Local hot sauce business catching on at stores and restaurants

Lizards on the Bayou, the small hot sauce business Bratton started in her kitchen seven years ago, is growing in popularity regionally and nationally after an almost accidental start.

Liz and her husband Jim Bratton love peppers and have grown their own for years. One year, after a very productive crop, they had some extras. Rather than let them go to waste, they started to make their own hot sauces.

“It took a couple of years to get it the way we want it to taste,” Bratton said. “All of our friends came over and were our guinea pigs. Once we got it the way we kind of liked it, they all really liked it.”

When the recipe was finalized, Lizards on the Bayou was born.

The first sauce was dubbed Lizard Spit. A second, even hotter sauce with more habanera and cayenne pepper, soon followed. It was called Gila Venom.

“I like to be able to taste certain peppers,” Bratton said. “In Lizard Spit, the habanera adds a nice flavor. It has the heat and they both have a nice flavor. It enhances what you eat, it doesn’t hide it.”

When the Brattons started their hot sauce business, they did all the cooking and bottling in their kitchen. They even had friends bring them bottles. Since then, they have hired IPack Inc. out of Winter Springs to be their bottler and to help with the distribution. IPack even helped the couple fine tune their recipes for mass production.

The two local hot sauces are receiving some national attention and are now available in different parts of the country. Both sauces have won more than a half-dozen awards at different contests.

Locally, the sauces are available in the sauce bar at Tijuana Flats on Eglin Parkway, Scully’s on the Bayou, Cocoon’s in Seagrove Beach and — in the biggest boon for the company — most local Walmarts.

Lizards on the Bayou’s two hot sauces have been sold in the Walmarts for the past year, with the exception of the store in Pace. It took three years for the Brattons to get approval to sell their sauces at the stores.

The two sauces have been at the Fort Walton Beach Tijuana Flats for about four years, and co-owner Brian Burger liked them so much he worked to get them in all the Tijuana Flats nationwide. That’s more than 70 restaurants in five states.

“It’s very popular,” said Jenna Leigh Caldwell, the other co-owner of the local Tijuana Flats. “It’s just a real fresh varietal pepper sauce. People love it.”

The Brattons are developing ideas to add two new sauces to their lineup this year. One of the new sauces will be hotter than their Gila Venom and the other will bring a little less heat than the Lizard Spit.

For the hotter sauce, Bratton said they were looking into using bhut jolokia peppers, which is the world’s hottest pepper, according to the Scoville scale that measures peppers’ intensity.

The couple also have other ideas for their business.

“We’re trying to figure out other places to get into,” Bratton said.