Hot Sauce Fun Fact - All-Encompassing Brand Names
People ask for a Coke, Kleenex and Tabasco...
But these are brand names and not actually an all-encompassing view of what products they actually are.
Tabasco is, in fact, the brand name of the American-made product, a very specific red-pepper sauce that is produced by the McIlhenny Co. in Louisiana. The McIlhenny family has made Tabasco sauce on Avery Island for some five generations. As the company shares, “Built on a salt dome, it’s a mysteriously beautiful place where the red peppers grow, the factory hums, and abundant wildlife can be seen in Jungle Gardens.” Tripadvisor even places the company’s factory tour on its top five things to do on the island.
McIlhenny grew his first commercial crop in 1868 and by the following year would send out 658 bottles of the sauce (at $1 each, wholesale) to Gulf Coast grocers, especially those in New Orleans. He labeled his creation, “Tabasco,’ a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean ‘place where the soil is humid’ or ‘place of the coral or oyster shell."