - On a good day.
- On a good day we'll make about 700,000 equivalized units.
- My great-great-great-grandfather...
- You're related!
- I'm related.
In his lifetime, he made 350,000 bottles.
30 years, 25 years of making Tabasco sauce,
he made 350,000 bottles.
That's a shift right now, not even, half a shift.
- [Daniel] So really, the stages of this factory
are organizing bottles, filling bottles, closing bottles.
- [John] Pretty simple.
- [Daniel] But it's pretty cool that you guys do it here.
How often is this factory running?
- At this time of year, during the fourth quarter,
holiday season, we're running five days a week
almost 24 hours a day.
- No s***.
- Yeah, yeah, we're busy. - Oh my god.
- It gets kind of mesmerizing.
You can sit and watch this stuff
and you just feel your mind go blank.
It's really kind of incredible.
- [Daniel] In trying to figure out how Tabasco
has gotten so popular over time,
I think it's important to look at the consistency.
The company is literally run by descendants
of the same person that started it
and every single person who works here
is obsessed with making the product
as closed as they can to the original product that was made.
- You've seen the process
and you've tasted the mash, you've tasted the pepper.
- Frankly, I tasted too much product and by-product
because I was just eating that and nothing else.
- As a reward for all of your hard work, we have a...
- Whoa!
- This is a stainless steel spoon.
It's like a badge of honor.
When you walk around the factory,
people know that you tried the mash.
- Will they let me in the bars
in New Orleans with this thing?
- No, they'll probably arrest you if they see you with it.
They'll think it's something else.
To grandaddy.
- Yeah, let's move mountains.
- The process for making sauces nowadays,
you grind everything up within it.
We have to take stuff outta this one.
When you look at the flavor profile, it's fairly flat.
It really needs to work with something.
That's what we want, that's the purpose of this.
- I gotta say, I've said this before,
but going through all the stages today
and meeting all the people that really
care about what goes in here, it changes it a bit for me.
I enjoyed that Tabasco bite a little bit more
than I usually do.
- That's really good to hear.
That's what we're here to do.
- Thank you so much for having us today.
- Thank you for making the trip down
and spending the time to learn about us a little bit.
- [Daniel] At this point I think it's safe to say
that hot sauces may come and go,
but Tabasco has proven that is has staying power.
(gentle music)