Some Like It Hot

Meet Kamaal Jarrett, founder of Hillside Harvest, a unique hot sauce company with Caribbean roots.

Kamaal Jarrett is the founder of Hillside Harvest. There, he taps his Caribbean roots, adding an American influence to his unique hot sauces. There are currently three hot sauces in the Hillside Harvest lineup: Pineapple Fresno, Original Hot Pepper, and Sun Kissed Tomato, plus an enticing Jamaican Jerk Marinade.

When tracking down Jarrett for this interview, he explained that he spends a lot of time on the road. And that is where we found him — in his parked car awaiting our call.

Kamaal Jarrett: Growing up, there was that Caribbean influence of culture and food, but also having access to friends from the U.S. and my family, who’s 100% Jamaican … experiencing their perspectives and their food. Having that combination and knowing I wanted to start a food business but wasn’t sure in what capacity. I was playing around with potentially launching a restaurant, and eventually, I had about seven or so years of production management and decided that product was the best route for me.

Hillside Harvest goes back to the combination of cultures and draws on those two themes. I was born in a place called Cypress Hall, which sits above the Red Hills of Kingston, Jamaica, and I grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, below the Blue Hills. We are taking from both cultures and paying homage to both.

NL: Did your family cook traditional Jamaican fare? What was your early experience with American cuisine?

KJ: My parents didn’t eat out much, so my exposure to American cuisine was mostly through American friends and television. I was a wake-up-early on Saturday kid, and I’d watch cooking shows on PBS. My parents gave me free rein to experiment with American cuisine in the kitchen. So, a lot of the American cooking in the household was by me. I was copying what I saw friends do, what I saw their parents do, and what I saw on TV.

NL: Is there a hot sauce culture in Jamaica?

KJ: Everyone has it. People get peppers and vegetables, and they put it in their jar with vinegar, and they just pickle it. They create their own. That’s the culture. It’s not like people are blending it and putting it in fancy bottles or anything, but everywhere you go, whether it is a house or a restaurant, they have their own homemade hot sauce. You go to someone’s house, and chances are they are making some.

What I did at Hillside is I drew on the flavor, not the format. You have to remember; spice was used as a preservative in the Caribbean. It was done out of necessity.

KJ: I think about hot sauce in terms of flavor, not like it is a novelty because [someone] tried this extremely hot thing. When I develop a sauce, I am focused on its flavor profile and the how person enjoying this sauce is going to use it versus how much heat it has.

I generally stick within a bucket of mild, medium, and hot. But again, it is not about heat but instead flavor. I am catering to the flavors consumers enjoy.

It sounds selfish and weird, but first, I need to like the hot sauce. I need to have pride in the product that I am producing. If you tried all three of the sauces, they may have no similarities. That was done intentionally because we want people to have a different sauce for a different meal or different occasion, so the goal is really a sauce for any heat tolerance.

I want to have something that you are looking for, and I don’t want to be too prescriptive of what you can use hot sauce for. I put Pineapple Fresno in my margarita; I put Sun Kissed Tomato on my mac and cheese.

What I would like to have happen is where people take out all three of our sauces for one meal. That is the goal—to have people interchange the sauces because they want different ways to experience a dish.

NL: How does someone know what flavor profile out of your three is right to complement their meal?

KJ: A lot of it was created with the season and what was available. We use a lot of ingredients that are in traditional Caribbean cooking, like ginger, scotch bonnet peppers, but then we add apple for sweetness. You might find something sweeter in the Caribbean, but it won’t be with apple.

We don’t want heat to stop people from enjoying it. The best thing for me is people who try our hot sauce, even when they claim they don’t like hot sauce. We start them out on Pineapple Fresno—it is a light, easy, approachable sauce, and this is what we are looking for. Pineapple is a recognizable flavor, and then we ease everything in. I mean, you could honestly drink it because it is delicious but has the right amount of kick.

Someone adverse to heat tastes this and they go, “Oh, I didn’t think hot sauce could taste like this.” They realize hot sauce doesn’t have to be a contest, like, whew, how hot can a hot sauce be?

NL: Which is your most popular?

KJ: Most popular? Our new one is Sun Kissed Tomato. I don’t know if it is because people are intrigued by sun dried tomatoes in a hot sauce. It is savory. But a close second is the Original Hot Pepper. It is the hottest. Still, people really are surprised by the high heat because it starts off sweet. Then gets super spicy. People like the evolution in the palette.

Image Credit: Hillside Harvest

NL: You launched Hillside Harvest close to the start of the pandemic. How did you adapt?

KJ: We had a year under our belt before COVID. But the goal was to go into 2020 to leverage the brand, going into restaurants and hotels and Whole Foods. People would see the brand, but they’d have already tried it. But that didn’t happen obviously, and we had to change course and think about ways we could market directly to folks. Doorstep Market was really instrumental at that time. They were launching and helped us get in front of consumers. That made us change course, and we realized we needed to reach them directly. It is important right now for us to focus on our local New England region.

NL: Not that long ago, when you wanted hot sauce, you’d get handed a bottle of Tabasco. Do you think Americans have refined their hot sauce palate?

KJ: People’s taste buds are evolving. This isn’t a fad. Hot sauce is an extremely crowded and competitive category, but it’s one of those categories like craft beer where people don’t have one brand. They enjoy multiple brands. That is the way the hot sauce culture is evolving. Hot sauce people are cool, so it’s not as cut-throat as other businesses. The hot sauce culture is born out of playfulness, and I am really enjoying it.