Larry Blanton has a fire in his heart. He makes his living as a traveling project-control engineer for Honeywell based out of Houston, but his avocation is making salsa.
“Salsa has been a passion of mine for about 10 years now,” he explains by phone from a job in California. “At first, I would strive to improve on the salsas I’d come across in restaurants, and then I began developing my own recipes.”
In the early days of his passionate affair with hot sauce, Blanton just shared his various salsa creations with family and friends, but he eventually sought a larger audience. He entered the Chronicle Hot Sauce contest in 1997, placing second in the Red Sauce category in his first attempt. He was back the next year, garnering an honorable mention for that effort. He took off a year in 1999 to fine tune his recipe and came back strong in 2000 at the 10th Annual Festival. As you may recall, the grand prize in the Individual category at last year’s event was the opportunity to have local co-packer Austin Kitchens Inc., bottle 10 cases of the winner’s salsa for private consumption. Larry Blanton struck gold.
When all the entries had been tasted and the judging completed, Blanton’s fire roasted red salsa was the grand prize winner, and he soon set to work with Gail Calder of Austin Kitchens to convert his small, homestyle recipe to a formula for mass production. “Converting the recipe and maintaining the original flavor was lots of work, but Gail did a great job,” he recalls, adding that bottling the salsa “was something I had planned to do anyway at some point. Winning the competition just meant I got started sooner.”
After he tasted Calder’s test batch, Blanton gave the go-ahead, and Austin Kitchens produced 10 cases of his award-winning brew. He shared about half of the production run with family and friends in celebration and reserved the other half for the inevitable next step in the process.
Once Blanton saw how well his bottled product turned out, his passion was fueled; there was no turning back. Realizing he needed professional assistance, he hired the Primo Angeli agency of New York and San Francisco to do market tests, develop a name, and design a logo. That process took several months, what with the creation of original artwork and trademark searches to make sure the product name he’s chosen would be his free and clear. When we spoke last week, Blanton had recently posted a trademark application, and his Lava Foods will produce salsa under the ChiliChaser label. He’s eager to affix the spiffy new labels to the cases of salsa he has in reserve and keep moving forward. In response to a question about whether he plans to produce the salsa himself or hire a co-packer, Blanton said he was so pleased with Gail Calder’s work on the original bottling that he plans to approach Austin Kitchens about producing his product. Once those arrangements are made and product-liability insurance is in place, it will be time to pitch his salsa to distributors and grocery store chains. Blanton’s longtime avocation could very well turn into a second full-time job.
While Larry Blanton’s award-winning ChiliChaser Fire Roasted Salsa wasn’t ready in time for him to debut as a commercial bottler in this year’s competition, he was hardly idle. The salsa entrepreneur is always working on new recipes, and as an individual he entered a chipotle sauce, a green sauce, and two different special variety preparations. Blanton again came out on top, placing first in both the Red Sauce and Special Variety categories. With his proven track record as a crowd pleaser, it shouldn’t be long before there are several more salsas under the ChiliChaser banner. We’ll be sure to let you know when ChiliChaser salsa is available in Austin stores. 
This article appears in August 31 • 2001.