If you plan on selling hot sauce in stores or on a large commercial scale than there are several things you need to know in order to follow the proper recipe protection, health guidelines and marketing tactics, without the threat of operations getting shut down or the possibility of fines. You do not need a team of costly lawyers and accountants but there are three very important processes to understand about the legal aspects of selling hot sauce.
If you want to sell your brand of hot sauce there are several common principles that need to be followed to ensure you are making, selling and marketing your hot sauce without running into legal issues that could shut down business.
Protect your recipe with a trade secret, find a commercial kitchen to make sauce or register a manufacturing facility with the FDA and label sauce without any misconception or mislabeling. This will require local regulations and inspection in the state and county that you live in to obtain a license to sell sauce across the country.
Guide To The Hot Sauce Business
Keep track of you hot sauce creations
Creating hot sauce in the kitchen can be a science and if you don’t carefully document your creations…a great hot sauce recipe can be lost and forgotten forever. I am always experimenting with different recipes to create an original hot sauce and often fail to log what I have done. Now! I have created and use the Hot Sauce Recipe Worksheet to record and file all of my recipes. Download the Hot Sauce Recipe Worksheet for FREE. Now that you have managed all your great hot sauce recipes it’s time to mass produce them.
Update! 7/14/21! Now a fillable PDF!
Document your hot sauce recipe
If you have a special sauce…document everything. If you have a sauce that you make from a recipe you have held onto in your head document it as your Trade Secret on an electronic file, PDF, Excel spreadsheet or Word doc. A trade secret will hold up in court as a legal document only if you precisely log the process your hot sauce undergoes during production. According to nolo.com the Trade Secret needs to follow two principles:
You may think that doing this will give someone a better chance of getting hold of the recipe and duplicating it but it is this documented process that verifies it is yours. Take these important steps when you have finally perfected your sauce and find a great establishment to mass produce it.
The United States Patented and Trademark Office (USPTO) has lots of additional information of protecting a Trade Secret. This office will also handle the registration of a Trademark but that is not necessarily related to your recipe. A Trademark protects your logo or phase used in marketing. Search the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) to find if your logo is unique.
There is another process of protecting your hot sauce recipe and that is with a patent. It could be difficult, time consuming and costly to patent a recipe but it can be done. Read 3 Ways To Protect a Hot Sauce Recipe. Once you have legally protected your hot sauce recipe it is now time to find a location to produce it.
FAQ
Do you need a license to sell food on Amazon?
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