Belizeans have a love affair with pepper – red Habanero peppers to be precise. Chances are that you have a bottle of red pepper sauce in your cupboard or on your dinner table – in fact we've seen some folks carry it around in their purses. Pepper people call it the power of the Habanero and as much we love pepper – it is one of those things we take for granted. We normally just open the bottle and pour. Truth is a lot of work goes in to producing that pepper sauce – making sure it is hot and tasty. And that's why in tonight's edition of 7 on the Inside – Keith Swift and cameraman Alex Ellis went inside of the place called Pepperland. Here's the story.
Keith Swift Reporting,
This is how most Belizeans start their meals – by dousing it with the pepper of their choice – whether factory or home-made, whether its fried chicken or rice and beans, it's got to have pepper. But have you ever thought of where the sauce comes from and what goes into making it? Well we did. Our search took us to the Hot Mamas Factory in Unitedville. Everyday Wilana Oldham and her all female staff of only 6 process hundreds of these bottles of sauce – and they do it the old fashioned way: through manual labour. Getting it on your table is a painstaking, tedious, and labour intensive process that is harder than it looks.
Veronica Lopez, Hot Mamas Employee
"It looks easy in a bottle but to get everything together it is very hard and complicated."
Hard and complicated because Veronica and her co-workers at Hot Mamas are a
small staff and so they multi-task and work almost exclusively by hand.
Wilana Oldham,
"We're a very small operation. We have six girls and myself make seven and we do basically everything by hand, although that's not where we want to be forever. Our goal is to eventually get some automated equipment but presently we do everything by hand. Everything is washed by hand, everything is cut up by hand."
And so by hand the workers dutifully peel, slice, and dice onions, carrots, and garlic – all key ingredients in the sauce.
Veronica Lopez,
"When dicing the onions so many times we cry."
But at Hot Mamas there is no time to cry - the vegetables are then boiled until they are golden in these giant pots. It takes anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour. And then the real work comes in – as from the pots they are moved by the buckets full to this industrial sized grinder. The next step is this giant blender.
Wilana Oldham,
"We do have a wonderful piece of equipment, it is a homogenizer that we use to help with the blend because quite honestly stirring by hands take
a little bit much and we don't get the blend like we need so we do have a piece of equipment for that. After we blend everything is poured by hand."
That includes the red habanero pepper. When we visited it was already mashed and stored in these barrels. This is pure red habanero pepper – and make no mistake – the concentrated power of habanero is potent and overwhelming.
Consuelo Escobar, Employee at Hot Mamas
"When we grind, especially when we cut, we get burned."
That is why employees wear goggles, masks, and gloves.
Veronica Lopez,
"When we are grinding the pepper it is really hot and everything and for me it is okay and everything but sometimes you feel pressure but everything is okay."
Wilana Oldham,
"When we are making mash it is hard work and the heat coming out of the power sometimes gets a little bit too much and so end up having to wear
eye protection and then nose and mouth and gloves and sometimes overalls and stuff like that when we're handling the raw peppers."
Raw pepper – which after mixing and grinding and blending – becomes pepper sauce. From these giant barrels it gets truly laborious because the workers manually pour the sauce into these 5 ounce bottles which are later sealed, labelled, and packaged for delivery to a restaurant near you or supermarkets in Canada or America.
Hot Mamas is a small operation but the hot mama herself says the future of habanero looks red hot.
Wilana Oldham,
"In 2000 we started, I started in the kitchen playing around with the recipe and eventually it came out with the manzanero sauce and from there we progressed. In a way it is nice because we are still very small. We do see we're growing and sometimes it is a little bit much and so there are plans for us to have equipment in here which will help with workload."
But it is a workload these Hot Mamas girls are carrying well. Make no mistake, it is backbreaking – imagine filling hundreds of these bottles with pepper sauce daily and dicing hundreds of pounds of onions.
Veronica Lopez,
"We always finish up everything and sometimes we feel like we want to give up."
Keith Swift,
But you do it anyway.
Veronica Lopez,
"I do it anyway because it is a job."
Consuelo Escobar,
"I think we are already used to that. We cried at first but we get used to it."
Keith Swift,
You work here but do you actually use the pepper at home?
Consuelo Escobar,
"Yes I like pepper, especially this one that we're doing – it is mild and not hot hot."
And however you like it, the next time you pick up a bottle of pepper sauce, you'll know that the flavour and heat packed inside every bottle is the product of hours of labour.
Hot Mamas can bottle as many as 240 boxes of pepper sauce daily. They prepare a full line of pepper as well as gourmet sauces you can find out more at Hot MamasFoods.biz. Stay tuned in two weeks for another edition of 7 on the Inside. Feel free to send your suggestions to tvseven@btl.net.
