Courtesy of T.W. Garner Food

No. 23 Best-Selling Condiment: Texas Pete Hot Sauce

Total sales: $18,027,340
Total sales: 11,971,440
Avg. price: $1.51

Like Frank’s RedHot and Tabasco, Texas Pete Hot Sauce, the third best-selling hot sauce in the U.S., is pretty mild compared with some of the mouthburners on the market these days. According to the Scoville scale—which measures the heat of a chili pepper—Frank’s RedHot Original scores only 450 heat units (on a scale from 0 to 16 million), Tabasco original ranks between 2,500 and 5,000, and Texas Pete hits 747. (A Sweet Bell pepper is a zero. A crystal of capsaicin, the active component in chili peppers, which can produce adverse physical effects, scores 16 million.) Texas Pete, which is owned by privately held T.W. Garner Food, was founded by Thad Garner in 1929 in Winston-Salem, N.C. The brand accounts for almost 8 percent of the total U.S. hot sauce market.

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