Community Highlights: Meet Jay Gleaton of Powerful Pepper Company

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jay Gleaton.

Hi Jay, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The Powerful Pepper Company’s origins literally grew out of the garden. Me and my dad shared a community garden plot for years and there I learned how to cultivate peppers, tomatoes, squash, you name it. It helped me to learn how to nurture and care for plants and with produce it is its own reward. The you get to eat fruits of your labor so to speak.

Anyone who has gardened know how productive healthy pepper plants can be, and habaneros are no different. Maybe a few years into gardening we were shopping and found a 4 pack of pepper plants. These were habaneros. I knew they were hot, what I did not know was how many peppers you can get from a single plant. Most of the time you get a fair amount of tomatoes off of a plant but any extras are easy to give away.

With a few pounds of habaneros coming off of four plants every week I had to scramble to find the most delicious way to preserve all of those spicy peppers for use all year long. All of this happening long before you could just ask google what to do. So we took a deep dive into looking at ways to preserve peppers, and then in an ah-ha moment, with some mangoes sitting on the kitchen counter and grill already working outside the condo the first iteration of smoked mango habanero hot sauce was born.

From there the story is probably matched by many in the hot sauce making community. The sauce was good. My friends wanted it, my family wanted it, and I started thinking this could be a thing! I was taking it to bars and restaurants, unlabeled bottles, definitely sketchy so I started my learning journey. I have to mention MJ and Nuevo Laredo Cantina, a local (and the best) Mexican spot in Atlanta for always supporting me and keeping our products available for their customers. Support and encouragement from establishments like theirs was invaluable to a fledgling company like mine.

How do you take a product to market? Well the first thing I did was go get knowledge, I took the Berkley course for BCPS (Better Process and Control School) which is part biology and part cooking and learning how to can at scale as well as getting my managers certificate for safe serv so that when the time came I would be ready for my work in the commercial kitchen. I was partly familiar with all of this since I had worked as a short order cook as well as in french fine dining at that point so was comfortable with the processes and the equipment I would need. I recommend all aspiring food manufacturers out there to learn how to do things right in your processes when getting started to reduce the chances of making someone sick by mistake.

After that it was putting together all of the other pieces I would need to get this thing going. There are a million ways to do things but I carved out a path that was right for me by calling around and finding someone who could help me manufacture the product but who was willing to let me remain a part of the process. I also had some friends with a marketing firm, I leaned on them a lot in the early years having them build my first website and worked with their designers to put together our logo. I absolutely think that the initial cost of starting the business with them was the most valuable thing I did. We registered our trademark, and did all the lawyery things. All this is just to say that I put my head down and went to work identifying all of the pieces I needed to make the business viable and then checked them off a long, long list.

Once all of the business items were out of the way I made my first batch of commercial hot sauce. I went from making a 100 bottles at a time at home to 1200 bottles all at once. With the minimums that the co-packer had in place it was a bit of a shock going from a creative to a sales man. That first year we sold maybe 700 bottles by going to events almost every weekend. Barely breaking even or losing money. We continued the next year and I decided to make a second sauce. We settled on a serrano, pineapple, and plantain hot sauce that was just excellent. By then I was starting to work with local artists for the bottle art and was starting to gain some traction with my products. I added a Hot Picked Okra, and a Salsa to the mix so I had a few categories of things to sell and people had more options to choose from at the festivals and markets.

Then COVID-19 hit.

Open Air Markets were done. I started ramping up online work and we had some great sales out of the gate and then those dried up as well. I decided to go into development and basically put sales on the back burner. I had some money saved up and decided to spend it on the company. By the time we came out of COVID I had gone from 6 products to almost 16. Since then we have refined our processes and in the summer of 2024 I got approval on a kitchen build that I had been working on for a while to manufacture all of my spices in house myself so that is a big achievement and a big step in our journey.

As a part of that new spice making facility we are launching a complete re-packaging and label re-design for our spices (Available Now) as well as a brand new steak seasoning that came about from demand from customers and as part of our talks with some of our partners like Frazie’s Meat and Market (my local butcher shop). You can see a mock-up of the updated spice packaging in the photos I shared. One of the great pleasures I get out of the business is the design and creative process. Even though I’m not a designer myself I love the process and I love the tangible results. One thing I do is keep a place on my website so you can go and find out about the local artists that we partner with and see more of their work.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As with any small business venture we face a number of challenges. My largest one is that I also own and operate another small business so it is always a balancing act with time, my most precious resource.

There have been challenges lately with manufacturing as the current administration cracks down on immigration, even legal immigration for the farms that we work with is a challenge leaving them under staffed. So we work through product delays and do the best we can with the tools we have.

I do always tell people that businesses exist to solve problems so we take them all in stride and work on ways to solve them as they come up.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Lately we’ve been working with a great marketing firm Southern Exposure, and I have been able to spend some time making cooking videos for social media and really expanding the recipe section of my website to teach people how to make spicy foods from around the world. I love cooking and this whole venture has been a way for me to share my passion for spice and cooking with a much larger community than I could have imagined just a few short years ago. My dreams are BIG, I’m making sauces and products but what I’m really doing is developing a brand. A brand that I love and that hopefully many others will come to love as well.

I still keep my hands dirty in the garden and grow rare pepper varietals that can be found in some of our small batch and small run products. My products are proudly manufactured by me locally in Georgia and Powerful Pepper Company is a locally owned, operated, and boot-strapped small business. We have been fortunate to have had many of our products earn awards from the top spicy food shows and competitions around the country. The most recent being a 2025 Golden Chili Award for our Strawberry Death Spiral Chili Jam, a sweet HOT strawberry jam that we like to put on our chicken biscuits for breakfast.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Please check us out online and sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop. You don’t have to spend a dollar to support us, just like and share on social media and that helps a ton! Otherwise cone and say hi. I love meeting new spice heads out and about!

Pricing:

• from $7 to $50

Contact Info:

• Website: http://powerfulpepper.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerfulpepperco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/powerfulpepperco
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@powerfulpepperco6687

Image Credits
All photos by Jay Gleaton