Phil and Melissa Pelletier, owners of Smokin’ Tin Roof. Photo by Christine Carignan.
Melissa and Phil Pelletier are bringing the heat as they grow their craft condiment business. Melissa, a health care worker with a degree in environmental education, and her husband Phil, a former IT technician, found their recipe for success in 2017 when they launched Smokin’ Tin Roof.
In the kitchen of their Manchester home, the Pelletiers experimented with home-grown and locally sourced ingredients, including ghost peppers from Melissa’s garden, to create hot sauce recipes. Grow a Pear, Burnin’ Raspberry, Bacon Stout Mustard and their Scovie award-winning sauce, Smoky Peppah, are a few of the gourmet sauce flavors they sell at craft fairs, state fairs and specialty food stores across NH.
They committed to turning their passion into a business as Phil left his IT career and the couple invested $5,000 into equipment, packaging, whole ingredients and rent for a commercial kitchen at Creative Chef Kitchen in Derry. Not all of its 11 sauces are high on the Scoville scale (which measures the heat of peppers). Some are made with just a touch of homemade ghost pepper powder.
It takes the Pelletiers about four to six hours to create one batch of sauce, which produces 300 five-ounce jars. With the recent supply chain issues, Melissa says production time has increased due to shortages of the bottles and whole ingredients they use.
To date, the Pelletiers have sold 15,000 bottles and jars of sauces, which range from $5.99 to $9.99. The Pelletiers say they entered 2020 in a strong financial position after a successful holiday season. When the pandemic hit, profits plummeted 50% as fairs and expos were cancelled, and 1,000 bottles of expired sauce had to be destroyed.
The couple put the business into “hibernation,” Melissa says. They negotiated contracts, held purchases of raw materials and saved on their usual craft fair attendance fees. Phil expanded the company’s wholesale line, traveling statewide to farm stands and local retailers and was able to sign on nine stores.
In 2021, the business generated about $50,000 in sales, most from fairs, though Smokin’ Tin Roof sauces can now be found at 21 specialty food stores in NH.
The Pelletiers expect to release three new flavors in 2022 and exhibit at more than 40 events. The couple hopes they can soon buy their own facility and expand their wholesale business to grocery stores. For more information, visit smokintinroof.com.
Written by Taylor Harper, a student at University of NH-Manchester and a participant in the Young Reporters Project, a joint venture of Business NH Magazine and UNH-Manchester to introduce students to journalism.
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