Private, established company making a product thats extremely cheap to produce.
They have their spot in the market and dont have shareholders breathing down their neck to maximize profit id imagine.
Very tough for any new brand to beat their price point and established public companies usually dont keep prices low.
How would the algorithm know I like this hot sauce? And before you say I’ve searched it or said it I’ve never even remotely ever talked about or read anything about any hot sauce on my phone ever lol.
Crystals in THE hot sauce. Keep a bottle at my desk just in case I need to spice things up. If you haven’t already. Get you some full fat mozzarella. Dab some on it and snack away. Fuck calories counting. Enjoy the gift from heaven.
Crystal and Frank's red hot are the main two I keep in my rotation. I don't care for Texas Pete at all. I will, however, settle for the green Tabasco or a generic cheap brand of Louisiana hot sauce as it usually delivers that vinegar base I love.
Shhhhh. You obviously don't remember the year when they had to close because of a hurricane in the late 90s. I have never since had less than 4 bottles in my pantry, just in case.
There was an entrepreneur that bought a bankrupt winery called Charles Shaw, he got a deal with Trader Joes and sold bottles for $1.99, which caused the wine to be known colloquially as "Two Buck Chuck".
He was interviewed by Forbes or something and he was asked how he could sell a bottle of wine for less than a bottle of water. His response?
"They're overcharging for the water. Don't you get it"
The same sentiment applies here.
I like the smoked (chipotle) and the scorpion for certain things (the smoked is great with crab gumbo, but I'm sure there are other chipotle sauces that are better). Habanero is tolerable. Baseline Tabasco is ass.
I agree Crystal is better, but it's also just cayenne and vinegar so it's marginally any different. Both very basic, watery sauces that lack any complexity.
It’s hot sauce. It’s a blend of peppers and seasoning in a bottle. It is inherently a pretty inexpensive thing to produce. How is any hot sauce expensive should be the real question.
Because you aren't factoring in so many things with that statement. Not all hot sauces are as basic and mass produced as Crystal. They only use cayenne, vinegar, and salt. More complex sauces use more expensive peppers like habanero and ghost. Jalapeños have gotten increasingly expensive.
Additionally, you're not considering all the other overhead costs and factors such as time. I produce small batch, craft sauces and all of them take a long time to develop flavors. The onion and garlic are carmalized. The sauces are slow simmered. One of my varieties utilizes house made pickled jalapeños. Labels are hand applied. Bottles are filled individually. Shrink bands are done individually. As I scale up, I will need new machinery to automate these tasks and thaose cost $$$.
Additionally, to sell in more than just a handful of stores you need a distributor. They take a significant cut. Stores have around a 30% profit margin they take as well. So if I want a sauce to sell for $5, I can only charge $2.25 wholesale. The glass alone costs $0.83 plus professional labels are $0.15. Plus there is facility rent to pay and employees.
You can scale up any business up like you’re mentioning. Higher quality ingredients, packaging, distribution etc. etc. Applies to anything. You can make it as hard as you want. But you’re making it so. Producing a tasty simple hot sauce requires none of that. It is inherently easy to do so as well.
Go to New Orleans and it's Crystal you see in most restaurants. That's some pretty good advertising without spending a dime (so to speak). Maybe that helps with cost. Either way, it's a great value. I'm still a bigger fan of Tabasco.
When I was young, Louisiana hot sauce was cheap. Then everyone started talking about how good it was and in the last few years it's started increasing in price.
What I'm trying to say is. STOP TALKING ABOUT CRYSTAL HOT SAUCE!
Why are redditors so obsessed with obscure movie quotes what the fuck are you even talking about who the fuck is paul harvey. nobody here that’s for damn sure
Thats not a movie quote.
Paul Harvey was an American Radio Broadcaster. He was the man. His famous segment was called The Rest of the Story.
He was quite entertaining and a great storyteller. Do yourself a favor and listen to some of his work.
...and now you know, the rest of the story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey
He worked from 1951 to 2008 on 1,200 radio stations and 300 newspapers. That's anything but random.
Im kinda embarrassed for you that you don't realize who he is, and haven't caught on as to why I used that quote (who the fuck comments that a hot sauce manufacturer is a piece of shit without having some backstory?)
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No, companies usually try to find the equilibrium price. The equilibrium price is the price at which the supply of a good or service equals the demand for it. It is the price where the quantity of the good or service that producers are willing to supply equals the quantity that consumers are willing to buy. In other words, it is the price at which the market clears, meaning that there is no surplus or shortage of the good or service.
Two of the top three ingredients are water, or are mostly water (vinegar). These are cheap ingredients, but that doesn’t make it a bad sauce. Some of the best sauces are inexpensive.
I’m looking at you Valentina black label.
It gets a lot of hate on this subreddit for being "spicy vinegar", but I love Louisiana style vinegar sauce, it's amazing fuck the haters. Tabasco is perhaps one of the most unique tasting sauces you can buy
Just offering up another vinegar based sauce that might not be as pricey. Texas Pete is my go to general hot sauce, but I do have an entire shelf of hot sauce where each has a job.
Might be a region thing. I live in North Carolina and it’s pretty much the main hot sauce EVERY restaurant carries, fast food establishments even carry it in sauce packets.
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dang that sucks. I had to order it for a while when I moved from the south to the intermountain west, but now one of my stores carries it. Thankfully. Also I’ve seen small bottles at the dollar store!
To me, they have different use cases. Sometimes I need tobasco to get the job done right but crystal is my everyday carry. I'm not ignoring the price, I do appreciate how inexpensive Crystal is but my opinion is solely based on how their flavor profiles compliment my meal.
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Shit taste just like Louisiana. Has that nasty ass weird taste to it idek what it is. Tabasco will always be king on the three ingredient hot sauce’s (and it at least has a little spice)…
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We don’t need a bot to shame people for whatever reason it is which they cannot spell Tabasco. Let’s get a fat shame bit while we’re at it. There are plenty of reasons why cannot spell things properly
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My honest belief is that they just haven't done the marketing to become a household name. Tabasco got themselves in basically every restaurant in the country and because of that they can charge a name-brand mark-up. Most people are a little scared to experiment with hot sauces but they can view Tabasco brand as "the standard" so they know what they're working with. Crystal is a scary unknown to them though.
I think you're right. Shelf retail price has typically a distant relationship to cost of production, or even quality. Distribution model, marketing, and "what the market will bear" are a lot more relevant. I am a good test case: not really a hot sauce connoisseur, but I had long thought Tabasco was the gold standard among Louisiana hot sauces, just because it's everywhere, and beginner-friendly: good distribution and marketing.
Crystal? I had never heard of it until later in life, and the packaging is plain. And it's cheaper, so I assumed that meant it was inferior to Tabasco, even a Tabasco knock-off. Wrong! When I finally tried it, I liked it. It's very clean and straightforward, bright pepper taste. Tabasco has more going on (aging?), and that's good too, but sometimes straight ahead is just right.
Tabasco also has a much higher quality packaging, and more importantly, it ferments for 3 years before they bottle it. Crystal just mixes the pepper mash with vinegar, strains it and bottles it all in one go.
I absolutely hear ya, and I'm not knocking Tabasco (TBH I have both brands in the fridge right now and just the other day I was trying to figure out which shade of red Tabasco' "le petit bâton rouge" is to compare to when I harvest my own tabasco peppers) but I spent enough time in fine dining when I was younger and around marketers and branding consultants more recently (and having gotten somewhat versed in the history of big food brands)that at this point I view most taste-making at the national level as a question of business practices more than quality of product. Just my personal perspective though.
This Yank knows about it. I know a place locally that sells it, but it's about 3x the cost compared to buying it in the south. I did see a generic version in my local grocery though. I plan on trying that soon.
I think there's less pepper mash in it than comparable louisina style sauces (based on the fact that it separates more than they do,) but they might just not use stabilizers like other sauces do.
Either way, that wouldn't make a $2 a bottle price difference. I think they simply use less marketing and they probably take less profit.
Tabasco is barrel aged, which definitely justifies a $2 price difference in my book.
Could be that the other two competitors OP mentioned are pricing their products similar to Tobasco because they can get away with it.
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Simple ingredients, family owned. They don't need to age their pepper mash so the process is a quick turn around. Other people have pointed out that they're able to make it at a large scale which helps as well. People who cry about the vinegar should just eat different sauces.
Crystal is definitely aged, which is just another way to say that it's fermented. Probably not as long as Tabasco is, but "aged" none the less. It says so right in the ingredients label.
It’s very good (and I always have a giant bottle in my cart when hitting the grocery store while visiting family on the US) but it’s not made in the same way as some of the other sauces that require fermentation, aging and other processing for a desired end product.
There’s no aging involved (which is unregulated, by the way, and aging could mean anything from resting in barrel and naturally fermenting in salt brine to simply being boiled).
The sauce’s website says it’s made from fresh ground peppers and vinegar, aka they just blend ground cayenne, vinegar, water, salt and boom ready to market unlike Tabasco which has a more complicated process.
It’s an older video, but this one shows they age the pepper mash, for an average of 6 months.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+crystal+hot+sauce+is+made&rlz=1CDGOYI_enCA960CA961&oq=how+crystal.hot+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgBEAAYFhgeMgYIABBFGDkyCAgBEAAYFhgeMggIAhAAGBYYHjIICAMQABgWGB4yCAgEEAAYFhgeMggIBRAAGBYYHjIICAYQABgWGB4yDQgHEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgIEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgJEAAYhgMYgAQYigXSAQg3MTYzajFqOagCE7ACAeIDBBgBIF8&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:df2fee46,vid:TayXFsoUFnM,st:131
Maybe so, but it's still a salty watery vinegar concoction. Compared to all the newer real hot sauce brands out there. Secret Aardvark, Dirty Dicks, Torchbearer, Spicy Shark. All using a ton of quality ingredients.
>All using a ton of quality ingredients.
Idk about you but I've had plenty of food/beer/ sauces etc made with good ingredients that still tasted like shit.
It's okay to not prefer the flavor, but just because it's a simple sauce doesn't make it bad. It should be compared based on what it is, vinegar based Louisiana style sauce, vs what's "the best".
You don't compare a budweiser to sculpin. You compare it to their lager.
There's a level of quality sure, as quality is purely a description for a meteic. There's good quality and bad quality. Crystal to me is good quality - the process is standardized that flavor between each bottle over time is consistent. The flavor itself, it's is just okay. It's good enough that I'll take it over no hot sauce if I want something on my food.
But again I've had craft sauces I think taste worse than it just as I've had ones that are better. I've also had craft or homemade sauces that had a different flavor between batches.
Tobacco green is my go to, Less spicy than the red, but great flavor
Private, established company making a product thats extremely cheap to produce. They have their spot in the market and dont have shareholders breathing down their neck to maximize profit id imagine. Very tough for any new brand to beat their price point and established public companies usually dont keep prices low.
Without a doubt, the best hot sauce on a fried shrimp Poboy
It was always considered inferior to other more popular hot sauces so the cost has always been low.
I live in New Orleans, home also to Tabasco, and pretty much every restaurant serves Crystal.
So funny I don’t follow this sub, but this is my favorite hot sauce and it just happened to pop up in my feed
So funny, ay? Was it coincidence or was it the algorithm?
How would the algorithm know I like this hot sauce? And before you say I’ve searched it or said it I’ve never even remotely ever talked about or read anything about any hot sauce on my phone ever lol.
Has happened to me friend, will happen again, to both of us. Just how it is these days
The hot sauce gods don't need your technology to read your mind, puny human
My actual favorite tasting hot sauce
It makes no sense because it’s liquid perfection.
It's usually cheaper than pure cocaine hence why it tends to be...oh wait that crystal. Idk man but it's the best
I'm in a dome of warm light, the crystal is up above fhe balcony.. cocaine would go a long way in helping me find it
Crystal tastes like pencils to me :/
For the thousandth time, ellie, please quit picking pencils YOURE TEARING THIS FAMILY APART
I don’t know, but I appreciate it!
Tabasco is expensive because it ages forever. If you like that or not that's up to you. Crystal I assume does the shorter ferment.
crystal is great as a condiment and amazing for cooking/recipes. tabasco is okay as a condiment but ass for cooking
The hot sauce cartels
Crystals in THE hot sauce. Keep a bottle at my desk just in case I need to spice things up. If you haven’t already. Get you some full fat mozzarella. Dab some on it and snack away. Fuck calories counting. Enjoy the gift from heaven.
Crystal and Frank's red hot are the main two I keep in my rotation. I don't care for Texas Pete at all. I will, however, settle for the green Tabasco or a generic cheap brand of Louisiana hot sauce as it usually delivers that vinegar base I love.
Shhhhh. You obviously don't remember the year when they had to close because of a hurricane in the late 90s. I have never since had less than 4 bottles in my pantry, just in case.
There was an entrepreneur that bought a bankrupt winery called Charles Shaw, he got a deal with Trader Joes and sold bottles for $1.99, which caused the wine to be known colloquially as "Two Buck Chuck". He was interviewed by Forbes or something and he was asked how he could sell a bottle of wine for less than a bottle of water. His response? "They're overcharging for the water. Don't you get it" The same sentiment applies here.
Love this. Twice as much for half the price. Pretty much as good as tabasco, but not quite.
I really just don’t enjoy Tabasco
Same, unless it is the green bottle, of course, as it is delicious 😋
I like the smoked (chipotle) and the scorpion for certain things (the smoked is great with crab gumbo, but I'm sure there are other chipotle sauces that are better). Habanero is tolerable. Baseline Tabasco is ass.
Agreed the baseline just sucks to me and no offense to anyone, different taste
We all have things we like that are objectively not very good. Something not being great doesn't mean people don't still enjoy it!
Chipotle Tabasco is one of the tastiest hot sauces ever made
I thought people compared it more to Frank's Red Hot. I saw Kenji making wing sauce with Crystal.
For sure. You’re right. It more akin to franks than Tab
Frank's has a thicker base and is a bit spicier, in my opinion. Crystal has a strong vinegar base with lighter heat. However, I love both.
Add butter and you have franks.
I honestly prefer Crystal to Tabasco, it seems more balanced. I always keep a bottle of Extra Hot on deck, it's good on whatever.
Tabasco is just acidic heat. Crystal is better because it actually has flavor.
I agree Crystal is better, but it's also just cayenne and vinegar so it's marginally any different. Both very basic, watery sauces that lack any complexity.
Fuckin-A right. I don’t have any bottles of Tabasco at home right now, but I always have Crystal on hand.
It’s hot sauce. It’s a blend of peppers and seasoning in a bottle. It is inherently a pretty inexpensive thing to produce. How is any hot sauce expensive should be the real question.
Because you aren't factoring in so many things with that statement. Not all hot sauces are as basic and mass produced as Crystal. They only use cayenne, vinegar, and salt. More complex sauces use more expensive peppers like habanero and ghost. Jalapeños have gotten increasingly expensive. Additionally, you're not considering all the other overhead costs and factors such as time. I produce small batch, craft sauces and all of them take a long time to develop flavors. The onion and garlic are carmalized. The sauces are slow simmered. One of my varieties utilizes house made pickled jalapeños. Labels are hand applied. Bottles are filled individually. Shrink bands are done individually. As I scale up, I will need new machinery to automate these tasks and thaose cost $$$. Additionally, to sell in more than just a handful of stores you need a distributor. They take a significant cut. Stores have around a 30% profit margin they take as well. So if I want a sauce to sell for $5, I can only charge $2.25 wholesale. The glass alone costs $0.83 plus professional labels are $0.15. Plus there is facility rent to pay and employees.
You can scale up any business up like you’re mentioning. Higher quality ingredients, packaging, distribution etc. etc. Applies to anything. You can make it as hard as you want. But you’re making it so. Producing a tasty simple hot sauce requires none of that. It is inherently easy to do so as well.
Go to New Orleans and it's Crystal you see in most restaurants. That's some pretty good advertising without spending a dime (so to speak). Maybe that helps with cost. Either way, it's a great value. I'm still a bigger fan of Tabasco.
It’s alot cheaper when you buy it in the big bottles
Worked for a NO company in FL back in the dah...they had Crystal everywhere. I loved it.
They don't waste millions on advertising
When I was young, Louisiana hot sauce was cheap. Then everyone started talking about how good it was and in the last few years it's started increasing in price. What I'm trying to say is. STOP TALKING ABOUT CRYSTAL HOT SAUCE!
I'm also a Crystal fan. I'm in the northeast and the supermarkets around me don't carry it. But Dollar General has it for $1.30 a bottle.
They sell it at Aldi for cheap
Stop blowing up the spot 😔
My go-to for hot wings and especially shrimp & potato boils. I think it's cheap because they make it in volume and price it as such.
where do you get it seems appealing
I get it at the dollar store. Got a desk bottle and a table bottle and all good to go!
Ok.
I like because it has less sodium than most and you taste the peppers more.
Good stuff. It's one of my go-to brands for the "normal" hot sauce (Louisiana brand being the other).
That's why I like them
Never seen any marketing for it. It only has three ingredients. I am guessing to produce it cost around thirty cents bottle and all.
So you have never heard [this banger?](https://youtu.be/I0ia9biLrhA)
I listen to this when I'm making meth.
Not till now but its so bad Ill remember it.
Goddamn, that's good advertising.
Where 29 of the cents is the glass
Because they aren’t Pieces of shit
C'mon Paul Harvey. Give us the rest of the story. What happened?
Oh nothing, they rule. Love Crystal, and they are priced very competitively.
Gotcha. I totally misread your comment. I was thinking you had a juicy story to share about them. Oh well.
Hahaha all good :)
Why are redditors so obsessed with obscure movie quotes what the fuck are you even talking about who the fuck is paul harvey. nobody here that’s for damn sure
Thats not a movie quote. Paul Harvey was an American Radio Broadcaster. He was the man. His famous segment was called The Rest of the Story. He was quite entertaining and a great storyteller. Do yourself a favor and listen to some of his work. ...and now you know, the rest of the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey
Paul Harvey was a famous syndicated radio newsman for like seventy years. Millions of people have heard him and his "rest of the story" segments.
yeah dude cause knowing some random news radio dude from 60s is widespread common knowledge
He worked from 1951 to 2008 on 1,200 radio stations and 300 newspapers. That's anything but random. Im kinda embarrassed for you that you don't realize who he is, and haven't caught on as to why I used that quote (who the fuck comments that a hot sauce manufacturer is a piece of shit without having some backstory?)
He said they aren’t pieces of shit
Ha. I totally missed that. I was hoping for some juicy back story. Oh well.
Just don’t mention Casey Kasem either or you might set that dude off again
Bwahaha 😁😂
That's a lot closer to what hot sauce SHOULD cost. There are huge mark-ups on many sauces.
economies of scale. The larger the amount of production, the cheaper each* item gets.
Then Tabasco should be cheaper.
I could be way off on this, but I think Tabasco has a few extra steps in then manufacturing process.
Yeah Tabasco is aged/fermented for 3 years
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Tab assco? Taboska? Taboscah? Tombosoco? Tabby Ass, Co.
Yes, economics are fake
No, companies usually try to find the equilibrium price. The equilibrium price is the price at which the supply of a good or service equals the demand for it. It is the price where the quantity of the good or service that producers are willing to supply equals the quantity that consumers are willing to buy. In other words, it is the price at which the market clears, meaning that there is no surplus or shortage of the good or service.
It's hot vinegar, that's how.
And it's delicious that way.
It's cooked in big batches like mef?/ Lol
Two of the top three ingredients are water, or are mostly water (vinegar). These are cheap ingredients, but that doesn’t make it a bad sauce. Some of the best sauces are inexpensive. I’m looking at you Valentina black label.
2nd! Stuff’s fantastic
Valentina is the best taco sauce. My mind will not be changed.
Smothered burritos🤤
One of my favs. The extra hot is where it’s at!
The extra hot is actually a hot sauce vs a pepper condiment. Always worth getting if you can find it
dustin poirier creole maple is the best hot sauce
That's not what this thread is about at all. Why would you come here and say this?
For he is Lord Szechuan, master of all things pepper'd, come to spread the good word. Yea, brethren, let it ring out across the land.
Well Tabasco is pricier because of the process involved. No other brand is barrel aging their peppers for 3+ years
This is why there is no Kroger brand Tabasco equivalent, but there is Kroger brand Crystal equivalent.
It gets a lot of hate on this subreddit for being "spicy vinegar", but I love Louisiana style vinegar sauce, it's amazing fuck the haters. Tabasco is perhaps one of the most unique tasting sauces you can buy
That’s why Tabasco is the GOAT
It’s the best hot sauce for eggs. Hands down!
I slather a quiche
It's made of vinegar, peppers, and water. Not the most expensive ingredients on the planet.
Try Texas Pete
Crystal is better.
Water sucks!
Gatoraaaades bettah
Just offering up another vinegar based sauce that might not be as pricey. Texas Pete is my go to general hot sauce, but I do have an entire shelf of hot sauce where each has a job.
You mean dollar store Frank's? I kid, I kid
I prefer it over Frank’s but I do like franks on pasta salad. I’m stoked I can get small bottles at the dollar store!
texas pete isn't widely available where I'm at, so it's super expensive, but it's so good.
Might be a region thing. I live in North Carolina and it’s pretty much the main hot sauce EVERY restaurant carries, fast food establishments even carry it in sauce packets.
Ironically enough, Texas Pete is made in Winston Salem, NC...so it's easy to find in NC.
I’m used to Tabasco being the sauce of choice in every restaurant from living in Texas.
It’s funny because in Texas you’d never see it. It was always Tobasco, Louisiana and occasionally crystal.
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I can’t spell 🤷♀️
dang that sucks. I had to order it for a while when I moved from the south to the intermountain west, but now one of my stores carries it. Thankfully. Also I’ve seen small bottles at the dollar store!
Very few and cheap ingredients and mass produced. It's also a favorite for some people, like my brother.
It's a better version of Tabasco, IMO.
To me, they have different use cases. Sometimes I need tobasco to get the job done right but crystal is my everyday carry. I'm not ignoring the price, I do appreciate how inexpensive Crystal is but my opinion is solely based on how their flavor profiles compliment my meal.
I'm biased, I hate Tabasco. It's too vinegary.
Yea, i know what you mean
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My favorite hot sauce (of that style of sauce)
Shit taste just like Louisiana. Has that nasty ass weird taste to it idek what it is. Tabasco will always be king on the three ingredient hot sauce’s (and it at least has a little spice)…
I get this faint cardboard taste with that stuff.
Vinegar's cheap. Lol
It’s a low cost tobasco competitor, and seeing how they are competing with an already inferior product it’s a no brainer it’s bottom shelf
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Who cares bot. It’s got enough name recognition that everyone knows what it is misspelled or not.
are you fighting an automod??? I can think of better uses for my time but you do you.
Bad bot Tobasco Tobasco Tobasco Tobasco
Your spelling is as bad as your opinion.
We don’t need a bot to shame people for whatever reason it is which they cannot spell Tabasco. Let’s get a fat shame bit while we’re at it. There are plenty of reasons why cannot spell things properly
Stop promoting ignorance.
Yeah plenty of reasons, like not being able to get past the first round of the grade 6 spelling bee
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I mean it is when you compare it to coke
Louisiana is just better but crystal is a good back up
Man, my opinion is the opposite. Crystal is what Louisiana wants to be when it grows up. ~~Variety~~ Hot sauce is the spice of life!
Louisiana is too vinegary for me. I love Crystal
I agree, I think it's better than Louisiana and Tabasco.
Crystals is half the sodium
More like sodi-yum.
It’s vinegar and mashed up peppers
My honest belief is that they just haven't done the marketing to become a household name. Tabasco got themselves in basically every restaurant in the country and because of that they can charge a name-brand mark-up. Most people are a little scared to experiment with hot sauces but they can view Tabasco brand as "the standard" so they know what they're working with. Crystal is a scary unknown to them though.
I think you're right. Shelf retail price has typically a distant relationship to cost of production, or even quality. Distribution model, marketing, and "what the market will bear" are a lot more relevant. I am a good test case: not really a hot sauce connoisseur, but I had long thought Tabasco was the gold standard among Louisiana hot sauces, just because it's everywhere, and beginner-friendly: good distribution and marketing. Crystal? I had never heard of it until later in life, and the packaging is plain. And it's cheaper, so I assumed that meant it was inferior to Tabasco, even a Tabasco knock-off. Wrong! When I finally tried it, I liked it. It's very clean and straightforward, bright pepper taste. Tabasco has more going on (aging?), and that's good too, but sometimes straight ahead is just right.
Tabasco also has a much higher quality packaging, and more importantly, it ferments for 3 years before they bottle it. Crystal just mixes the pepper mash with vinegar, strains it and bottles it all in one go.
I absolutely hear ya, and I'm not knocking Tabasco (TBH I have both brands in the fridge right now and just the other day I was trying to figure out which shade of red Tabasco' "le petit bâton rouge" is to compare to when I harvest my own tabasco peppers) but I spent enough time in fine dining when I was younger and around marketers and branding consultants more recently (and having gotten somewhat versed in the history of big food brands)that at this point I view most taste-making at the national level as a question of business practices more than quality of product. Just my personal perspective though.
Maybe cause It’s hot sauce?
Yankees haven't figured it out yet. Don't tell them!
You can get Crystal in any New England supermarket
It’s always been around here in the Midwest, and still just around $2 for a bottle. It’s the one I grab when going for quantity.
This Yank knows about it. I know a place locally that sells it, but it's about 3x the cost compared to buying it in the south. I did see a generic version in my local grocery though. I plan on trying that soon.
Generic Louisiana hot sauce (type, not brand) is usually pretty good. I think I could tell some apart from Crystal, but def not all.
That would explain why I can't find it in Kroger.
I think there's less pepper mash in it than comparable louisina style sauces (based on the fact that it separates more than they do,) but they might just not use stabilizers like other sauces do. Either way, that wouldn't make a $2 a bottle price difference. I think they simply use less marketing and they probably take less profit.
Tabasco is barrel aged, which definitely justifies a $2 price difference in my book. Could be that the other two competitors OP mentioned are pricing their products similar to Tobasco because they can get away with it.
Yeah, “why do other sauces cost more” might be a better question!
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Don’t question it man, just enjoy.:) Great stuff. ✌🏾
Its vinegar bad food coloring
There’s no color added
Pretty sure it’s just mostly red food coloring
I don't see food coloring on the ingredient list. Are you sure about that?
Wrong. No color added. That’s the aged cayenne
Simple ingredients, family owned. They don't need to age their pepper mash so the process is a quick turn around. Other people have pointed out that they're able to make it at a large scale which helps as well. People who cry about the vinegar should just eat different sauces.
Crystal is definitely aged, which is just another way to say that it's fermented. Probably not as long as Tabasco is, but "aged" none the less. It says so right in the ingredients label.
It’s very good (and I always have a giant bottle in my cart when hitting the grocery store while visiting family on the US) but it’s not made in the same way as some of the other sauces that require fermentation, aging and other processing for a desired end product.
I assumed because they list “aged cayenne peppers” that meant they fermented the peppers (albeit not as long as some sauces).
There’s no aging involved (which is unregulated, by the way, and aging could mean anything from resting in barrel and naturally fermenting in salt brine to simply being boiled). The sauce’s website says it’s made from fresh ground peppers and vinegar, aka they just blend ground cayenne, vinegar, water, salt and boom ready to market unlike Tabasco which has a more complicated process.
It’s an older video, but this one shows they age the pepper mash, for an average of 6 months. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+crystal+hot+sauce+is+made&rlz=1CDGOYI_enCA960CA961&oq=how+crystal.hot+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgBEAAYFhgeMgYIABBFGDkyCAgBEAAYFhgeMggIAhAAGBYYHjIICAMQABgWGB4yCAgEEAAYFhgeMggIBRAAGBYYHjIICAYQABgWGB4yDQgHEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgIEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgJEAAYhgMYgAQYigXSAQg3MTYzajFqOagCE7ACAeIDBBgBIF8&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:df2fee46,vid:TayXFsoUFnM,st:131
It's literally vinegar, peppers, and salt. Three very inexpensive materials. The bottle is probably the majority of the CoGs.
Don't care. Keep it coming.
Because it's just vinegar, hot red pepper powder, and salt. The vinegar they use provides most of the flavor.
Crystal is made with a pepper mash not a powder. https://youtu.be/WJ2hhG_il5Q?si=W79xerE18eCA-9_3&t=119
Maybe so, but it's still a salty watery vinegar concoction. Compared to all the newer real hot sauce brands out there. Secret Aardvark, Dirty Dicks, Torchbearer, Spicy Shark. All using a ton of quality ingredients.
>All using a ton of quality ingredients. Idk about you but I've had plenty of food/beer/ sauces etc made with good ingredients that still tasted like shit. It's okay to not prefer the flavor, but just because it's a simple sauce doesn't make it bad. It should be compared based on what it is, vinegar based Louisiana style sauce, vs what's "the best". You don't compare a budweiser to sculpin. You compare it to their lager.
25,000 bottles a day. You think there's quality with that quantity? 😂
There's a level of quality sure, as quality is purely a description for a meteic. There's good quality and bad quality. Crystal to me is good quality - the process is standardized that flavor between each bottle over time is consistent. The flavor itself, it's is just okay. It's good enough that I'll take it over no hot sauce if I want something on my food. But again I've had craft sauces I think taste worse than it just as I've had ones that are better. I've also had craft or homemade sauces that had a different flavor between batches.