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About Us

K-Pow Hot Sauce was born out of a love for all things spicy.

I started K-Pow Hot Sauce in July 2019.  I decided to give it a crack after my Spicy Plum sauce won the best homemade hot sauce competition at the NZ Hot Sauce Festival in May 2019, beating nearly 40 other sauces.  I’d been thinking about selling my sauces for some time and I guess winning was the validation I needed to convince myself that my friends and family weren’t just being “polite” when they’d say they really like my sauces, and “you should sell them”. 

So, even though this journey of starting up and running a company is just beginning, my love of all things spicy goes back a long way, to when I was in my early teens in the mid ‘80s.  My mum, who was an amazing cook, first introduced me to the world of spice, with chilli con carne in about 1985 and I loved it.  She soon added a Thai Curry to her list of dishes, and back in the mid ‘80s in New Zealand, these were pretty exotic flavours, but I was hooked.  My brothers used to reckon I was adopted because of how much I liked hot and spicy food, no one else in the family liked it quite so hot, so they figured I can’t have been related to them 😊

Fast forward 20 odd years and I’d been trying for a while to make some really hot and tasty chicken wings, similar to the buffalo wings I'd seen on American TV shows, but could not find anything spicy enough to put on them in the supermarkets or local shops.  There were basically zero hot sauces available that were actually hot.  So, I decided the only way I was going to get what I wanted was to grow my own chillies and make my own sauce, so that's what I did!  I planted a couple of plants out the back of my flat and managed to get a fair few chillies (cayenne’s) from my first crop to make a decent kind of sauce from them, well at least good enough to finally make some hot wings!

Over the next few years I worked on the recipe to get it just how I wanted it, and decided I needed a name for my sauce.  I wanted something fun, not too serious and a bit kitschy, and there wasn’t too much kitschier than the old original Batman TV show I used to watch when I was a kid with the speech bubbles of fighting sounds, so I thought I'd use the first letter of my name (so it related to me somehow), and that's how I came up with the name K-Pow! for my sauce.

As usual, when I get interested in something I tend to go way overboard, and there was nothing different here.  Even though it was just a homemade sauce that I had no plans of selling, I decided I needed proper bottles and labels for it, so I designed something similar to what I used to see on the TV show, and that’s how K-Pow! the brand was born Batman.  That original sauce, which I’ve now been making for nearly 10 years, is actually the Mexican Habanero sauce we have for sale on the site.  It’s pretty much unchanged, other than I’ve ramped up the heat a bit from the original one, but the basic recipe is still the same after all these years.

This is a pretty exciting time for us, launching the company and the website and we’d really like to thank you for stopping by and taking the time to read about us, and if you bought a bottle of our sauce, then we’d like to thank you even more, and really hope you enjoy it.

We’d love to hear what you guys think of the sauce, so drop us a line and let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions for future sauces you would like to see.  You can reach me at kev@kpow.co.nz or you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook

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Enjoy!

The winning sauce, with Neil Smith (The Hippy Seed Company), Myself and Johnny Scoville.

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The winning trophy.

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