“Nobody’s going to get that excited talking about ketchup, right? But talk about hot sauce and it’s interesting.”— Stacy Moritz
Sometimes our deepest passions don’t start out as our own. They begin in the hearts of someone we love — and then, through their contagious energy, become a part of us.
This, at least, is what happened to Stacy Moritz, the driving force behind Secret Aardvark, the Portland, Oregon-based hot sauce company whose loyal following is the stuff of hot-sauce legend.
When Moritz and her husband, Scott, founded the company 20 years ago, it was primarily to support Scott's fervent love for hot sauce. Scott’s passion ignited at age thirteen when he entered his first chili cook-off. He couldn’t get enough of the spices and flavors. Decades later, Scott was still experimenting and perfecting his spice concoctions in their kitchen, driven by an insatiable hunger for the perfect kick.
But then tragedy struck. Just five years after they started the business, Scott passed away from pancreatic cancer. Despite the heartache — or maybe because of it — Moritz chose to keep Secret Aardvark alive. She did it in part to honor Scott's legacy, but she also had discovered her own passion for hot sauce along the way.
“I’m not a chili-head,” she tells me, referring to the group of enthusiasts who pursue the spiciest sauces they can find, often treating heat as a thrilling challenge. These are the people you see on TV shows, eating whole ghost peppers and chasing an intense burn. “But I love hot sauce. I just don’t love hot sauce that melts my face off. I kind of feel like if you’re covering your food up with something so hot that you can’t taste your food, you might want to find some different food to eat!" she says.
I reached out to Moritz because I’ve been a fan of Secret Aardvark ever since I first discovered it while living in Portland in college. I always have at least one bottle in my refrigerator. The company has developed a cult following, including from people like Jimmy Fallon, who gave a shoutout on his show in 2019 when he said that “all he knows about Portland is Secret Aardvark!” I wanted to get to know the person behind this company that makes people like me so — literally — On Fire.
“I have this really weird philosophical theory about hot sauce,” Moritz says. “It’s one of those things that transcends all cultures. I went to Belize… they got some hot sauce. I crossed the border in Guatemala. They got different hot sauce and it’s a whole different base and a whole different thing, right? Go to Sri Lanka, whole different thing. It’s one of those things that no matter where you go, you can talk to them about their hot sauce. Nobody’s going to get that excited talking about ketchup, right? But talk about hot sauce and it’s interesting. I’ve had so many conversations that way.”
Secret Aardvark started in Moritz’s kitchen. At the time, she was working in healthcare, running state and federal contracts. Scott, a touring musician who was what she calls “a consummate entrepreneur good at ideas but not process,” couldn’t stop testing hot sauce recipes in their kitchen.
“I would come home from work and he would hand me a glass of wine,” she says. “He’d be like, ‘You should go out to the roses.’” Since this was November, she reminded him that there weren’t any roses that time of year — just rain. “Well, you can’t come into the kitchen,” he told her. “It’s a mess.”
So she encouraged him to follow his passion. “I told him, ‘Do the hot sauce thing. You’ve always wanted to.’”
And they did. While Scott was hard at work at putting together the right combinations of tomatoes, peppers, and onions in their kitchen, Moritz focused on the business side of the venture. “I’ve always been a business person,” she says. Losing her parents young and being raised by her grandparents, who introduced her to the joy of selling coins at just five years old, instilled a strong business sense in her. Her experience in healthcare also honed her business skills. “The 20 years of running state and federal contracts? That's a business,” she insists. “Yes, it's based on health care. Yes, you're meeting contract requirements, but you're also writing bids and proposals and budgets and marketing plans. We don't call it marketing in healthcare; it's called healthcare quality.”
While Scott was making hot sauce concoctions, including their famous habanero hot sauce and others with names like Drunken Jerk and Red Scorpion, she was building the brand. She created the labels with the unmissable blue aardvark character and meticulously listed all the ingredients before printing them out on their inkjet printer and sticking them on the bottles, one by one. She found a commercial kitchen for Scott to work in, ensuring their home wasn’t always a fiery mess. Moritz also figured out how many farmers’ markets they needed to attend each week to turn a profit, and worked on getting their products into retail stores.
For a while, this was their teamwork routine — and their path to success. Before Secret Aardvark, Portland didn’t have much of a hot sauce scene. It started to become a thing.
But then, Scott got sick. He was on tour with his band at the time when he suddenly fell to one knee during a show. Soon after, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Scott lived for eleven more months and four days, four times longer than doctors thought he would have.
During those months, the business took on new meaning. It became a way to honor Scott’s passion and keep his spirit alive. Moritz juggled hospital visits, business tasks, and her demanding full-time job, determined to continue the dream they had built together. She began taking on more and more of the business responsibilities.
“I’d drop him off at Kaiser for his chemo,” she says. “I would have the car loaded with hot sauce to drop off. I would go deliver sauce, then go back to the chemo room and I would sit there and have a conference call with my [healthcare] team on some project we were working on.”
It would have been easy to let the dream go. After all, hot sauce wasn’t Moritz’s own passion at first. So why didn’t she?
She pauses.
“[I realized] I don't want this company to go away because it's doing something that no one else is doing,” she says. “It's bringing flavor to the table with heat instead of just vinegar and heat. I mean, part of it was it's a legacy-building business. And I loved him. But also, I just couldn't imagine what the world was going to be like if we didn't have Aardvark… and I wasn't going to learn how to make batches of it so I could have some myself.”
After Scott passed away, Moritz kept going — even developing her first original recipe, a green hot sauce called Serrabenero. Moritz continued working in healthcare while growing the business for nearly six more years before finally quitting her job to run Secret Aardvark full-time in 2014. Earlier this year, Taco Bell reached out to her to include Serrabenero in their new Secret Aardvark Nacho Fries, which shows just how much her passion has spread to others.
“It was scary as hell,” she recalls of the decision to go all in on hot sauce. “Because there's no safety net, right? You are the safety net. But also great, right?”
She hasn’t looked back. “I think that healthcare was my passion for years, and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved that we were changing lives and impacting healthcare and making things better and doing all these things.
“But I gotta tell ya,” she continues. “Most people have two or three jobs in their lifetime, right? Or careers. I've had two or three passions now. And I loved healthcare, and I loved what I was doing, but the ability to transition some of those things to Aardvark, and then to just grow more and do other things…”
As her face lights up, I can see she’s as on fire about Aardvark as Scott ever was — and that her passion is the real secret ingredient in her famous products.
“Grilled cheese sandwiches, French fries. Pizza. Who can eat pizza without Aardvark on it?” she says. “I use it on everything.”
For Moritz, it’s clear, hot sauce is more than just a condiment. It’s a calling.
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Moritz’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One Lesson: Embracing Passion through Loved Ones
It's easy to believe that our passions must come solely from within. However, Stacy Moritz's journey with Secret Aardvark illustrates how the passion of someone you love can ignite your own. Moritz wasn’t initially a hot sauce enthusiast, but her late husband Scott's fervor for creating the perfect hot sauce blend inspired her. By embracing his passion, she found her own path and built a thriving business. Sometimes, our deepest passions can start in the hearts of those we love and become our own through shared energy and dedication.
One Exercise: Do the Math
When I asked her for advice for aspiring entrepreneurs wanting to create a passion-based business, Moritz didn’t skip a beat: “Do the math,” she said, emphasizing the importance of understanding the financial aspects of your business. For aspiring entrepreneurs, especially in the food industry, doing the math is crucial. To begin, take your idea and break down all the costs associated with production, marketing, and distribution. Ensure that your pricing strategy covers these costs while providing a profit margin. By meticulously planning your finances, you can avoid the common pitfall of underestimating expenses and ensure the sustainability of your venture.
One Curiosity: Using Hot Sauce to Add Flavor
As someone who loves adding hot sauce to nearly everything — from tacos to pizza to potatoes — I realized after talking to Moritz that I could be more intentional about it. Instead of just adding a few drops to burn my mouth, I could explore how hot sauce can enhance the flavors of various dishes. I’m not much of a cook, but I think even I could figure out how to marinate something ahead of time to add an extra kick.