Meet Jacklyn & Kieran Parhar of San Diego Pepper Company

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jacklyn & Kieran Parhar.

Hi Jacklyn & Kieran, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
San Diego Pepper Company is a husband and wife duo of us, Kieran and Jacklyn Parhar. We got married in September 2021 and tried a Scotch bonnet sauce in St. Thomas during our honeymoon. This sparked our journey into making hot sauce. Over the course of about a year, we perfected some recipes and decided to take a chance and start the business, officially forming in July of 2022

After learning about all the packaged food licensing and other administrative hurdles to get our business started, we made our first batches in the last few days of December 2022.

We have a clear goal that we are working towards: to be recognized throughout San Diego as the staple condiment in the region, and to be just as visible in helping our community improve. With this, we decided to do everything ourselves—no co-packer. We wanted to oversee the quality ourselves. Selling a sauce that someone else made wasn’t in line with our goal of being a community-minded business. With both of us working full-time, we took evenings after work to make our sauce in a rented kitchen in Encinitas. Our first batch was launched with the San Diego Sauce, a chipotle garlic flavor, and Indian Spice Sauce, a mild masala blend. We heavily underestimated how long it would take and how much work it would be to make a single batch, but we got through it, learned a lot, and had about 80 bottles of each sauce!

With Kieran having a career in multimedia, we cut costs on label design, photography, videography, and website maintenance by doing it ourselves. We launched our website right before the New Year and had enormous support from loving friends and family, who placed orders right after the launch.

In January 2023, we paused to go to India for a friend’s wedding, planning to resume the business afterward. After the wedding, we saw Kieran’s family in Punjab and drank a lot of instant coffee with brown sugar. This inspired the flavor profile for the 805 Heat—our third sauce, a sweet habanero, which launched shortly after.

Our first big moment came when we got on shelves at a consignment shop across the street from our apartments—Vinya: vino + vinyasa, a wine bar and yoga studio, as well as The Crazy Pepper, a hot sauce shop in Old Town. With state approval for the 805 Heat, we felt confident in our sauce trio and decided to expand.

With only weekends available outside of our full-time jobs, we looked into farmers markets. We applied to Solana Beach and Cardiff and were approved as a fill-in for Solana Beach on May 23, 2023. Despite challenges, we committed to this opportunity. We had no farmers market supplies, displays, or branded materials. In five days, we got custom t-shirts, a banner, tablecloths, borrowed a canopy and tables, and printed information cards. We didn’t have a card reader but thankfully got one the day before. A local company, Chipz Happen, offered to supply us with pink Himalayan salt tortilla chips to use for sampling.

On Sunday, we had no clue what to expect but had great success. We were welcomed back to Solana Beach and approved for Cardiff two weeks later.

When we first started, our business operations ran out of a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate. We had a shelf space dedicated to sauce, packaging, and farmers market supplies.

With full-time jobs, making sauce in the evenings, and running booths on weekends, the business felt real. Each week we made a new batch, worked markets, urged our roommate to move out, and dropped off samples. Three months later, we gained loyal customers, increased production, and found a dedicated space without a roommate. Our hard work paid off with placements at Jensen’s in Point Loma and Seaside Market in Cardiff. Seeing our sauce on grocery store shelves was a huge milestone.

We found ourselves chasing our own tail, playing catch-up, with business and personal lives getting busy at the end of 2023. Jacklyn quit her job to add two weekday farmers markets and focus on growing the business. Fast forward to now, we are in 22 locations for sale, and two restaurants use our sauces—The Crack Shack in Encinitas and STP Bar and Grill in Clairemont.

We recently launched our fourth sauce, Spicy Pupper Sauce, in partnership with The Animal Pad—a nonprofit that rescues dogs in San Diego and Mexico. Spicy Pupper Sauce raises money for training TAP’s “spicy” pups who need help being comfortable with other dogs or warming up to humans.

While hot sauce is our product, our goal is to establish ourselves as a community staple. In all our business decisions, our north star is creating a positive impact in San Diego. While we’re still early on our journey, we’ve already done some things to further ourselves towards that goal. When we first started, we wanted to have a Community Fund where we took a portion of our products and profits to give back to the community. This has taken the form of donating sauce to charity fundraisers, making monthly donations to nonprofits, and most recently our partnership sauce! Outside of direct monetary donations, we recently became participants in the Adopt-a-Highway program with the Department of Transportation. With our sauce 805 Heat being named after the 805 freeway, we adopted the northbound Balboa Avenue exit and are doing monthly cleanups.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When most people picture 24 year-old newlyweds, they don’t usually picture evenings and weekends working on a hot sauce venture. Most companies in the packaged food industry seem to come from people who worked in the culinary industry in some capacity, so it was a huge learning curve for the two of us. Being our first business, failing fast has been the best way to learn, as each mistake we make turns into a lesson.

We’ve had our share of chaotic situations when orders are due. Whether it is delayed shipments for ingredients and bottles, lack of kitchen availability, last minute labeling before farmers markets or anything else. We have also learned that stressful nights usually lead to creative solutions.

Having struggles with our initial filler (a handheld pancake batter dispenser) we eventually upgraded to an automatic piston filler (Which is currently broken at the time of answering this).

Our biggest hurdle has been the balance of time. With our careers, the business, family, two dogs at home, and spending what little time we have left for ourselves, we have definitely had to make sacrifices. It is rare we get a free day in a month, we struggle to stay in touch with friends, and picturing kids in our life at this time would be next to impossible.

This all being said, the road for us has been fairly smooth. Our business has exceeded the expectations we had, and we were fully aware of the sacrifices we would have to make. We wouldn’t change a thing. Being able to share our product with the community has been so fulfilling. We are looking forward to getting San Diego Pepper Company into more stores, restaurants, and mouths!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
San Diego Pepper Company’s sauces are about flavor, not pain. If you find a store with a vast hot sauce section you will see tons of options with skulls, fire, ghosts, and everything gimmicky you can imagine to show how hot their sauce is. Our sauces are here to make meals better, not ruin them.

Compared to other sauces on the more mild level, we wanted distinct flavor for each sauce, so everyone can find something they like in our lineup.

San Diego Sauce sauce is the first sauce out of our lineup. A chipotle garlic sauce with not too much of a bite. It is great as a base to make a chipotle crema sauce or aioli. We want to see San Diego Sauce at every cafe in San Diego and be known as the San Diego hot sauce.

Our Indian Spice Sauce tastes like Indian food in a bottle! His dad being born in Punjab, Kieran has cooked Indian food his entire life and made this sauce with his own masala blend. Great to use on top of rice, veggies, stir fry, or as a marinade.

805 Heat has an initial wave of sweetness that is slowly overshadowed by a habanero heat! This sauce is great as a glaze for meats, and mixes well with dishes to add heat and sweetness.

Spicy Pupper Sauce is made with chile de arbol which gives it an up-front bite, and mustard powder that gives the sauce a creamy texture. Great on everything you can imagine, and helps out spicy pups in partnership with The Animal Pad!

As much as we are a San Diego hot sauce company, we want to grow more and give back as much as we can. Our biggest accomplishments are from what we are able to give back as a company to our community. Cleaning up the 805 North, donating sauces for charity drawings, giving free stickers out to kids at farmers markets, and especially helping dogs at TAP (Our own dog Pickles was an alumni from The Animal Pad!).

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
What might be seen as a risk, we usually try to reframe as an investment and keep everything within our means. From a financial perspective, we self-funded our entire business, have remained debt free, and spend within our means.

However, we really do believe in failing fast and learning. When we started the company, we invested thousands of dollars and most of our free time into a business in which we had no prior experience. Some would see this as a risk, but we see if in a different light: if the company failed and the market didn’t like our product, we would have come out learning more about running a business and it would be worth much more than the money and time we put into it.

In general, we love calculated risks and are try to look at situations where we will be winners regardless of the outcome.

If we pay for a larger event and we don’t make our money back? We got a great deal on a day of marketing.

If we have a sauce order that breaks during transit? We get an opportunity to show great customer service and replace it.

If we buy labels from a new supplier and they aren’t high quality? We saved so much money in the long term by making the mistake now while our business is small.

If our business fails after all we invested? We won’t have to look back later in life wondering “What if”.

We probably fall under risk-takers, but that has a bad connotation, most risk boils down to a decision and it is just finding out what is best for everyone in their own life or own business.

Pricing:

• San Diego Pepper Company Sauces MSRP is $9.99

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sdpeppercompany.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sdpeppercompany/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SDPepperCompany/
• Other: https://g.page/r/CfBRyYhJ37FbEAI/review

Image Credits
Indian Spice Sauce photo taken by Michelle Yutuc. Feature Photo taken by Julie Allan Photo of Kieran with Indian Flag taken by Jacklyn Parhar All other photos taken by Kieran Parhar