Help a fellow ADV rider get his own business off the ground: BBQ sauce

I’m not sure if anyone here contributed to the fundraising for Baxter’s Original Sauces by member @Scott Baxter but here’s an update on what Scott has achieved since.

A Waikanae sauce-making family has received two awards at the prestigious American-based World Hot Sauce Awards.

Baxter’s Original scooped a silver medal and bronze medal in the barbecue sauce division for its spicy bourbon barbecue and chipotle barbecue sauce.

It was quite an achievement, considering more than 1000 products were entered by 213 companies from 16 different countries.

“We just couldn’t believe it, because we’re a gluten-free item,” co-owner Scott Baxter said.

When Scott and his wife Erika came to New Zealand from the United States four years ago, for him to take up a work opportunity at Weta Digital, the sauces he tried didn’t agree with his stomach.

So Scott decided he’d create his own sauces, with a hypoallergenic focus, that he and his family could enjoy.

After a lot of trials, and a number of failures, the couple created recipes in their former Miramar house, which hit the delicious button.

“The first one we did, sweet and smoky, was such a failure we were about to dump it out, and then we decided to just throw in a bunch of stuff to try and save it, and it ended up being the best sauce we’d ever tasted in our lives,” Scott vividly recalls.

The family run company has been working perfecting their recipes using healthy ingredients and hand-crafting every portion.

Scott started letting work colleagues at Weta Digital taste the product and soon had orders rolling in.

“It got so popular I decided to sell it to the public.”

The couple and their two boys, Brodie, 6, and Calan, 4, moved to Waikanae about a year ago for lifestyle reasons, and started selling their product at the Saturday Waikanae market in Park Ave.

“The public really liked it so we’ve been working on getting the product into stores,” Scott said.

The couple have a commercial kitchen in Wellington, close to Scott’s workplace, where they hand-create four barbecue sauces – sweet and smokey, spicy bourbon, chipotle and dragon’s breath.

“I do believe dragon’s breath is the hottest barbecue sauce in New Zealand,” Scott chuckled.

They create about 350 bottles per batch and supply the sauces throughout the Wellington region to about 10 stores. National distribution is a goal.

In Kapiti, the sauces can be found at Waikanae New World, on the tables at the Salt and Wood Collective restaurant in Waikanae, Waikanae Butchery, and Bin Inn, in Paraparaumu.