They’re Sauce Baby: Meet Central Coast duo building a local hot sauce company

Manzano, Fresno, Serrano and Thai chili peppers are blended with brewed hibiscus tea, tomatillo and other ingredients to create a hot sauce that goes on everything — from breakfast burritos and pizza to ice cream.

Sauce Baby, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the movie “Bridesmaids” where the main character had a company called Cake Baby, is the hot sauce company of Diana and Michael Muranaka.

The husband-and-wife duo got married in 2011, and said they have always wanted to start a business together. Coming from designer backgrounds, business ideas like creating an agency would bubble to the surface.

The Muranakas would make hot sauce at their home in Orcutt, and decided to take it a step further: start their own hot sauce company.

“These hot sauce recipes we’re making are kind of derivative,” Michael Muranaka told The Tribune. “Can we make our own? We got lucky with that too, because we tried different combinations and … we were thinking how the hibiscus would taste in the hot sauce. It ended up making a perfect balance.”

Finding ingredients like hibiscus tea in their cupboards made the duo craft the “perfect” recipe for their first hot sauce, named after Diana Muranaka — Hot Lil Mama. The sauce contains four types of chili peppers, the famous hibiscus tea, tomatillo, apple cider vinegar, shallots, lemon and lime juice and seasonings.

The first-time business owners went on a roller coaster in creating the hot sauce, but also in finding their audience and the sample size when letting customers taste the sauce during pop-ups.

“You really never know who a hot sauce person is,” Muranaka said. “Every once in a while, a nice little old lady will come up, and she’ll easily, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so good.’ Everybody likes hot sauce, and it’s never who you’d expect. It’s surprising and funny at times.”

Beyond the sauce’s medium spicy taste, the bottle’s label of a bruised-yet-spunky face was not planned to be the face of Sauce Baby.

Michael Muranaka designed the character five years ago, and it “always spoke” to him. When it came time to design the bottle, he took a chance on the character.

“It’s fun and bold and funky, and it’s like a description of us,” Diana Muranaka told The Tribune. “It’s all these things put together.”

Over two years after Sauce Baby’s first hot sauce recipe was born, the couple is in their experimentation stage again — for another hot sauce.

“The biggest question we get asked all the time is if we have something hotter, so we’re working on a hotter version of our sauce because we like the flavor, but we don’t want to mess with it too much,” Michael Muranaka said. “We’re thinking, basically our same recipe, but with Carolina Reaper peppers.”

The Muranakas are also working on a green hot sauce, and while the testing and production stage is tough, they are positive that they’ll “get there,” and may even expand beyond hot sauce.

“It might be because of the look and the branding of the business, but it really could be anything,” Diana Muranaka said. “Right now, we’re making another hot sauce, but we also have merch, maybe we’ll make a line of shirts or designs in some other different way. It could be food, it could be anything, really.”

Sauce Baby is in 21 grocery stores from Paso Robles to the Santa Ynez Valley, with bottles priced at $14 for a one-time purchase online or a subscription of $12 a bottle, with free local deliveries every month.

For more information

For more information about the growing Sauce Baby, visit its website at heysaucebaby.com.