American Beat: Tune In, Drop Out, Make Sauce

One of the great things about this country is that if you're tired of your mundane 9-to-5 existence, you can always quit your job and start making hot sauce. This little bit of insight into America's vast entrepreneurial possibilities comes courtesy of John Hard, a man wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt with chili peppers all over it.

I ran into hard-and a dozen hot-sauce makers like him-at last week's International Fancy Food and Confection Show, an annual trade fair for specialty-food makers, the customers who love them and the journalists who love free samples.

Hard may not be everyone's embodiment of the American Dream (after all, how many of us would wear a shirt like that?), but he should be. A few years ago, he grew sick of the daily grind of running a company that designs systems to put out fires in office buildings and gave it all up to indulge his passion: starting fires in people's mouths.

His Ohio-based company, CaJohn's Fiery Foods, now offers more than 70 hot products. "We've expanded 250 percent in both of the last two years and we're on pace to do the same [this year]," Hard said.

For seven years, I have covered the fancy food show in search of an insight into the American Dream through its bizarre specialty foods. One year, the hottest products were chocolate bars with holograms etched onto them ("The most imaginative confections on the planet!"). Another year was The Year of the Jerky ("It will satisfy the health-conscious consumer and the jerky lover in you," an ostrich jerky maker told me).

This year, a group of asparagus-growers from Michigan held me in thrall for 40 minutes while they talked about about Esparrago, a new, no-fat guacamole made out of asparagus rather than fatty avocado ("Did you know that Michigan is the third-largest producer of asparagus?" Perry Dekryger of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board asked me. To be honest, I'd actually thought it was fourth).