Ranch, garlic dip, or hot sauce: finding the right sauce for your pizza can be a lifelong search. Which hot sauce ranks best? Sriracha? Marie’s Sharp Habaranero? Secret Aardvark?
Melinda’s, a New Orleans-based company that created hot sauces for over 30 years, promises to narrow the search for the perfect hot sauce: its own aptly-named Red Pepper Pizza Hot Sauce. The slogan reads: “All the flavor and none of the seeds!”
“We are turning crushed red pepper flakes into an easier-to-use liquid sauce you can squirt on your pizza. It has some heat comparable to the dried flakes and seeds, the difference is the mess of the flake and seeds all over the plate, table, and floor. Your body also does not digest dried flakes and seeds very well. Our sauce is a lot more pleasant and packs more flavor,” said Greg Figueroa, co-inventor of Melinda’s hot sauce.
Related: Hot Sauces: For Customers Who Like Their Pizza with a Spicy Kick
The hot sauce is a blend of cayenne pepper mash, white vinegar, sweet pepper mash, tomato puree, white onion, garlic, and salt along with the famous red pepper flakes seen in nearly every pizzeria throughout the U.S. Figueroa says this combination blends well with pizza.
So how does this sauce compare to the widely-loved commercial hot sauces? “It is in the similar bottle design as Sriracha and it’s red pepper-based like Frank’s, but it has fresher ingredients and thicker gourmet hot sauce,” said Figueroa.
With fierce competition, why invent a new hot sauce specifically for pizza? Figueroa explains that condiments are now tailored to cuisine specifics with sauces for chicken, seafood, and steak. He saw that over 200 million homes buy at least five pizzas every year so he felt there was a huge need in a spicy alternative to dried red pepper flakes.
The hot sauce will launch nationally in the U.S. on April 5, 2020, with Walmart as the first U.S. grocery retailer.