Caribbean hot sauce industry catches fire.

• Author: Zehr, Douglas

THEY CALL HIM THE "Peppa Mon" on this eastern outpost of the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the United States, he has a cult following; letters arrive weekly from fans pleading for more of his hot sauce. He's even gotten mail from Hong Kong.

The Pepper Man, or "Peppa Mort," is Bob Kennedy, a U.S. expatriate from New York. He has grown chilies and bottled hot sauces on St. John for two years and last year made five hundred cases of Virgin Fire hot sauce in his kitchen blender and sold it throughout the world.

"I could sell five thousand cases, but I can't produce that right now," Kennedy says. "I'm it--farmer, manufacturer, labeler, bottler, distributor, and delivery boy."

Kennedy is one of the scores of entrepreneurs who have emerged to fill the burgeoning U.S. demand for Caribbean hot sauce.

With the U.S. hot sauce market now hitting $1 billion annually, Kennedy and scores of other sauce sultans have emerged hawking blends from the Caribbean based on habaneros (a particularly fiery chili). And a swelling crowd of chili heads is clamoring for more.

Aficionados say there's more to the Caribbean hot sauce than the heat. Caribbean sauces pack a pungent array of spices and flavors, featuring mango, pineapple, papaya, and other tropical fruits as key ingredients.

"People are not just looking for hotness, but they're looking for flavor too," says Flaurance Voltaire, owner of FoFo's Caribbean, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the 1980s, Voltaire spent two years traveling the islands and studying Caribbean spices.

"You have influences from all over the world--Spanish, African, Indian, American, English, Dutch, and French," Voltaire says. "So you have all those different flavors in there."

Her research complete, Voltaire created a dry seasoning with twenty-eight different Caribbean spices, among them, cumin, lemon grass, garlic, ginger, and Jamaican chilies. She sells them to thirty-five retail stores in New Mexico, South Carolina, North Carolina, and New Jersey.

"My whole thing was what makes island food different and unique," Voltaire says. "You've got the whole Caribbean in one bottle."

As more and more entrepreneurs bottle hot peppers for export to the U.S., the field is getting crowded. That prompted Richard Reiher of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, to develop a niche product.

"Everybody else is making sauces to dump on your food," says Reiher, owner of Virgin Islands Herb & Pepper Company. "Rather than compete with that, I came up with cooking sauces."

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