Wherever a bottle of Mississippi Red Pepper Sauce goes, Ty Thames, its creator and director of shipping, knows about it.
As it has become more popular, what once was the house hot sauce on the tables of Restaurant Tyler in Starkville is spreading across the country.
“That kind of gives me a sense of reward,” he said. “I see my hot sauce going to Colorado, and it’s like having a little piece of me out there in the world. … Utah, North and South Dakota, Washington State. I’m selling to all these places I’ve never even visited.”
From an idea born on a deep-sea fishing trip with friends, the Starkville chef – who also owns BIN 612 and The Guest Room – has pushed his side hustle into more than 60 retail locations across Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana, helping revive the popularity of a century-old heirloom hot pepper from Laurel along the way.
“You really get a taste of Mississippi and the South,” Thames said. “… And it’s a true taste of the South because everything is grown and made here.”
More than a decade ago, while fishing in the Gulf, Thames used red chilis he bought from Bountiful Harvest Farms to make a pepper sauce. He liked it so much that when Thames returned home, he tracked down the farm’s owner, Sam McLemore, about supplying peppers for more sauce.
“My only qualifications, or rules of engagement, so to speak, was it had to be a red pepper and it had to be a hot pepper,” Thames said. “I didn’t want the sauce to be super hot. I wanted it to be well-balanced and flavor-forward.”
Then Thames, through a teammate on the Mississippi charity barbeque circuit, learned about the rooster spur pepper, named for its size and shape. With a similar heat profile as a tabasco, the heirloom first cultivated in Jones County was an ingredient in sausage made at the White House during the Jimmy Carter administration.
Thames tracked down seeds, took them to McLemore, and in subsequent years the pair built a seed bank and production base that keeps the rooster spur at the center of Mississippi Red’s recipe.
“There will always be rooster spurs in the sauce,” Thames said. “There are also other heirloom peppers. … That’s kind of the beauty of the sauce. It does change a little bit.”
To achieve the desired thickness, and to balance the heat, Thames uses red jalapenos. The “extra hot” version uses habaneros. Vinegar, dry herbs and a little brown sugar round out the flavors of the sauce.
“I always tell people if Tabasco sauce and sriracha had a baby, it would be Mississippi Red,” Thames said.
Since the sauce hit the tables in Thames’ flagship restaurant downtown, his customers started pushing him to scale up. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he built a production kitchen at his farm in Houston, Mississippi, which allowed him to start making 40-gallon batches. That was enough to make 30 cases at a time to supply the Oktibbeha County Farmers Cooperative and a few other small retailers.
By 2023, Thames contracted with a copacker as demand had grown the batches to 500 gallons.
“In one afternoon, they can bottle 4,000 bottles, which would take me about a month to do at my farm,” he said.
Thames has also added product lines like hot honey and spice blends.
To get his products in big-box grocery stores, Thames said he needs to drop his wholesale prices by about 30 to 40%. He is also “in talks” with food purveyors like Sysco and PFG.
In the meantime, he needs more pepper growers to service his existing wholesale and retail sales, while saving profits to majorly scale up his farm and production facility in Houston.
“I open the floor to anybody who would like to grow peppers (that fit Mississippi Red standards),” he said. “Because I can’t buy enough peppers locally right now to meet my demand.”
McLemore is doing his part, some years growing as many as 400 rooster spur plants, along with other red pepper varieties.
“We’ve got a guaranteed market for every red, hot pepper we can bring him every year,” McLemore said. “That’s pretty awesome, and we’ve been able to plant a whole lot of peppers on that.”
But his collaboration and friendship with the Thames family goes beyond peppers and sauce.
“They have supported us in many ways, buying lots of our other products – our microgreens, our edible flowers, our tomatoes, bell peppers – that they can use in the restaurant,” McLemore said. “… I bring the peppers along with anything else I have.”
WHERE TO BUY LOCALLY
Starkville:
Restaurant Tyler
BIN 612
Two Brothers Smoked Meats
Oktibbeha County Farmers Cooperative
The Linden Guild
Columbus:
CJ’s Pizza
West Point
Rose Gift Co.
Words by ZACK PLAIR
Photos by Rory Doyle, courtesy of Mississippi Red