Hot sauces on fire

Festival promotes family proprietors

The festival Saturday on Main Street will showcase hot and barbecue sauces along with microbrew beers, wines and specialty foods, all produced in-state.

A companion event, Heritage Day, will feature an antique sale, book sale, plant sale and live music.

Bailey Farms is run by Randy Bailey, 39, who began growing hot peppers in 1989 on Oxford farmland that had borne vegetables and strawberries. Bailey also markets jalapeno and red and chocolate habanero hot sauces.

"I called him and said, 'I want your hot sauce here in my store,' " Overton said.

An Oxford native, Overton said she realized the Granville County town 37 miles north of Raleigh lacked a unifying celebration of its history.

"Then I thought: If we're looking for an event, why don't we do a hot-sauce contest?" she said. "So we called the N.C. Department of Agriculture, and they said there wasn't another hot sauce festival in the state. So I asked the folks in Oxford: Why not capitalize on one of our strongest assets?"

Overton found out about Bailey Farms and another hot-sauce maker in town, Tyrone Holmes, through her work as a board member of the N.C. Specialty Foods Association, a networking group of gourmet enthusiasts. Holmes' Spice It Up! sauces will vie with Bailey's brand and about 10 others in several competitions.

A People's Choice award allows festivalgoers to vote for their favorite sauce. The maker who sells the most bottles gets $500. Another $500 will be awarded for Critics' Choice, to be decided by a panel of judges. And a Meet the Heat prize of $500 goes to the creator of the hottest sauce.

Bailey's Farms has experienced tremendous growth since its inception in 1989. That year, according to Bailey, net sales didn't reach $100,000. This year, he said, the company should come close to hitting $30 million.

"In 1989, me and my father did most of the work," he said. "We had just a handful of harvesters. We might have sold 100 cases a week, and we were delivering in pickup trucks. As of last week, we're at 36,000 cases a week."

A hot business

Last year the company outgrew its shop on an Oxford farm and moved into a nearby 30,000-square-foot warehouse. It's mostly a huge cooler where workers sort, stamp and grade peppers such as jalapenos, habaneros, poblanos and Serranos. The temperature hovers at 48 degrees Fahrenheit, so workers dress in hooded sweatshirts and jackets.

The company employs 150 people, from harvesters to office workers. Bailey said the company has grown 30 to 40 percent over the past five years. He attributes that growth partly to the region's influx of Hispanics and partly to people's more sophisticated palates.

Bailey's love for spicy foods was nurtured during childhood, when he went home for dinner with his friend Jose Resendiz, whose family served spicy Mexican fare.

Now, Bailey says: "If I have a burger, I've got to have a jalapeno to go with it. I take a bite of the burger with this hand, and a bite of the jalapeno with the the other one."

Bailey Farms broke into the retail market in 1991 when it expanded from terminal markets, or farmers markets, to Food Lion. In 1997, Bailey Farms began supplying fresh peppers year-round to most major grocers on the East Coast. Now it contracts with 600 acres of farms in Florida, in addition to tending about 120 acres locally. The local harvest season runs from mid-July through September.

Although the The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week lifted a Salmonella Saint Paul advisory for jalapeno and Serrano peppers, Bailey said he sold 20 percent fewer jalapenos, his No. 1 selling pepper, after the outbreak occurred.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later announced that jalapenos and Serrano peppers grown, harvested and packaged in Mexico were to blame for the outbreaks.

"Luckily, we weren't heavy on product," he said. "But since then, sales haven't come back to what they were. For a week, they had everybody on the advisory."

As for the festival, Bailey looks forward to the competition -- and sampling his competitors' sauces.

Last year, Blues BBQ's Habanero Reserve swept the Critics' Choice and People's Choice awards, selling 126 bottles.

That's a lot of capsaicin, the chemical compound responsible for the intense burning sensation peppers bring.

Bailey's remedy?

"Eat something greasy or drink something alcoholic," he said. "The fat in whole milk will help wash the capsaicin away. But beer's my favorite antidote."