When Life Gives You Lemons...Make Hot Sauce

I like hot food, the spicier the better.  I like it so much that there is a three and a half foot poster of a bottle of Tabasco sauce next to the pantry in our house.  There’s some Tabasco, and seven other hot sauces, in our refrigerator too.

Today, Tabasco is a ubiquitous condiment.  You see it everywhere.  But did you know that Tabasco was born out of adversity…

An article in the June 2006 issue of Executive Leadership tells the Tabasco Story.

• In 1863, the Union Army invaded the region around Avery Island, LA, where Edmund McIlhenny operated a sugar plantation and salt works.  McIlhenny and his family fled.  When they returned tow years later, their property was in ruins.  Among the only living things left standing: some Mexican hot pepper plants that had reseeded themselves in the family’s kitchen garden.  Living hand to mouth, McIlhenny started experimenting with the peppers to spice up his family’s sparse diet.  First, he ground up the peppers; then he fermented them, creating a dry-hot potion.  This potion became the much loved and imitated Tabasco sauce that today is used to flavor dishes and drinks from scrambled eggs to Bloody Marys.

The lesson here, according to Executive Leadership, is simple:

• Leaders see opportunity in every adversity.  More than a century after McIlhenny’s invention, his family continues selling his product around the world.

After selling only one version of their hot sauce for years, Tabasco has recently added to its line.  I like the chipotle pepper sauce that is smoky hot, and the green sauce that is sour hot.  Try some, you’ll like it.

While we’re on the subject of hot sauces, let’s have a little poll.  Please use the comment section and tell us your favorite hot sauce.  I like Tabasco, but I love Cholula, a Mexican hot sauce.

That’s it for today.  Thanks for reading.  Log on to my website, www.BudBilanich.com for more common sense life and career advice.

I’ll see you around the web, and at Alex’s Lemonade Stand.

Bud

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Comments

[Shane Bernard]

Thanks for mentioning our product. Yes, indeed, E. McIlhenny certainly did manage to turn adversity into opportunity, despite all the stumbling blocks in his way: It took five days back then just to get his product to market in New Orleans, on steamboat via a circuitous route of backwaters. That alone would have discouraged many people!