A local sauce-slinger said things haven’t been too hot.
Merfs Condiments, which said the hot sauce was once in 700 restaurants and another 400 stores, will close early next year.
“The product is in high demand, but I can’t make any money from it,” said Kelly Schexnaildre, owner of Merfs, named after her dog Murphy. The company will officially close its doors when supplies run out, which is expected to happen at the end of January.
“We have been absolutely destroyed by Covid,” she said. “If the pandemic never happened, I would still have my business.”
Merfs, which she founded in 2014, has lost 80 percent of its turnover and seen costs triple since the pandemic, says 37-year-old Schexnaildre.
“All my clients are broke and I’m broke and all our costs have tripled,” she said. “Loss of revenue would have been one thing, but tripling costs was the nail in the coffin.”
The vast majority of Merfs’ customers before the pandemic were restaurants, which accounted for about 80 percent of sales, she said. The rest went to supermarkets like King Soopers, with whom she signed an agreement in 2018, and gift shops. The company’s flavors include jalapeno and lime, apricot and habanero plus strawberry and jalapeno.
But when the pandemic forced Colorado’s dining establishments to close in 2020, restaurant wholesale business dropped to a third of the company’s revenue, she said. To make up for the loss, Schexnaildre strengthened its e-commerce, retail and grocery streams, with each also accounting for a third of Merfs’ sales.
“I was a restaurant supply company,” she said. “That’s why we stopped.”
She said Trump’s impending presidency is also a factor in the shutdown.
“If we really start having 25 percent tariffs with the new administration, companies that use glass are going to go out of business,” she said, noting that all her sauces come in glass containers. She also mentioned chili peppers, which she sources south of the border, as another potentially valuable commodity.
The Louisiana native started Merfs in January 2014 to create an artisanal hot sauce alternative to staples like Sriracha and Tabasco. She worked out of a committee kitchen for the first few years, making most of the products herself, and by the third year she was profitable, she said.
Soon after, she signed with distributors Shamrock Foods and eventually Cisco. The company’s peak, when Merfs was in the aforementioned 700 restaurants and hundreds of stores, was just before the pandemic.
In February 2020, traditionally one of Merfs’ slower months, Schexnaildre said her revenues had tripled from February 2019. She expected 2020 to be “enlightened.”
“I wanted to be the hot sauce company in Colorado,” she said. “It’s painful after 11 years of being the hot sauce boss.”
Schexnaildre is launching another company, The Juicy Lemon, to give other entrepreneurs a roadmap for launching consumer packaged goods. She will connect them with industry figures she met through Merfs, and she will also offer individual coaching to young owners.
It goes live on January 1st.
“It didn’t work for me, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work for someone else,” she said.