Lydia Harfield and Mat Watkins of Apostle Hot Sauce Photo: Supplied/Apostle Hot Sauce
When Wellington couple Mat Watkins and Lydia Harfield first moved up the coast to Paekakariki, they were a little lonely, before striking on the idea of making and selling hot sauce at the local market.
That germ of an idea has now grown into Apostle Hot Sauce, with 200 stockists, here, in Australia and the UK.
The business' hot sauces have saintly branding; their nine flavours range from the Saint John Mango, Turmeric and Ginger sauce to the Saint Francis Kimchi Ketchup, and they release a new one every year.
Once they started selling at the market, they soon became known as "the hot sauce couple," co-founder Mat Watkins told RNZ's Nine to Noon.
"I thought what's an interesting thing that we could explore. And so, we started doing the hot sauces, and people really loved them."
"So now we know a lot of people there, which is really cool, and they all know us as the hot sauce couple."
Hot sauces traditionally were "barbarically masculine," Watkins said.
"It was all about, challenge your physical capabilities, can you handle the heat? And it's not something that really resonated with us at all.
"We find food to be a really nice, shareable, kind, loving thing.
"If you look back at like old branding for especially hot sauce companies, it would be like a nuclear weapon on the front of a bottle."
Hence the saintly branding, he said.
"What's the polar opposite to all of that, and what we want representing? We thought that the saints were really, really beautiful depictions of love, kindness, all the things that we wanted to represent in a brand."
The pandemic turned out to be boon for the hot sauce business, Watkins said.
"The pandemic was awesome, a lot of people ended up being at home, and they became more experimental with what they were cooking.
"A lot of people, when they leave home, they've only got maybe a few recipes under their belt that they sort of mix and repeat. But when you're cooking every single night at home, you need something to make your meals a little bit more exciting."
The products are distributed through independent retailers, he said.
"We don't do the big supermarket chains, we like to support local, small businesses, family-owned and we're doing a lot more sales online too.
"Because New Zealand is so small for us to be sustainable as a small business, especially a food business with low margins, we have to look further afield, so pushing more into Australia, the UK, and then, depending on how things go, maybe the US."
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