Feeling hot hot hot this summer? There's no cooling down with Britain's finest 'chilli-makers'

Our collective tastebuds have never been more a-tingle. The traditional world of British condiments has become decidedly heated in recent times, with hot sauces blazing their way into the mainstream like never before. Adding a fiery pep to our food has turned into something of an obsession — be it soups, sandwiches, steaks, salads or scrambled eggs — and our kitchens now regularly see chilli-laced bottles standing shoulder to shoulder with old stalwarts such as ketchup and brown sauce.

This rise in popularity is more than anecdotal. Waitrose reported a 55% jump in hot-sauce sales earlier this decade; Tesco revealed in mid 2025 that its customers had purchased an additional 2.5 million bottles of the stuff over the past 12 months; and almost every farmer’s market worth its salt (or should that be spice?) now features artisan hot-sauce producers.

Where has this enthusiasm come from? Those in the know point to everything from the effects of the pandemic lockdowns — basic sauces being relatively easy to make at home — to an ever-growing interest in different global flavours. Another factor is the simple, colourful pleasure of growing your own chillis, a joy requiring little more than a gardener’s eye and a south-facing windowsill.

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

The sauces themselves can be addictive, too: scientific studies suggest that consuming chillis tricks our brains into releasing endorphins to counteract the ‘burn’ of the heat. None of this would hold as much weight, of course, if it wasn’t for the fact that hot sauces can elevate a dish like little else. They now come in such a dizzying array of different strengths and varieties that the best of them have heat and flavour profiles that please the palate to delicious, and well-balanced, effect.

Craft chilli growers and hot-sauce producers are now dotted all over the UK. We speak to five British makers of hot sauce to hear how and why they got started, as well as what makes their piquant products very much worth a dollop or two on your plate.

Sheldrake & Sheldrake, Aberdeenshire

When chef and fermentation aficionado Jonathan Hope met brothers Cosmo and Merlin Sheldrake — a multi-instrumentalist musician and a microbiologist, respectively— in 2018 with a view to collaborating on a condiment, the results were always going to be out of the ordinary. The process of finalising a recipe at Sheldrake & Sheldrake, however, was not quick.

‘The Sheldrakes had always made one at Christmas to give to family and friends and they wondered if it was possible to turn that into a business,’ recalls Hope. ‘This conversation went on for about 18 months. They’re very detailed, so it developed at a glacial pace, but then we got it right.’

The end result takes the Sheldrake family recipe and combines it with koji — an ancient fermented food made by introducing a specific fungus to cooked rice — to produce a thick, umami-rich sauce. The brothers are renowned mycologists (‘they’re presently on field work digging for mushrooms in Nepal,’ explains Hope, so the approach seems fitting. ‘It’s essentially like a textured, hot, soy sauce,’ he continues. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone else doing it this way.’

Hope makes the sauce from his base in Aberdeenshire, using largely organic ingredients from places as diverse as Scotland, Galicia, Japan and Mexico.

How should the sauce be enjoyed? ‘The thing I do most often is put it on eggs, whether they’re poached, scrambled or fried,’ reveals Hope. ‘Second to that is making chipotle mayonnaise. I take a tablespoon of our hot sauce, whip it through with a dollop of mayonnaise and put it on roast potatoes.’

Great Scott Hot Sauce, Cornwall

‘To be honest with you, I put it on absolutely everything apart from a roast dinner,’ laughs Freya Scott. When she and partner Joseph Love went travelling to Mexico and Central America in 2016, they weren’t expecting to come back with a business idea. Then serendipity stepped in.

‘In Mexico, we noticed that everywhere made their own amazing hot sauces,’ recalls Scott. ‘We started keeping a diary of the ones we’d tried at different restaurants, then we visited a small hot-sauce factory in Belize, which was a very cool set-up.’ Back home in London, they started experimenting with making their own.

A move to Falmouth in Cornwall followed and, after striking up a relationship with a local chilli farm, they began selling hot sauces at markets and food festivals around the region. Scott and Love now produce 10 different hot sauces as Great Scott Hot Sauce using Cornish chillis, ranging from milder choices such as Apple or Gooseberry & Serrano to ‘not for the faint-hearted’ options, such as the Black Garlic & Balsamic Reaper.

Pairing a chilli with ingredients that complement it needs careful thought. ‘It really helps if you try the chillis raw,’ explains Love. ‘It’s like wine tasting, there are background notes: some chillis have more of a stone-fruit flavour, others are more citrussy or have an immediate peppery harshness to them. Balance is key.’

Legendary Sauce Co, Cumbria

When the pandemic forced Richard and Sarah Gore to close permanently their café in the Yorkshire Dales, they needed a fresh outlet for their culinary skills. ‘I’d always been really interested in chilli sauce and tinkered with it,’ says Richard. ‘I did a couple of flavours and they went down very well, so we took it from there.’

A few years — and a move to Cumbria — later, the small-batch sauces they produce have already garnered two Great Taste awards and eight prizes at the National Chilli Awards, with flavours ranging from Pineapple Scotch Bonnet to Blueberry Armageddon.

The name they gave to their start-up business, Legendary Sauce Co, is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Impressively, Gore still makes all these sauces from scratch in his kitchen at home in Carlisle. ‘A batch of 200 bottles will generally take a full day,’ he explains. ‘That’s an hour or so of prep work, three to four hours of cooking, then the same again to bottle and label it all. Then I have to give the air some time to settle for a few days.’

The key to finding the right flavour profile? ‘You’ve got to be able to taste the chilli. That’s the important part. You’re not just trying to blow people’s heads off,’ he smiles, ‘although that’s a good byproduct.’

South Devon Chilli Farm, Devon

‘Most people aren’t looking for really, really hot sauces,’ believes Amrit Madhoo. ‘The average person wants something to add some zing to their tacos or chili con carne. If you reach for a generic supermarket chilli sauce, it’ll just taste very vinegary, but a good one allows you to add that spike of heat without altering the dish’s core flavour.’

He and his wife, Jenny, took over the long-standing South Devon Chilli Farm, a few miles inland from Salcombe, in 2022. Since then, they’ve overseen a roll-out of renewable energy across the farm and Madhoo has appeared on Gardeners’ World and James Martin’s Saturday Morning. The farm is a large-scale operation. ‘We’ve got eight crop tunnels, each of which is about 50 yards long,’ notes Madhoo.

‘We’re growing about 3,500 chilli plants overall — they grow directly in the ground and we’re harvesting about 40 varieties each year. They differ in their spiciness, their style and their heat. We’re on a nice south-facing slope, but the main challenge is getting the seedlings ready to be planted at the start of the season — about May time.’ The chillis go into a range of fiery jams, chocolates and some 17 different sauces, including the ‘truly evil’ Green Demon sauce, featuring unripened ghost, reaper and scorpion chilli varieties.

Big Ginger Sauce Co, Surrey

Peter Bennison can trace his obsession with spicy food back to his schooldays. ‘My best friend was Pakistani. Whenever I was at his house, his mum always brought out these incredible foods — I was instantly hooked.’ Fast forward a few decades to the pan-demic and Bennison, by now a fan of making his own heat-laden dishes, occupied his time by chilli-growing.

It bore fruit, in more ways than one. ‘I ended up with about 30kg of chillis in my freezer, thinking, "What on earth am I going to do with them?"’ The answer was experimenting with small-batch hot sauces. Feedback was not only effusive, but sustained. Therefore, after leaving a finance job in 2023, he founded Big Ginger Sauce Co.

His five sauces already have seven Great Taste stars and several National Chilli awards between them. Based in Pirbright, Surrey, Bennison now sources all his chillis from his local green-grocer, who has ready access to the London fruit and vegetable markets.

‘You’d be surprised what you can get,’ he says. ‘Even some of the more exotic varieties are readily available.’ Although he produced more than 20,000 bottles in 2025, the cooking remains his own work. ‘It’s only me,’ he admits. ‘Me, a big pot and a big stove. I love the creativity of it.’

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.