In the 17 years since Jean-René “JR” Marion concocted his very first hot sauce, what’s a key lesson he’s learned?
“Keep it simple,” he advised. “That’s the essence of a great product to sell.”
That tip has served him well in his progression from a home-based experimentalist serving sauces to family and friends to an international seller of a dozen different products.
Marion shared his entrepreneurial journey during a March 11 webinar hosted by Link North, an initiative of the Timmins Economic Development Corporation, as part of its Agri-business Knowledge Camp series.
A welder by trade, Marion moved to Timmins from Quebec in 2002 to take a job in the mining industry.
While harvesting his backyard garden one day, he realized the bell peppers he thought he’d planted were actually the ghost and scorpion varieties — among the world’s hottest.
Not knowing what else to do with them, Marion, an enthusiastic home chef who’s a lifelong adherent of gardening and preserving, decided to experiment with a batch of hot sauce, later dubbed JR’s Ka-Boom.
But it was while on dinner break at the mine, when his coworkers started tasting and loving his hot sauce, that Marion realized he might have something worth marketing.
“I was lucky because I had a trial group at the mine. So, 600 grown men, 600 coworkers, 600 guys that will tell me if it's good or not,” Marion said. “They won't lie to me. They'll just go straight to the point: this is terrible or this is great.”
Marion took the plunge into entrepreneurship about seven years ago, learning everything he could about how to turn his side project into a business: JR’s Hot Sauce.
That included meeting the stringent food prep requirements of the highly regulated food industry. He needed approval from the local health unit, had to set up a certified kitchen, and submitted his sauce for testing at a lab approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to prove the product was shelf stable.
He also had to learn how to sell his product to buyers.
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For his first pitch, he turned to the place that helped him start it all — the farmers market where he sourced most of his ingredients — and they agreed to sell it there.
Since then, he’s secured shelf space in stores across Northern Ontario and does a bustling online business, shipping his sauces across Canada and the U.S.
Marion prefers to deal with one store at a time so he can adequately scale the business, mostly keeping to small and medium-sized enterprises.
“I'm a small business, so I like to support small businesses,” he said.
If a store owner doesn’t want to buy right away, Marion will ask for a time to follow up and then shows up on that date, whether it’s two weeks or four months later. More often than not, his persistence pays off.
Once his product is on the shelf, he’ll set up live, in-store sampling demos so customers can taste the sauce and speak with him directly. He can answer questions about ingredients or recipes, directing them to the shelf where they can find his products.
“And 90 per cent of the time, if people stop at my table, they will buy at least one bottle,” Marion said.
With expansion, Marion’s found he’s only able to grow about 60 per cent of the peppers he needs every year to meet demand, so he’s now sourced growers in Montreal and London who specialize in cultivating hot pepper varieties to help fill in the gaps.
He also travels — a lot — to hot sauce expos, farmers markets and other events around the province where he can host demos, meet potential buyers and get more exposure for his brand.
Marion has even sponsored the competitive eating career of Mike Jack, a Canadian spice enthusiast who holds multiple Guinness World Record titles for eating hot peppers. With the JR’s Hot Sauce branding on the back of his T-shirt, Jack helps promote Marion’s products wherever in the world he travels to compete.
More recently, Marion has learned to leverage social media in his favour, regularly posting videos to TikTok. He might show off the plants he’s growing in his greenhouse, pack orders for shipment, or talk about new recipes. He’ll even make a meal featuring his products.
The tactic has worked: Marion said he’s grown his fan base on the popular social media platform to 10,500 followers from 500 in just two months, and the sales have followed.
“I get about 30 orders a week off of TikTok, plus, since. So that's a lot. They're big orders all the time. They're always nine to 15 bottles. They're not small orders.”
Marion knows that, to maintain his success, he has to grow slowly, but there are plans in the works to expand further.
He’s already upgraded his equipment to cut down on production time, and he’s now on the lookout for additional land and growers so he can cultivate more of the ingredients that go into his sauces. His next step will be upgrading to a bigger facility.
All this is happening while Marion and his wife continue to work full-time jobs — with his three kids helping out, too — but Marion said they’re having a great time doing it.
“We get to meet great people with what we do,” he said. “So, we’re having fun at the same time working really hard at what we do.”