Heat You Can Handle

by

Less burn, more joy: How the owners of HYCH hot sauces make heat for everyday use

Hot sauce. Anyone with a social media account has watched its transition over the last decade from a bottled product to a vast world of gimmicks and gotchas. It was thrust into public consciousness and conversation with the help of celebrities, TikTok challenges, and a YouTube talk show. The death-themed branding, from skulls and crossbones to grenades to mouths engulfed in flames, says it all: only the most daring with the strongest wills to survive may enter.

But on the shelves at your neighborhood Roth’s and local farm store is a hot sauce with a different story, and it’s good news for folks who just want to enjoy a home-cooked meal with a little extra heat inspired by global flavors – without having to call the fire safety inspector.

HYCH (pronounced “hitch”) stands for Heat You Can Handle, and it’s crafted and bottled right here in Salem by Chef Matt Kuerbis and his wife, Catharine Kuerbis. Matt has worked in the food scene since the early 90s, first in various restaurant jobs and then as the executive chef of Portland’s Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. Catharine taps into her expertise in public relations as she handles much of the marketing and business strategy behind the brand. After many adventures abroad, they have created products that provide a balanced and bold complement to meals.

We had a conversation with Matt and Catharine about HYCH, the journey that led them to their homegrown business, and why being in Salem is a win for their small business.

Their sauces

HYCH currently offers five award-winning sauces. 

“Our most popular flavor is the Nashville,” Matt said. That is, their Nashville spicy red sauce, meant to be drizzled over fried chicken or tossed over wings. It’s a three-out-of-five on the flame scale, according to the label.

They also have Bibimbap (one out of five flames), a Korean-style marinade flavor; the Guajillo (two out of five), often used on tacos or breakfast burritos; the Tamarind, a tangy and sweet ode to Thai flavors that can easily be used on Pad Thai or, for the more open-minded, over ice cream for dessert; and the Pineapple (three flames out of five – their spiciest offering), a sweet and hot dipping sauce or marinade inspired by Matt’s experiences in Costa Rica.

Their story

In Matt’s description, both he and Catharine are “adventurous people in life.” They got together in 2014. He was getting ready for a trip to Costa Rica and Catharine, who had just sold her part of a business, decided to come along. They found jobs at a retreat center in the mountains.

“While we were there was when this was born, because living in Costa Rica is hard to make enough money to be comfortable. We were like, ‘we need to start a business.’”

Matt had landed various cooking gigs on their travels, and had made sauces at two of them. He thought, “Well, we could maybe bottle this stuff.”

They started their first sauce production in September of 2016 after they had just moved to Salem.

“We were just making it in our kitchen,” Matt said. “We did get into the Salem farmers market as our first market.”

They started, under their original name Hoss Soss, to get in front of more people with an event called “Hot Sauce Happy Hour” at Prost!, a bar in Portland. 

Catharine is bashful about their beginnings. “The bottles looked really…”

“Terrible,” Matt said.

“They were 10-ounce woozy bottles. It was a very homegrown design,” Catharine said. “We ordered stickers on VistaPrint. And nothing was shelf stable, so we just had to take a cooler with us everywhere we went. Our first farmers markets, our first holiday events we just had a big cooler full of hot sauce. I’m really quite frankly shocked that anyone bought any hot sauce from us.”

Matt is a little less shocked. “It’s the allure of a homegrown product.”

The following year they went on to work with a graphic designer on a logo and built their website. After a change in name and branding, and several years of finding the right business and bottle process, the couple now focuses on wholesale. 

HYCH sauces can be purchased around Salem at Roth’s, EZ Orchards, Bauman’s Farm, and Willamette Valley Pie Company. More broadly, they can be found at Market of Choice, New Seasons, QFC, and Zupan’s Markets.

They say Salem, as a smaller city, is the ideal market for HYCH.

“Pre-COVID, Salem is on this trajectory for food. People are opening different places and there is a desire to be kind of like Portland in terms of the food scene. COVID kind of botched a lot of things up of course, but I think there is this desire to have next-level food stuff going on here,” Matt said. 

“We’ve said for years that we’re happy we’re based in Salem because it is a much smaller business community than, say, Portland. We were able to network more easily and everyone was super supportive at the farmers market. You would start to see the same people, regular customers. We joined the Chamber of Commerce for a couple years. I think being in Salem is a win for a small business,” Catharine said.

Turning down the heat

“We had spent some time looking at the hot sauce industry,” Matt said.

“Once you started making sauces we brought home sauces we’d see at the store,” Catharine said. “Then we’d get home and try it and it was so hot. It was all habanero. You couldn’t eat it.”

“Matt likes to cook with sauces, but if the sauce is too hot, you can only use a couple drops.”

In hindsight, they had had the conversation about how so many hot sauces had intolerable heat levels with many people. 

“From a business perspective, why in the world would I create something that you’re only going to drop a few drops on here and there. You’re not going to have a successful business with a novelty item,” Matt said.

This thinking went beyond the flavors.

“We chose a more unique bottle shape so we can stand out, but also it has this wide neck so people are going to pour out a lot of sauce,” Catharine said. 

In Matt’s recipes, he encourages people to use the whole bottle. And why not, if instead of inflicting spicy panic, it enhances your favorite dishes with exotic flavors.

What’s next? 

Matt has developed a number of sauces over the years that they never brought to market due to the give and take of a wholesale business.

“For grocery stores, a lot of times they aren’t going to take all five flavors. They’re going to say ‘what are your best sellers?’” he said. 

For that reason, the focus hasn’t been on churning out new sauces, but on getting their current offerings to a wider audience and making hot sauce more accessible to the average consumer, both because of lower heat levels and because cooking with those sauces requires few other ingredients to make a well-rounded dish.

While Matt and Catharine previously led international travel retreats, they have considered starting them up at a more local level, again, making their passion more accessible. On that note, Catharine said, “stay tuned.”

This story originally ran in Press Play Salem issue 23 ( Spring 2025)