Photo By Andrew Revelos | BMCS Harry Hladun, assigned to Naval Support Activity Washington, displays some of his...... read more read more
Before Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Harry Hladun dedicated his life to serving in the Navy, before the trials and tragedy that arrived all too soon, it started with family… one that happened to bond over a shared love of spicy – very spicy – food. Many years and voyages later, the love that centered his family has grown into an award-winning business that honors two siblings who are now gone, but not forgotten. The endeavor reached a new level of success last month when one of Hladun’s hot sauce varieties took home a second place “Screaming Mimi” award in the mustard category at the New York City Hot Sauce Expo.
When Hladun is on duty – pretty much all the time for a Navy senior chief petty officer – he serves as the senior enlisted leader to the Naval Support Activity Washington (NSAW) Port Operations Department responsible for the Ceremonial Barge Chesapeake and its missions on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. In between his mentorship of junior Sailors and supporting NSAW, he somehow finds time to not only sell his sauces at local farmer’s markets, but also continue the search for the next great capsicum rush with new hot peppers, formulas and experiments.
“If anybody truly wants to do something, they’re going to find the time to do it right,” he said.
While the business got its official start in 2015, the real journey began when Hladun and his younger brothers, Jon and Derek, would visit their father on the weekends as kids and indulge in spicy foods. Unsurprisingly to anyone with a brother, the eating of ever-spicier foods sometimes took on a competitive nature and became a recurring theme of family events.
“When my brothers and I were kids, we liked wings and all that other hot stuff,” said Hladun. “My dad would get these hot peppers and we would always challenge each other as brothers. Dumb stuff… kid’s stuff. It was always just something there. He’d grow [hot peppers] in the garden and we’d see him on weekends and eat them. My dad would sit back and laugh at us.”
The brothers maintained that passion even as Hladun left to begin his career in the Navy in 1998. He would travel the world with the Navy and expand his knowledge of (and an impressive tolerance for) fiery foods.
His brothers stayed home in Pennsylvania, where Derek became a cook on the Philadelphia restaurant scene with a promising side project: in his free time, he developed the basis of what would become some of the endeavor’s signature flavors. “This was actually my brother’s thing,” said Hladun. “He was making hot sauce and living in Philly, hustling on the corners and a group of friends said ‘this is really good, you should sell this.’”
The venture soon expanded from street hustle to a farmer’s market. Sales were brisk. “It was like oh, this could really be something,” said Hladun. A friend of Derek’s helped develop a logo, but life soon took an unexpected and tragic turn.
“There were some hard times,” said Hladun. “I told Derek that if this is something you’re passionate about – I don’t know that much about hot sauce or anything like that – but I do have some money that I can help you out with if you present me a solid business plan, if we can move forward and you’re serious. He ended up passing away, but since I made him a promise I rolled with it and started the company in his memory.”
The Love Sauce LLC was born, though keeping the promise and actually turning a dream into a business was uncharted waters for Hladun. With the help of Jon, the brothers cataloged Derek’s recipe notes – some were clear enough, while others were fragmentary and in need of reformulation.
“I tinkered with the recipes that he originally drafted, and came up with The One, which was the first sauce I released,” he said. “I had to do my own research… figure out how to do this. I made a batch that was similar, but I was like eh… it turns out he was fermenting the sauces and I didn’t know anything about that. So I read up on it and I was like wow, you can kill somebody if you don’t know what you’re doing with food safety, and I don’t want to do that! I turned it into a cooked/blended sauce and it tasted almost identical to the sauce he was fermenting, just with a different method.”
But perfecting the recipes for larger scale production was only part of the learning curve. The other – complying with exacting food safety regulations and putting the business details into legal order – was even more difficult. “I found a small-batch food packer and had to send them samples and get FDA approval,” he said. “Once that is done you get a packet which tells you the procedures you have to follow, the numbers you have to meet, how to get the labeling right... people have no idea what is involved.”
The hard work soon paid off. Once the FDA process was complete and production underway, sales grew, at first online. By 2020 Hladun was selling at the College Park Farmer’s Market on Saturdays; he expanded his one-man sales operation to the Olney Farmer and Artists Market on Sundays starting in 2022. He also perfected new sauces such as El Amore, the second in his lineup, and started attending festivals and entering his sauces into contests.
While learning every facet of the business essentially by himself, Hladun was able to lean on the foundation of cooking and self-reliance he learned from his mother. “I grew up cooking,” he said. “My mom taught us how to cook when we were kids. My parents were divorced so we had to learn a lot of things at an early age. We were taking out the garbage, doing dishes, cooking and cleaning as she was working to take care of us.”
Entrepreneurship was another early life lesson, with Hladun taking on lawn mowing and snow shoveling gigs before he was even a teenager. By age 15, he was managing a crew of helpers. “One of the things both parents instilled in me was that there are basically only a couple of things in life that have solid value; two of the most important are time and money,” he said. “Never waste people’s time and never waste people’s money.”
Life in the Navy also provided a useful foundation. “Reading complex stuff and having to learn new skills throughout my career definitely helped, but learning to really seek feedback is also something I learned in the Navy,” he said. “Of course your friends will tell you they like something, and maybe your real friends will tell you when something is bad. That’s just real. Until you get outside of that and get it from random people, that’s when you get your real feedback.”
But tragedy was not done with the Hladun family, however, and Jon passed away unexpectedly in 2021. While the healing process is ongoing, Hladun finds some solace in the legacy he and his brothers created. He plans to invest in and grow the business even further when he retires in May.
“Next year when I retire I plan on putting more money and effort into expanding,” said Hladun. “Five out of our eight sauces have won very reputable awards from big people in the industry. When it’s not just your friends and family that like it, you’ve obviously got something. The success feels good.”
As Hladun’s personal and professional resilience continues to makes waves in a highly-competitive industry, he offers some free advice to Sailors thinking about embarking on their own entrepreneurial voyage. “Research… and don’t quit your day job,” he laughs. “Don’t put everything into it until you learn whether it’s something you really want to do. There’s always more to it than just having an idea.”
While hard work and the will to succeed are not on any FDA-approved ingredient list, it’s clear that they are key components to The Love Sauce and Hladun’s success. But the number one non-listed ingredient is love – for his family, for his craft and for his customers. In fairness, it’s right there in the name.
“When people tell you that your hot sauce is the only one they use, the only one in their fridge, it feels really good” Hladun said. “I like making people happy.”
| Date Taken: | 11.30.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 12.07.2023 14:32 |
| Story ID: | 459417 |
| Location: | WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, US |
| Web Views: | 482 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Spicy Love – Senior Chief’s Sauce Venture Earns Accolades, by Andrew Revelos, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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