Small Business: Turning up the heat with Apostle Hot Sauce

Apostle Hot Sauce utilises unique Kiwi ingredients as part of their blends, including combinations such as Kiwifruit and Kawakawa Verde. Photo / Alexanders Art Agency

Mathew Watkins, co-founder of Apostle Hot Sauce, talks to Tom Raynel about how the company uses Kiwi ingredients, and the growing bespoke hot sauce market.

What is Apostle Hot Sauce?

We make really delicious, interesting flavoured condiments. We have a big focus on the design of flavours, textures and colours from the inside of the bottle to the outside. It’s like a reflection that the content is going to be as delightful as the exterior with the packaging.

We put as much effort into the packaging as we do into the actual product itself, which differentiates us from a lot of other places as well.

What inspired you to start the business?

I always liked cooking food and making interesting things, and I always made my own sauces and spice mixes. How it started was I would make them and share them with neighbours and other people I knew. Then when we moved from Wellington City to Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast, there was a monthly market that was hosted on the first Saturday of every month.

I was in a bit of a down-depressive spot at that point and so Lydia (Harfield, co-founder) forced me to go to the market and make something. So I brought along some of the ones that I used to make for myself and they went really, really well.

Then Lydia always wanted to work for herself and I was in a position where I was like, well, we have nothing to lose, so we worked together on starting it as a brand. It took us a year and a half to get started and then we launched in December 2019.

Apostle Hot Sauce co-founders Mathew Watkins and Lydia Harfield, alongside trusty brand ambassador Ben. Photo / Alexanders Art Agency

What goes into your hot sauces?

I love trying new food and we both love different cultures and trying new things. So we thought what if we fused a few of these things with locally available ingredients? We try to represent some of the different flavours that are available in New Zealand, so an example of that is our Kiwifruit and Kawakawa Verde.

Another one is our mole sauce, they’re intense and they’ve got an enormous spice list and it’s an incredibly rich but savoury flavour and no one made anything like it.

It took months and months trying to get that recipe down, and then formulate it into a chipotle/mole hybrid because people have an idea of what a chipotle sauce is. I wanted to use a native wood that has a delicious smoke flavour to it, so mānuka was an obvious choice because it’s so floral and earthy, very subtly but in a really delicious way.

You have very unique artwork on your bottles, tell us more about that.

A lot of other hot sauce brands when we first started seemed to love massive manmade catastrophes and the devil. We felt like what’s the polar opposite of that thematically, characteristically and identity-wise, and it was Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox saints, Irish illuminated manuscripts and Tarot de Marseilles and their representations.

If you’re an art history person, the church is incredible, the most incredible works you could ever see, and it puts us in a pretty good position in terms of inspiration because we’ve got 2000 years of works to draw from. We found an artist called Juju on Instagram and we were just like, oh, we’ll just send her a message she’ll probably never get back to us, and then she did.

We gave her quite an intensive brief for each individual artwork, what it had to show, and what it couldn’t show. With iconography, especially religious iconography, each saint is known for particular things. It might be items or symbols or maybe it has a part of their background or story or what their patronage might be.

She takes a lot of care and we go back and forth and she gives us just a really basic like line drawing, and then we colour it and do all of that additional design stuff ourselves. Lydia is a graphic designer, so she does all the colouring and everything and makes sure every single element is in its right spot and sends the right message.

Based in Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast, Mathew Watkins and Lydia Harfield had a shared love of trying new foods and combinations. Photo / Alexanders Art Agency

How has the market changed since shows like Hot Ones have become popular?

I think that’s definitely part of it for us, but I think the way people market and create products has changed a lot, especially since the pandemic. It was good for us because we’d started right before it.

We got noticed by a few more people during that period because a lot of people were suddenly eating at home and realised they didn’t know how to cook. People started looking at condiments, spice mixes and sauce brands, and they became more interested.

What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs?

For us in particular we had nothing to lose, so we were really passionate about wanting to make a good product rather than starting a business that was going to pay for our ability to sort of live and ideally survive.

If you’re really passionate about making a thing, then you’re gonna do that regardless. If you’re really passionate about just starting a business and making money, you’re gonna do that regardless. The difference is going to be in the product that you end up producing.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.