By Tadgh Byrne (2015)
You will have probably noticed it by now. If not gracefully rubbing shoulders with the salt and pepper at your local brunch joint, then perhaps on the shelves in artisan food stores. Or maybe even in various spicy wing recipes or Bloody Marys across town. Australia’s own Diemen’s sauce. So named after its secret ingredient: the Tasmanian Diemen pepper berry. In a city obsessed with flavour, how did three Canadians and their Aussie friend get their product on tables and into households across the city? I spent a month getting to know the guys and unravelling their secret recipe to success.
We’re sitting in a cafe on a busy St. Kilda street that was pivotal to their story in the early days. Reece, the artistic one of the four and the designer of its colourful label, is telling me how their various backgrounds and life passions have influenced his artwork. “The design of our labels and the brand itself, combines together several sources of inspiration: symbols of nostalgic Australiana, folklore, magical potions but also elements of bbq, petrol head and street culture. We’ve been heavily influenced by a lot of categories of business, retail, tech, sports, arts, music and fashion for many big clients, so we’re able to draw upon a lot of different influences and experiences.” His business partner Richard, the ‘brains’ of the company continues, “when I first saw Reece’s sketches for the labels, his use of the Tasmanian Devil and, now extinct, Tasmanian Tiger were the initial stand outs but there’s also a lot in the detail. One of my favourite symbols is the white star in the centre, from the Australian national flag.” The artwork is a strong representation of everything Diemen’s is about and it becomes clear early on that they invest as much into the what goes onto the bottle as what goes into it.
The label and the sauce have garnered much global acclaim of late with the team picking up a couple of acknowledgements at the 2016 World Hot Sauce awards; 2nd best hot sauce label design and 2nd best Louisiana style hot sauce. Global domination is high on the agenda for The Diemen’s Group. “We’ve made have made strong strides in Sydney over the past six months and this year we’ve started to focus more on Perth and Adelaide, both of which seems to have a strong desire for hot sauce. We’ve made a lot of logistic progress in preparing our sauces for overseas markets. We’ll be selling in the UK in the next couple months and on the west coast in the US,” says Reece.
It was in the UK is where Derrick and Douglas Compeau, the twins behind the secret recipe, first met the Diemen’s managing director, Richard Hack. He recalls how they introduced him not only to hot sauce but also how they all became like family. “I was on my own in London, so I didn’t know anyone else but them and the rest of our sales crew, so we became pretty tight. We did door to door street sales and cold calling. I think you tend to bond with the team you work with over that sort of job. You have to manage your time and keep your motivation. You also have to handle a fair share of negativity and as a team you work together to keep one another on the front foot,” Richard says about his future business partners.
The recipe dates back the Compeau brothers’ early childhood days in Ontario, Canada. They grew up with an extreme addiction to Frank’s Red Hot, a Louisiana-style sauce. During their teen years, if they got in trouble (as they often did), their parents would take away their hot sauce as punishment, so they learned how to make their own. They worked in pubs, sports bars and crab shacks throughout Canada before heading to London. By that stage, the early versions of the recipe were already underway. “I remember they were always experimenting. They used to carry around small bottles they had re-filled with their homemade batches of hot sauce. The boys would splash it on chips or pub meals or anything really. We were on the road a lot so it became like BYO flavour. They would always offer anyone a taste. Their enthusiasm for hot sauce is so contagious, Doug and Derrick pretty much turn everyone they meet into chilli fans,” Reece recalls. yes
Richard returned to his native Melbourne to start his own marketing and design agency, Taboo, with co-founder Andrew Mackinnon. During his fifteen years at the agency, he worked with a lot of big companies, many of which were food based.
It is here that he spotted the artistic talents of Reece Hobbins, who has since gone on to gain worldwide acclaim for his design work. Reece, who is originally from Alberta, Canada, also runs a charitable organisation called ‘Save By Art’ and spends his free time creating artwork for his website editevening.com, as well as playing ice hockey. But it was a shared love of food that that drew the four boys together.
It wasn’t until years later, in 2014 when the four friends launched the sauce in Melbourne. “We were looking for a pet project and product driven business idea to take on outside of your client work and we knew the boys had a great recipe they’ve been making over the years. We decided a hot sauce was a common love amongst us all and so we set out on trying to find on a solution that could solidify us as a truly australian hot sauce,” Reece states. During a trip to Tasmania, Doug came across the Diemen pepper and it didn’t take very long for the boys to discover it was the perfect ingredient to integrate into their recipe.
When dried, the Diemen pepper berry is five times stronger than a regular black peppercorn. Within this pepper berry lies polygodial – a hot compound, which starts with a unique fruity flavour with hints of Australian rainforest. It has a Szechuan kind of heat on the tip of your tongue or front of mouth. It doesn’t linger for very long and has a slight numbing sensation, almost similar to what you get what from a natural horseradish or wasabi.
It is this unique flavour and clever marketing that means that Diemen’s now sits on tables across hundreds of food outlets throughout Melbourne and increasingly across Australia. There up to around 300 cafe’s and restaurants now stocking the sauce, primarily in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania. It seems the years of hardship in the London days have truly come full circle and paid their dividends. Years of door-to-door sales have made selling their passion an easy feat for the Diemen’s group. They have just started to get into the WA and SA markets and recently been stocked at IGA nationally. Rather than spending money on advertising campaigns, Diemen’s relies largely on product placement, branding and word of mouth to get its products out there. “I think Diemen’s is well received by people because we work hard on the the balance of flavour, the integrity of the product, and the quality of ingredients. It’s also uniquely Australian,” says Richard.
The company has a strong focus on increasing awareness through trial of product and creating strong associations with leaders in food and culture. They have been active in the usual social media channels, but also have had a very strong focus on key venues in major cities. They’ve been very successful in getting the sauce on the tables at the best restaurants, bars, cafes as well as more accessible places, such as Grill’d.
Burgers are amongst the latest in a long line of Melbourne food obsessions that help helped fuel its recent obsession with hot sauce. Recent trends; Mexican, Korean and Vietnamese cuisine, all come with their own requisite spicy topping, but it is Melbourne’s latest dalliance with BBQ and American diner food where local examples, like Diemen’s, have really come into their own. North American countries have long had an appetite for hot sauce, but Australia’s catching up fast.
In addition for being loved for its flavour, it has been proven that chilli might be one of the only addictive substances that are actually good for your health. Not only does it contain antioxidants and vitamin C, but has also been proven to be a mood enhancer. When nerve cells receive pain from the heat, the body releases its natural pain killer, endorphins, resulting in a slight high and subsequent craving for more in the aftermath. The body responds much in the same way as it would respond to opiates.
The cafe in which we are sitting, Dr. Jekyll (named after the character believed to be addicted to Laudenum, a potion that transforms him into the reckless Mr. Hyde), was one of the first to stock Diemen’s. Breakfast has finished. We’re waiting on our second round of coffees. Rich’s face comes alive as we begin to discuss our shared passion for classic cars. If he’s not driving the Diemen’s work vehicle, a mint condition 1974 Holden 1 Kingswood ute, he cruises around his home city in a 1974 Alfa Romeo GTV 2000.
But he’s a humble man and hasn’t lost sight of his London days as a door-to-door sales man with the twins. “It was tough at the time but when it came to selling the sauce, we were the perfect candidates. Sales were second nature to us, amplified by the fact it was our own product!”
Although Richard remains their Melbourne representative, the twins have largely been ‘face’ of the company. They’ve been travelling extensively across the world attending various food events and trade shows, but have made sure that product development has remained an integral part of the company. Derrick is currently in Canada but will be back to London soon in order to work closely with their UK agent. The agent they have chosen to work with has a fair bit of experience with people new to the scene; they own a restaurant in Cornwall where their chosen head chef, Anton Piotrowski, won MasterChef in 2012.
In recent years, Doug has been living in Sydney for strategic as well as family reasons. He spends much of his time in his industrial kitchen experimenting and perfecting new his recipes for future products. When not working, he’s playing football with his two boys or watching cooking programs with crisps and hot sauce.
Doug calls me up and we are having a long chat comparing the dining habits of both Melbourne and Sydney. It’s seems Sydney prefers the extra hot ‘Stinger’ sauce, made with extra habanero chillis and they sell far more of the milder, ‘Original Sauce’ in Melbourne. He tells me of his plans for the coming weekend. The three boys are to be reunited at the first birthday of their favourite pub, the Rochester hotel in Fitzroy. “Being a traditional crab shack style kitchen they know their hot sauce so it was an important endorsement for us having them take on Diemen’s. Both our businesses sort of began around the same time so it’s awesome to see them charging on,” Doug comments about the pub, recalling how key of a venue it was for Diemen’s in the early days.
When the Diemen’s guys get together, and once business is out of the way, it’s all about food. “We like to hang out at our stockists’, switching it up each time to spread the love. Otherwise a lot of the time we have a BBQ at Richie’s house with his Rolls Royce of a BBQ smoker. We put together a big menu. Derrick and I will bring new product ideas. Reece brings the Craft Beers,” says Doug.
There are two new products on the horizon aimed for release in early 2017. Neither of them are hot sauces. So in addition to building distribution and visiting customers, all of the guys are heavily invested in product development at the moment. Reece closes with saying that, “the range of possibilities is endless with Diemen’s and although hot sauce may seem exclusive to some, there many different categories of products that we’ll be exploring in the foreseeable future.”
Tadgh Byrne 