We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jack Moore a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jack, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
A strong work ethic was instilled in me at a very young age. I grew up in rural Ohio in a factory town. Both my parents were factory workers. I watched them work long days at physically demanding jobs to make the best lives for us kids as possible. I also wasn’t much for school, so I chose to put my skills to work straight out of high school by going to automotive training. Mechanic life is tough work, but I found joy in working with my hands and problem solving any issues that came across my bay. After a large layoff at my luxury car shop, I found myself without a job for just a couple of hours before I got a call that my buddy was hiring for a pizza delivery driver. That night, I was delivering pizzas and stepped into my first ever culinary door. Turns out, I loved working with food. It was a new way to use my hands, and opened up an entirely new career path. After going back to college to get my degree in Culinary Arts, I became a Chef. Now more well-known, the chef life is not an easy one. Not only are the hours grueling, but the consistent, heightened sense of managed chaos can either cause someone to crumble or thrive. I chose to thrive, and the kitchen became my safe space. I worked hard for the guest in the dining room trying our spot for the first time, for the accolades and recognition of our efforts, and for the incredible people working together to make the machine GO every day.
Now, in my career as a business owner creating living culture fermented foods, I carry the chef mentality with me every day. Not only are the methodical processes of preparing just the right ingredients or composition of a dish applicable to my daily work, but also the experimental whimsey of testing new batches and having high accountability for myself and future employees (it’s just my wife and I, for now) are just a few reasons I have chosen this path. Having the work ethic of a factory worker parents, a mechanic, and a chef have all sculpted my work ethic as an entrepreneur. With a passion for the art of fermentation and preserving tradition, the work is meaningful and feels incredibly worthwhile.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I founded Black Cap Hot Sauce to get more people to try fermented food. I always made a version of this hot sauce in my restaurants, so when COVID shut down my restaurant, I finally had the opportunity to get it into bottles. We had an amazing support system in place with friends, family, and colleagues, all who were willing to help us bring our brand to life. The namesake came from our initial blind taste tests, in which we bottled two slightly different recipes in plain bottles, one with a black cap and one with a white cap. You can guess which one won, and the product practically named itself.
Ultimately, the goal with Black Cap is to amplify the health and wellness benefits of creating and consuming fermented foods. “Preserving a culture” is our mission, and that goes beyond preserving the live probiotic, gut-friendly culture in our sauce. It extends to our sustainability practices, like sourcing local produce whenever possible, composting all food waste, and using recyclable glass bottles and metal caps. Our living culture, small batch ferments reflect our local agricultural system, supporting local farmers and sharing our collective food journey.
Long term, we will come out with seasonal Black Cap flavors and, eventually, other fermented condiments. The overwhelming support for Black Cap has made that pipedream truly possible!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Three skills that have helped me so far in my journey are:
1- Preparing for the worst
2- Having personal, rich industry knowledge
3- Being entrenched in my community
1- Preparing for the worst
Every night during a service in a restaurant, you’re going to open your doors whether you feel prepared or not. It’s either going to be a 500-cover night where there’s a back-to-back country legend playing next door and no one moves from their stations for 12 hours, or an average night of date nights and late nights. Either way, with the “prepare for the worst” mentality, no matter what happened, we made our best guesses and developed critical forecasting processes. At the end of the day, we may not always guess right, but we got much better at anticipating anything and everything. This helps me now when I think about anything that could possibly go wrong, from the raw product and glass goods to my bottles sitting on the shelf at a retailer. My goal is for EVERY customer to have an amazing experience with our product, and the attention to every possible thing that could go wrong helps their experience go RIGHT.
2- Having personal, rich industry knowledge as a chef is an incredible benefit to my role now. I understand how to work with food, having had the benefit of fermenting foods at various restaurants. I got to build relationships with farmers, understand do’s and dont’s of fermentation, and get real time feedback from guests while building my product concept. Classically-trained culinary know-how took me to my first level, but being a chef at some prestigious and award-winning restaurants with my name on the menu has helped me establish a good following in the regional culinary world.
3- Being entrenched in my community: Whatever industry you’re in, surround yourself with the best. Most of my colleagues have gone on to either open their own restaurants, write their own books, win culinary awards, and more. The fact that I have these amazing individuals to learn from, lean on, and ultimately collaborate with is invaluable. I think of Jeremy Umansky, Owner of Larder Delicatessen and author of Koji Alchemy, who I used to work with in Cleveland. He is now known as a fermentation and Koji expert, and he was the very first person to order Black Cap for his shop and someone I consistently receive valuable insights and feedback from. Everyone should have the sort of circle that they can reach out to others smarter, more experienced, or more accomplished than themselves. That’s the community that will continue to push us all forward.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
The biggest challenge we’re currently facing is the quick-to-market hot sauce industry. Black Cap has made waves both in the hot sauce world and the fermentation world. That said, the fermentation market is much different than the hot sauce market. It is commonplace for many hot sauce makers to develop a recipe, outsource production, and act as marketing/sales organizations. We hand-make our product, hand-cutting our peppers, sourcing locally whenever possible, and don’t outsource any part of our production. There is a lot of love that goes into each bottle. Another obstacle is that our product is not shelf stable, as it is a living culture ferment and must be refrigerated. We get pushback from retail buyers who may not give the idea of a refrigerated hot sauce a chance, or, because we’re not the spiciest hot sauce out there or shelf stable, they may lose interest.
Where I want to break the mold is more easily drawing the line from hot sauce to gut-friendly, health-based, 100% natural fermented foods. We fit into the fermented, natural foods category although we are a hot sauce. Traditional models just don’t work for us in our sister category, so we are working to build more educational point of sale materials, do more consumer education, and get our products into as many people’s mouths as possible so they can taste the difference for themselves.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.blackcaphotsauce.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/blackcaphotsauce
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/blackcaphotsauce
