MEET THE MAKER

Funky’s Hot Sauce Factory has been in business since 2018, but Matt Mini has been making hot sauce for much longer than that.  It all started in the early 2000’s with his home pepper garden in Santa Rosa, CA where he and his family used to live. He had really fallen in love with growing their own food and especially, peppers.  Matt worked at a beer brewing company at the time and that’s where he learned all about fermentation.  So, he began fermenting the peppers and eventually experimenting with making some sauces.  For years, he gave the sauces away as Christmas presents and friends and family would tell him to try to get it into stores.  Matt & family moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2015 in search of a simpler life and he continued to produce sauces from home harvests.  In 2018, after being laid off from a construction job in Bellingham, Matt and his wife Rachel decided it was finally time to take the leap into the world of hot sauces. They started Funky's Hot Sauce Factory and Matt began taking handyman jobs on the side to pay the bills.

Nowadays, the peppers and other ingredients in their sauces are 100% Non-GMO and/or organic which they purchase from local farms in Whatcom and Skagit Counties when possible and they reserve their homegrown harvests for test batches.  One of their core values has always been to produce great tasting, well balanced sauce with loads of flavor along with the heat.  They pride themselves on delivering unique sauces to both hot sauce fanatics and those who have just begun to explore the hot sauce universe.  In these next couple of years Funky's Hot Sauce Factory hopes to move into their own facility, expand distribution across the US and into Canada and develop recipes for other condiments and of course, more hot sauce!  Also, although it is rewarding work, Matt looks forward to the day that he can stop taking handyman jobs and focus completely on hot sauces.

Since then Funky's has grown. In 2022 they went from local favorite to national acclaim when they won the “Screaming MiMi 2022 Grand World Champion” award at the NYC Hot Sauce Expo. Then their journey took another thrilling turn when their sauce Stellar Fuzz was featured in slot #3 of Hot Ones and it also became a Good Foods Foundation's finalist. In 2026 Funky’s Hot Sauce will once again be featured on the Hot Ones with Sean Evans (Season 29)! This marks Funky’s second time on the show, a huge milestone worth celebrating.