10/14/2024
*PLEASE READ – IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT*
Hey everyone! This is Nick, founder and sauce boss at Halogi. We’ve got some news, and it isn’t necessarily great all around. First, before anyone starts worrying too much, we are not closing our doors at Halogi. However, we are going to make some significant changes in the next few months. The short version is that in 2025, we will no longer be selling our sauces in stores or online, and we will only be at events in South Dakota. We will still attend the shows we have already booked, including the 2025 Fiery Foods Fest in March 2025.
Right then, on to the what, why, and when. We are reducing Halogi from a commercial business to a cottage food business again. For those of you who don’t know the story, Halogi started from a father’s day gift and a bunch of hobby-level sauce recipes developed over my life. When friends told me I should sell it, I decided to see where it would go. Within months, I found an amazing business partner in Luke who helped us find a commercial kitchen space. Luke also ran point on booking shows and wholesale, growing Halogi’s footprint into new spaces for more people to enjoy. We saw a boost from our appearance on Hot Ones, and we’ve been growing since then at faster and faster rates. We hit a pivot point where our current space and processes can no longer keep up with our demand, and we started exploring options to take operations to even higher levels. Crazier still, the numbers worked out: it was viable to make this little dream of a hot sauce company become a full-time gig.
That dream would come at a cost, though. Supporting Halogi part-time already requires travel on a couple dozen weekends throughout the year; some events last for four days. To make the numbers work for full time, it meant more events, longer events, and so on. All of this would be on top of hundreds of hours in production. It’s time away from our home. It’s time away from our friends and family. It’s time, and we all only have so much of it to go around.
After a bunch of reflection and discussion, we made the hard choice to scale the business back. We are moving out of our commercial space when our lease ends at the end of January 2025. I will still produce sauce in much smaller batches in my home kitchen to sell at events in South Dakota under cottage food law. If you’re in the area—resident or visitor—and need some sauce, give us a shout and we’ll see what we can work out.
We know this comes as a let down for many of you, and for that, we are truly sorry. This hasn’t been an easy decision in the slightest. We’ve still got plenty of inventory on hand, and we are still making sauce in our commercial space until the lease is up. We are no longer restocking the stores that carry our sauces: once they’re sold out, they’re gone. If you’re interested in buying case quantities, send us a message and we’ll get you sorted.
We want to—no, we *need* to thank all of you: whether you’ve supported us from the very beginning or just stopped by and had fun trying our sauces… thank you. Thank you with every fiber of our being. This has been an incredible journey, and we achieved more than we ever thought possible. It’s because of you that we’ve reached these amazing heights and we are forever grateful beyond what a few words can express. I want to give a few shout outs as well to my business partner Luke for all the incredible work he’s done to build us up; to Dana for keeping the two of us sane on the road and slinging samples like the absolute pro you are (also, everyone should check out Dana Anderson Painting); to Weston for working tirelessly behind the scenes in the kitchen to keep bottles coming; to my parents and siblings for supporting me out of the gate without a second thought; and to Moiria and the kids for always believing in me and supporting me on this adventure.
Also, Idunn’s Apples comes out tomorrow. Oh, and we’ll have another batch of Gunnlod’s Gold to sell online too, once that time of the year rolls around again.
