LIFE, WITH A dash of SPICE
After losing his taste for the highly stressful tech sector, former project manager starts business that fires him up
In the tech mecca that is the Bay Area, it’s not unusual to hear how a project manager broke away from a Silicon Valley company to launch a startup. Scott Zalkind, 49, of Hayward, did just that. He spent nearly 20 years as a project manager for a variety of companies, including Webvan, one of the most infamous of the dot.com busts, as well as Microsoft and Kaiser, but found the high-stress work thankless and taxing.
So Zalkind chose something a bit more spicy. Always in search of a hot sauce with a balance of punchy flavors and kicking heat, Zalkind jumped into the competitive market and developed an award-winning line of hot sauces, made with mostly California-grown ingredients, with deep layers of flavor and zip.
Lucky Dog Hot Sauce, his small-batch, artisanal brand, was launched in 2012 and now moves tens of thousands of bottles of sauce each year. One of his 10 award-winning varieties even nabbed a coveted spot on the web series Hot Ones, a show with millions of subscribers in which celebrities are interviewed while eating progressively spicier chicken wings, melting away layers of conversational pretense.
But Zalkind still works hard, spending most weekends engaging customers and slinging sauce at farmers markets in Oakland and San Rafael with his high-energy style.
Q Where did you come up with the name Lucky Dog?
A My black Labrador border collie mix dog, Lucky. I had him from 2004 until 2018. About six months before I launched, I was struggling to come up with a name. And one day I was playing ball with my dog, and I said, ‘Come here Lucky dog!’ And I thought, ‘Ooh, that’s catchy.’
“I love spicy food. I’m the guy that if you went on vacation and I watched your dog for you, you didn’t bring me back a shot glass, you brought me back a bottle of hot sauce.”
— Scott Zalkind
Q What inspired you to start making your own hot sauces?
A I love spicy food. I’m the guy that if you went on vacation and I watched your dog for you, you didn’t bring me back a shot glass, you brought me back a bottle of hot sauce.
But there was kind of a watershed moment. My friends and I would get together every week or so at Windy City Pizza in Borel Square in San Mateo for pizza and ribs and barbecue, and they had a little hot sauce bar with about 30 or 40 kinds of hot sauce. And every time we’d go there, it was my heaven, I’d grab two or three bottles, and try a couple on each of the pizzas, or brisket or whatever I bought.
But one time, I grabbed a bottle of sauce and poured it on my food and it blew away my face and ruined my dinner and I had to throw it in the trash and buy another dinner, and I was pissed. I thought to myself, ‘That sucks that anything as hot as what I want that’s out there, has capsaicin extract and that’s an awful, metallic flavor.’
About a week after that, a friend gave me a sauce from Cheech Marin’s brand called Gnarly Garlic and the flavor was great. I kind of lost my mind and said, ‘Damn it, why can’t something that tastes good like this have heat.’ And that was it, I was going to make my own hot sauce.
Q How did you start out?
A I started buying garlic and peppers and what was around at the mercados; habaneros and serranos and jalapeños and manzanos, and things like that. And I would take them out to my barbecue, I had an old school Weber with coal, and a saute pan, so I’d grill garlic, and roast peppers, and make the ingredient flavors I wanted, then add them to a kettle and experiment.
Then I researched and learned how to ph balance, how to pasteurize, and how to hot pack. I never had any intention of starting a hot sauce company, I just wanted to make something delicious for myself to eat.
Q How were the results?
A My first few sauces tasted just god awful. They were terrible. I made a lot of fail sauce. But as I got through the process, I took kind of an art and science approach to it. I would picture the profile of flavors I wanted to capture, and the acidity that I thought was a good balance of flavor. And then the scientific approach is getting a really nice scale, measuring every ingredient and gram weight, writing down every note and every recipe and then taking notes on the results, and then tweaking the recipe by tweaking levels of ingredients.
Q What made you want to launch an actual hot sauce business?
A I started giving sauce to friends and bringing bottles to parties and I was getting feedback from friends who said, ‘Hey you really should think about selling this stuff, it’s getting pretty good now.’ And strangers who knew people I gave bottles to were contacting me with positive feedback, too.
Also, I was stressed out of my gourd at my day job. I was sleeping two to three hours a night. Project management is a thankless job. You have 100 bosses and the dependencies are off the charts.
Q How’s your work life now, as a oneman company and working weekend farmers markets?
A I work twice as hard now as I did then for a quarter or an eighth of the pay, but it’s eight years in and I’m not burned out on it. I’m still creating things and I’m still loving what I do. It’s fun to do more with the creative side of my brain. As a project manager, there was a lot of flow-charting and a lot of upward management of executives and massaging egos. I don’t have to do that anymore. But, I’ve missed every wedding, bar mitzvah, death, funeral, birthday, bris, I miss everything. That’s tough. I miss football, I only see a game and a half each week.
Q How do you come up with the flavors for your sauces?
A Inspiration comes from a lot of places. My first three sauces were roasted habanero, jalapeño, and serrano sauces. And then, me being a barbecue guy, I use coal, I like to grill a lot, so I branched out to some smoked sauces.
All my life I’ve loved spicy food, and I thank my parents for that. They were very adventurous eaters. Growing up in the diverse Bay Area, that was a huge thing, we’d all do family dinners and go out, whether it was Szechuan, Hunan, Indian, or Thai, African food, everything.
Versatility is key for me. When I demo out hot sauces, I make a batch, I take it around with me, I eat it on everything and I take notes. How does it play on this, what notes open up?
Q Did getting your Year of the Dog sauce featured on Season 9 of Hot Ones give you a lift in business?
A Hot Ones has definitely helped sales, it’s not quite the windfall people think it is. They order a sizeable amount for their subscription service, but it’s not like winning the lottery. Some guests comment on the sauce, and some don’t. And I got really lucky, where Halle Berry, Schoolboy Q, Kumail Nanjiani, all commented on my sauce, the Jonas Brothers really were effusive in their praise of it. Trevor Noah said it danced on his tongue like Fred Astair, that was the best comment I ever got. When he said that, I got flooded with 30 or 40 web orders.
Q What’s it like to have celebrities compliment your hot sauce?
A No different than if you tell me you like my hot sauce, but millions of people are watching. Halle Berry is a Bond girl. I’ve been in love with her since she walked out of the ocean in that orange bikini. There’s no question that it meant something a little more to me. But at the end of the day, it’s just one person’s opinion. You have to have super thick skin because some people will crap on what you do, but there might be 1,000 more who love it. I always go back to “The Big Lebowski.” ‘That’s just, like, your opinion, man.’