It’s fine and all that Americans eat so much Mexican food, in all sorts of plates and cans and buffets and microwaveable trays, but they’re smart, too. They could have easily just stayed with the food and left it at that—but they’ve also incorporated the Mexican love of the hot stuff: salsa, from red-colored water to lava capable of dissolving concrete.
Those salsas are at Serrano’s on an early, blazing Sunday August morning in Austin. It’s a beautiful restaurant, sectioned off into a main dining room, a large patio, and a clubhouse toward the back that’s attracting a parade of people. These are no mere eaters; a solemn, important task awaits them: the tasting and judging of salsa.
The occasion is the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival, one of the oldest and largest in the United States. Every year, thousands of people head to Waterloo Park, right in downtown Austin, within walking distance of Serrano’s, with a view of Darrell K. Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, to hear music, feast on food, and bake on the prickly lawn of the trodden park. But the most popular draw to the fiesta, naturally, is the salsa. In tents better suited to a Pentecostal revival, long lines of people crawl down rows of tables and taste the salsa before them. Green salsas and red ones. Some spiked with fruit, others with tomatillo, pepper, and little else. Hot sauce and pepper sauce. Chunky, mild, scorching, bland. Smaller booths ring the main tent, barking out deals on T-shirts and salsa bottles, but the majority of the action is in those big tents: the people’s winner will emerge from here.
The juried competition begins at Serrano’s clubhouse. A good thirty or so food critics and restaurateurs, farmers and businessmen, Texans and a couple of stray Californians (who get teased about their state’s strange interpretations of spicy condiments—this is the land of TexMex, after all) sit at a table with high-backed wooden chairs, a setting better suited for war negotiations, which is exactly what’s about to happen.
They divide themselves into groups of four. On another table stand dozens of salsas in various containers: Tupperware, bottles, jars. Dozens more appear every fifteen minutes, brought in by a brigade of volunteers. Each group of judges gets a batch of entries, broken into categories (green, red, hot sauce, other). If three people like a particular salsa, the entry moves on to the second round; if three people don’t like it, it joins the losers’ table, which starts piling up like Longhorn defenders on a fumble.
Baskets of chips lay on all tables, along with water pitchers. The judges are ruthless. “I can tell liquid smoke from a mile away,” an older man remarks, referring to artificial flavoring that amateur chefs use to bypass hours of cooking in an effort to re-create the magical tang of smokiness. His lips curl after tasting one of the green-salsa entrants. Its sickly hue and fuzzy consistency are akin to mold. “It’s a shortcut—and shortcuts get you nowhere in salsa except the sink.”
“It’s not that difficult to roast peppers and tomatoes to achieve natural smokiness,” adds another judge, munching through a bright-orange mango salsa, fruity yet fierce, that passes on to the next round.
Another dips a chip into a frothy number, takes a taste, and grimaces. “This isn’t even a gazpacho,” she says, spitting it out.
There’s lobbying, laughing, gasps of glee, groans of disgust. Whenever entries arrived in tubs, snickers inevitably arose about the big ego of the entrant—this, in Austin, in Texas, where large egos are required by state law. Salsa begins staining the tablecloths, the shirts and pants and skirts of judges; no one notices. The difference between a winning and a losing salsa can be a misplaced Serrano pepper, too much tomato. Some of the better salsas were milder than vanilla, yet exhibited a well-rounded symphony among heat, citrus, and other flavors. Some of the hottest salsas were the most loathed, not because the judges feared scorchers but because there was no depth other than heat—“If all I want is fire,” quips one lady, “I’d put out my cigarette on my tongue, then throw in Tabasco.”
Then Robb Walsh strolls into the chaos. He helped create the hot-sauce festival back in the 1980s, back when he first defended the merits of Tex-Mex in the Chronicle’s pages. He’s a large man, bearded and Falstaffian, with a booming voice, the archetypal Texas gentleman, respectful but boastful, and he thanks the judges, reminding them of the importance of their duty. Later in the day, Walsh and a second round of judges will do the heavier lifting of determining the official winners from those that are currently passing.
“Hello…” Walsh begins, but notices no one pays attention. “Hey, y’all!” he drawls. That’s better—the room snaps to attention and erupts in applause. “Welcome one and all. We’re eating hot sauce already—hallelujah!”
He notices the stacks of the approved. “These are the yeses?” he asks a volunteer. She nods; Walsh smiles and grabs a tub. “I need something for my eggs.”
How to make your food taste better with a tasty sauce: it’s been a conundrum in this country for centuries. Ketchup, mustard, and mayo were the classic answers, with a trail of others following. But at some point in your American life, you must have heard the following truism: salsa is now the top-selling condiment in this country, even more than ketchup. It’s partly true: salsa does bring in more revenue for companies than ketchup, $462.3 million to $298.9 million in 2007, according to one research firm. But ketchup moved more units, and Americans purchased more of it in raw volume than its Mexican cousin by far, 329.8 million pounds to 184.6 million pounds.1
It doesn’t matter: the legend has become fact. “Here’s a fact about American life that may illustrate as much as any census finding,” NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon stated in his clipped, stentorian voice one February morning in 1992, as sales figures released earlier that year disclosed the country’s new normal. “Salsa—as in picante, enchilada, and taco sauce, English for salsa—now outsells ketchup in the United States.”2 People repeat this as an article of faith and amazement—how is it that something so un-American, so Mexican, now outsells ketchup, that condiment as American as chili?
Such thoughts ignore the obvious: the world has loved the heat of Mexican food ever since its first encounter with it. It was the promise of peppery spice that drove Columbus across the Atlantic. It was the salsas of the Aztecs that captivated the Catholic Spaniards with their hellish temptation. It was the many capsicums traded across the globe after the Conquest that changed world cuisine, arguably more than any other food from the Americas besides the tomato.
Salsa’s dominance in the American cupboard, then, was inevitable. Commercial hot sauce in this country has existed since at least the 1800s, and became popular in the 1860s with the rise of Tabasco Hot Sauce, which is Mexican only in the appropriation of the name of the Mexican state and the pepper. It wasn’t until the 1880s, however, that commercial American producers marketed their sauces as explicitly Mexican, under the name “chili colorow,” a mangling of chile colorado, Spanish for the red peppers used to create salsa. The term was popular enough that one packager, William Railton of Chicago, tried to trademark it to corner the market; the U.S. Trademark Office declined. Many American cookbooks, meanwhile, offered recipes for hot sauce under many names, both in Mexican cookbooks and collections written by women’s groups. By 1908, the Ortega Company of Los Angeles canned salsa under the name “Tru Salsa” and sold it across the American Southwest; a competitor, Santa Ysabel, offered its concoction under the name Salsa Pura (“Pure Salsa”).
But salsa’s march to American dominance didn’t start in earnest until 1947, when a transplant to San Antonio discovered what the company he formed still calls the “syrup of the Southwest.” David Pace was a son of Monroe, Louisiana, born into a syrup-producing family that expected him to continue the family business. World War II took him to the Alamo City, and here Pace espied Mexican-style hot sauce for the first time: not relishy like most salsa, but concentrated into a thick liquid and not as vinegary as American-style hot sauces. Intrigued by the business opportunities, especially for Anglos such as he reticent to indulge in the hot stuff Mexican restaurants offered, Pace figured he’d bottle his own concoction, call it “picante sauce” (picante being the Spanish word for “spicy”), and stock it in grocery stores.
The original picante sauce wasn’t much, more pureed tomato than pepper. In a city such as San Antonio, where Mexican families and restaurants made their own salsas at home, the public met picante sauce with indifference. Luckily for Pace, the country was preparing to love the taco.
Tacos are delicious things, but they demand a condiment. Mexicans have always drizzled salsa on their tacos, but the condiment’s fiery nature wasn’t yet ready for American palates. Mexican food in this country has been, if anything, eminently mutable to match demand, so some wily businessman concocted “taco sauce”: salsa shorn of its heat. It was first marketed in 1948 by the Mountain Pass Canning Company, an El Paso firm that turned it into the name we know it by today: Old El Paso. It’s biggest competitor was La Victoria, created by the Banda family of Los Angeles in 1917 but not entering the national scene until 1951, when German immigrant Henry C. Tanklage assumed control. He switched the focus of La Victoria from the Mexican market to the American market, taming his company’s offerings to ensure that Americans who were just familiarizing themselves with tacos didn’t scorch themselves.
Tanklage expanded La Victoria across the United States, with many imitators following. Like Taco Bell, taco sauce served as a gateway to hook people into moving on to something stronger. Back in Texas, Pace kept at it with his picante sauce, content with making a profit and with no real dreams to expand farther than the Lone Star State. There just wasn’t a need—taco sauce largely fulfilled America’s Mexican condiment needs, whether in a taco or on a combo plate.
As late as 1977, the Washington Post still felt the need to describe salsa to readers as “a piquant relish used extensively with Mexican foods.”3 But the 1980s saw the exponential ascendancy of salsa in the American market, a rise so sudden that American food companies were caught off guard and forced to play catch-up. It just wasn’t the continued immigration of Mexicans into the United States or even the spread of Chi-Chi’s (which bottled its own salsa and sold it commercially starting in the 1970s): that decade saw the rise of an informed American gastronome more accepting of ethnic flavors than ever before, and willing to replicate them at home. Also important, however, was the health-food craze, which took to salsa like aerobics: in the freshness of a proper salsa—its many vegetables, the low use of sodium, the lack of preservatives—was a reflection of a lifestyle. Its enlivening taste was almost beside the point: here was a new condiment, one much better than sodium-and sugar-heavy ketchup. “The business exploded when the hippies came along,” Pace told reporters years later. “No question but this health stuff made the whole category explode.”4
The trendiness of salsa convinced bigger players to enter the market. Campbell’s Soup introduced their own line; even Chesebrough-Pond’s, most famous as the manufacturers of Vaseline, debuted Montera salsa in 1983 with a $20 million advertising campaign larger than Pace’s profits that year. The company, however, was unfazed. “We just have to keep up our quality,” remarked Kit Goldsbury, son-in-law to David Pace, as the big boys invaded Texas.5
And they did. In 1979, only Goldsbury and Pace worked the day-to-day operations of the company. Under the guidance of Pace’s daughter, Linda, and her husband, Goldsbury, the company strategized to further their sales and reach. They added other flavors—mild, hot, and thick and chunky—to expand from the classic picante-sauce recipe. Pace created special-order six-pack containers, urging purchasers to “send someone the taste of Texas.”6 The company also secured a contract with the armed forces as the military’s salsa provider, ensuring a customer base that sought the stuff upon returning from their stint.7 By the mid-1980s, Pace became America’s top-selling hot sauce, a position it has rarely relinquished since.
As Pace succeeded, so did its competitors. The Southwestern food movement also encouraged people to experiment with fruit salsas, sweet salsas—anything involving tomatoes and heat. Even Heinz entered the salsa game, since its own numbers showed the market was taking over the country; in 1988, 16 percent of American households purchased salsa; by 1992, a third of the country did.8 That was the year when analysts surmised that salsa became America’s top-selling condiment; one reporter called the victory over ketchup “the manifest destiny of good taste.”9 And in the ultimate indicator of its victory, Campbell’s bought out Pace for $1.15 billion in 1994 after years of courtship, a move and a price that sparked national headlines. The Pace paterfamilias did stick around long enough to see his company dominate the market. “In ’47, my sauce bottles exploded all over the grocery shelves because I couldn’t get the darned formula right,” Pace told the New York Times a year before his death in December 1993. “It just tickles me to see [salsa sellers] take the ball and run with it.”10
His legacy remained with the company, most notably in a memorable television campaign launched in 1995 to push Pace into the New York tristate area for the first time. Incredibly, Pace had reaped millions of dollars in revenue from selling mostly in the Southwest and hadn’t yet penetrated the rest of the country. Company execs gingerly tested their product for a national audience in the form of commercials that tweaked all the Johnny-come-latelys who had followed in Pace’s wake.11
In the ad, cowboys sit around a campfire. One of them spoons the last chunk of Pace’s sauce and asks the cook for more “picante sauce,” pronouncing it with the nasal a of a Chicagoan, garbling his Spanish so the word sounded like “pecany.” The white-haired cook tosses him another brand. “This ain’t Pace Picante sauce!” the younger cowboy exclaims.
“What’s the difference?” the coot mumbles. The younger cowboy launches into a soliloquy extolling Pace Picante, most importantly because it’s “made in San Antonio … by people know what picante sauce is supposed to taste like!”
Another cowboy reads the alien sauce’s label. “This stuff’s made in New York City?!” he exclaims.
“New York City?” everyone yells, now surrounding the old cook. The commercial ends with another young buck looking directly into the camera, deadpanning, “Get a rope.”
It played for laughs, but the Pace commercial also served as a powerful allegory. Gone were the days of taco sauce masquerading as authentic Mexican salsa. Americans expected heat and authenticity, even if its producers were Americans. Pace’s commercials became wildly popular, helping the company earn record profits. And across the country, other salsa-savvy entrepreneurs dreamed.
There are no indicators that the Tapatío Hot Sauce company is based in the industrial city of Vernon, California, until you walk into their small lobby. Save for the poster that screams “Tapatío WANTED” in the style of Old West outlaw posters, a fake chile plant featuring ripe peppers, and a place mat with the company’s name on it, its lobby looks more like the waiting area of a dentist’s office. That medicinal appearance carries over when Luis Saavedra opens the door to greet a guest. Tall, bespectacled, with a mustache and the personality of a children’s librarian, Saavedra wears a lab coat and carries a notepad. “Welcome to our factory!” he exclaims before entering a conference room where bottles are stacked against the wall and artwork featuring their bottles hang—four pastel-colored Tapatío bottles à la Warhol, on posters, on mouse pads, in promotional literature.
His sister Jacquie walks in, followed by the patriarch: José-Luis Saavedra, also wearing a lab coat and with heavy glasses. Though in his early eighties, he has hair that is movie-star thick and only now graying. José-Luis’s gravitas is unquestioned—he sits at the head of the table, his children looking toward him at all times, following his cues and laughing at his jokes. He insists on speaking in accented, though impeccable, English: Ricardo Montalban comes to mind—that is, if Montalban wasn’t a Latin lover but instead a rough-hewn scrapper like Saavedra carries himself.
Saavedra starts talking about the logo for his company, immediately familiar to lovers of Mexican food. It’s a charro—a Mexican cowboy—wearing a yellow riding jacket; a red handkerchief tied around his neck; a helmet of brown hair; a thick, though not obnoxiously bushy, mustache; and a sombrero with arabesque stitching snaking around the brim. The illustration is proportioned so that the hat is as large as the charro’s torso, but this isn’t another stock bandito caricature. The Tapatío man is smiling, proud, exuding mexicanidad.
“This is a real Mexican,” Saavedra states emphatically. “We started to represent the charro like a human being instead of a cartoon.”
If there is a trusted brand among Mexicans for their hot sauce, it’s Tapatío—assertive, thick but smooth, immediately peppery, chiles reduced to their fiery essence. It’s not as big a seller as Pace or any of the other brands trotted out by multinationals in the past decade—Tostitos, Herdez, Newman’s Own, and many more. Tapatío, however, is a family-run Mexican operation, a company that doesn’t release sales figures but is ubiquitous in Mexican homes, and increasingly in American homes—and it’s only beginning to become a national brand.
Saavedra was born in 1929 in Mexico City, moving to Chicago in 1954. With a background in accounting and sales, he found work proofreading for a magazine geared toward doctors in Latin America. But Saavedra didn’t enjoy the Windy City’s harsh weather and moved to Los Angeles in 1957. Chicago had a large Mexican population but not so much that jobs were at a premium for a Mexican male; in Southern California, center of the Mexican diaspora in the United States, Saavedra’s skills relegated him to sweeping floors at a manufacturing plant.
Saavedra’s pride didn’t allow such a station; within a couple of months he switched to an office job at the same company, using that position to move up with another corporation to head their shipping and receiving. His job took him far from the catering trucks that fed most of working-class Los Angeles at the time, and Saavedra didn’t have much of a taste for the Mexican-American restaurants and fast-food taco stands then in vogue. Instead, he brought homemade lunches to work, always packing a bottle of hot sauce from a recipe he concocted while growing up in Mexico. Saavedra’s coworkers asked for some; it was such a hit that they suggested he cook up a batch for everyone. The year was 1971.
Mass-produced hot sauce had yet to penetrate American cupboards, and Saavedra visited stores to see who his competition might have been. He found taco sauce “nothing to worry about” and was only able to find two others: an unnamed Mexican brand and Tabasco, which he cryptically refers to as “the Louisiana sauce. There was no real Mexican sauce on the market.” After the company he worked for shut down, he had another impetus toward making commercial hot sauce. Saavedra rented a kitchen in the city of Maywood, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, for sixty-five dollars a month, a cubbyhole twenty feet long and twelve feet wide, with three tables to chop peppers, a sink to wash them, and a hundred-gallon tank to create the hot sauce. He turned a meat grinder into a red-pepper grinder, and chopped all the peppers with the help of two part-time workers and his children—on weekends during the school year, and all week during summer vacation. Saavedra did everything else, even gluing labels onto the bottles and screwing on caps late into the early morning.
He produced a couple of boxes and named it Cuervo Sauce, with its logo the modern-day Tapatío man, but with a crow’s head (cuervo means crow in Spanish) instead of a human. Saavedra tried to stock it in small stores in Southern California’s Mexican neighborhoods, but “no one wanted to buy it. People still made their own salsas. It was hell for the first five years.”
His wife and friends urged him to quit, but the stubborn Saavedra refused, even mortgaging his home to secure a four-thousand-dollar loan to continue the business. “I continued because I knew I was going to have success,” he says. “When, on the other hand, I didn’t know.” On top of all this, Saavedra received a cease-and-desist letter from José Cuervo, the manufacturers of tequila, whose founding family were distant relatives of Saavedra’s wife. Saavedra flew to Mexico City to negotiate with the Cuervos, offering to sell his hot-sauce recipe to them; they refused, wanting only that he stop using their name. He dropped the name and the crow’s head from his logo but didn’t have enough money to create a brand-new theme. Instead, he found a stock image of a Mexican man and affixed it to the old Cuervo logo. Saavedra thought of naming his new business Charro Sauce, but instead chose Tapatío in 1974 to honor his children’s birthplace: Guadalajara, Jalisco, whose residents go by the nickname tapatíos.
“It has charisma and phonetically it sounds good,” he says.
“Even when people mispronounce it,” his daughter interjects, “it sounds good.”
But Saavedra is savvier than he lets on. Southern California has received hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Jalisco for more than a century. Calling his new hot sauce Tapatío was a genius ploy that ensured Saavedra almost instant success upon starting anew in 1975. Buying a bottle didn’t merely satisfy taste for customers, but also a longing for cultural validation.
“The name has appeal to them,” he grudgingly admits. “You appeal to the Jaliscans, you immediately have an audience. One bottle is like a walking billboard for us.”
Tapatío started with five-ounce bottles, graduating to ten-ounce versions in 1988, thirty-two-ounce monsters a year later, gallon-sized buckets in 1999, and seven-ounce packets in 2000 that allowed them to become beloved components of the MREs of military personnel, just like a previous generation enjoyed tiny bottles of Tabasco to mask the flavor of their provisions. But their expansion plans aren’t just limited to the size of their containers, or even multisized versions of their sauce. In 2010, the Saavedras entered into an agreement with Kraft for food service distribution, ensuring that Tapatío enters even more markets as part of the American condiment giant’s galaxy of ketchup, mayo, and salsa. Kraft had commissioned a marketing study asking what condiments people preferred; so many mentioned Tapatío, which shocked the company because officials had never heard of it, that they requested a meeting with the Saavedras. In 2011, they also entered into a partnership with Frito-Lay to produce Tapatío-flavored chips (Fritos, Doritos, Ruffles, and Lay’s) that didn’t require the Saavedras to give up their recipe and also gave them final say over the finished product. “It is a blessing that others want to make our company grow,” José-Luis says, “but it’s our company. Expansion, yes, but not at the loss of our honor.”
José-Luis has assumed a smaller role in his august years, delegating most of the responsibilities to his children, but he still shows up to work every day and “we all report to him,” says Jacquie. Jacquie is the office manager. Another sister does the legal work, while their children work at the factory during the summer, as they did in their youth. They all work out of Tapatío’s facilities, a thirty-thousand-square-foot factory and warehouse they constructed in 1996 that is starting to feel crowded.
“We’ve seen other brands cut on the quality—their bottle of five years ago isn’t the same today,” Luis says. “We want adults to remember the same flavor they first experienced as five-year-old kids. It’s not just a hot sauce. It’s a table sauce. It goes with everything. It’s an international flavor. Tabasco is like Big Ben. We’re a Swiss watch.”
The heat. That quick tweak of the tongue, followed by a rush of endorphins, a splash of sweat. Salsa and hot sauce are addicting—they make men enter competitions to see who can eat the most, drive them to spend tens of thousands of dollars just for the privilege of saying that they, too, can make hot stuff like a Mexican, even if it doesn’t earn them a profit. Lynyrd Skynyrd have a brand, as do Patti LaBelle and Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony; there’s even Joe Perry’s Rock Your World Hot Sauce. Cheech Marin makes a pretty peso with his line of salsas. And the late Paul Newman—Cool Hand Luke!—made a mint on best-selling, quite delicious Newman’s Own salsa, the label featuring the Oscar winner wearing a sombrero, a thick mustache, and a smile.
But the best celebrity Mexican-style hot sauce of them all comes from Dexter Holland, rhythm guitarist and singer for the iconic punk band the Offspring, and owner of Gringo Bandito. Everything about it seems to scream “clueless gabacho,” a cheap publicity ploy. The sauce’s name, of course. The logo—the blond, spiky-haired, fair-skinned Holland bedecked in bandoliers, revolvers, sombrero, and shades—that apes a bandito, the Mexican archetype that has intrigued and terrorized Americans since the days of Pancho Villa. The promotional pictures on the sauce’s Web site—Gringo Bandito superimposed on the Virgin of Guadalupe, standing next to a Chihuahua statue, being poured on an unsuspecting drunk—look like slides from a frat-boy visit to Puerto Vallarta.
“I hope you enjoy the adventurous flavor and tingling tantalization of my not-so-famous pepper sauce,” Holland explains on the Web site in a half-serious, mostly mocking tone reminiscent of carnival medicine men. “For over two years, I have searched far and wide for the perfect combination of spices to make your next dining experience a zinger. And I tried to make it easy on the pooper, too. Try it on tacos, burritos, eggs, pizza—it’s like a party in your mouth. I personally guarantee it.”
But what started as a joke is becoming an unlikely success story. Gringo Bandito is now available at grocery stores across the United States; in health-food markets and at taco stands; in dozens of restaurants across Orange County—and increasingly, the Southwest. Warped Tour used the sauce in 2009 during catering, and Metallica takes it on tour. It won two Scovie Awards in 2009, one of the longest-running hot-sauce contests in the country, for its recipe: flavorful but not salty, like too many commercial hot sauces, packing proper but not hellish heat, with chile seeds left intact and no preservatives to muck up its charms. Gringo Bandito isn’t selling at Tapatío levels yet, still largely a Southern California phenomenon, and Holland hasn’t left his day job recording with the Offspring—but then again, Smash was supposed to be a local indie release and ended up selling 16 million records. And Holland hopes—knows—his product’s best days are just beginning.
Holland understands, even appreciates, the bewilderment most people feel about the idea of a gabacho, a punker, a kid from Orange County selling his own brand of the manna of Mexican food. “I realize the inherent contradiction,” he says. “It’s unlikely. It’s unexpected. It was wrong to make it, and that’s the fun of it. It’s a challenge.”
Between recording and touring with the Offspring early last decade, Holland experimented with different blends of hot sauces at his house—just him, some knives and pots, a cutting board, and a stove. He relied on a master’s degree in molecular biology from the University of Southern California to determine how to make hot sauce smoother, how to bring out certain flavors, but mostly he relied on trial and error. Once Holland was completely satisfied with a batch, he poured it into bottles and handed them out to workers at his Nitro Records label as a gag Christmas present in 2005.
“They came up to me after tasting it and said, ‘Dude, this is good,’” he says. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. ‘No, we’re serious. We’re addicted to it.’ I thought they were just being polite.” But once workers finished Holland’s hot sauce, they asked when the next batch was coming.
“That’s when I realized I might have something,” he says. “From there, we just went with it. ‘I need a label—hey, it’d be funny if I dressed up like Pancho Villa, how silly would that look?’ And then the name—someone said ‘gringo,’ someone rhymed it with ‘bandito.’ Then someone else suggested we should sell it, and it just clicked.”
Helping him run the operation is Florencia Arriaga, a stout woman with stylish eyeglasses who says with a laugh, “My kids are very proud that their mommy works for the guy from the Offspring.” Arriaga is the quality-control director for Hungry Punker Inc., the official company that produces Gringo Bandito. More than anyone working for Gringo Bandito, she’s the least surprised at its existence. “I’ve been seeing Dexter eat for more than ten years,” says a family friend. “My God, he loves salsa! I would always see him tasting different salsas, looking at them, studying them. Eventually I would hear him say, ‘I want to make salsa. Will you help me?’ Of course. Over the years, I’d tease him—‘So when are we going to start?’ He’d always say he’s too busy. Finally, one day, he asked me, ‘I want to make a salsa. Can you help me?’ Of course!”
In 2009, Holland stopped giving away bottles to restaurants; most continue to carry it because of demand. “It’s nice to have a hobby, but it’s nicer if it can turn a profit,” he says. “I probably should’ve started a clothing company, something that made more sense. I should’ve picked something that sells for more than two bucks per bottle. But we do it because we love it. It’s just fun.”
“My nephews in Mexico say, ‘Gringos don’t eat chile,’” Arriaga says. “Oh, this one does.”