With summer right around the corner, things sure are starting to heat up around here, but that’s not the only thing sending heat waves around here. Chef David Heatley has been in the food service industry since he was 13 years old and after more than two decades of working in local pubs, upscale hotels and country clubs, owning restaurants, participating in Tasty videos, and auditioning for Hell’s Kitchen he’s now dedicated himself to creating the best tasting hot sauce out there. What started out as a small pepper farming hobby, during the COVID pandemic in 2020, soon became a full-fledged family-owned hot sauce business better known as Chef Heatley’s Hot Pepper Farm.
What makes Chef Healtey’s classic hot sauces different from all the rest? According to Chef Heatley, every hot pepper on his farm is grown organically, without the need for chemicals, pesticides, or fertilizers. Not only can you buy sauces like Big Sun, Bacon Chipotle, Mango BBQ, and Roasted Reaper, but you can also grow your own super hot peppers at home since Chef Heatley also sells his pepper seeds online; while they may not be the easiest plants to grow, the chef has also included growing instructions for each consumer’s convenience.
In this case we think it’s fair to say that the family who grows peppers together stays together, seeing as though Chef Heatley runs the show with his wife and two daughters. Funny enough, if you checkout the team page, it seems that Chef Heatley has hired the world’s youngest CEO and CFO, but we’re sure that daughters Blake and Kara run a tight ship.
Before these tasty hot sauces can enhance a consumer’s breakfast tacos, BBQ, steaks, omlettes, or pizza slices though, Chef Heatley and his team had to make sure that the right traceability information was found on each and every bottle, packet, and product.
What happens when outdated coding and marking practices can’t take the heat? Let’s just say that when the local health department began requiring new customer lot coding requirements, they went running out of the kitchen, leaving Chef Heatley and his team looking for a more efficient way of adding information onto their products. Why are lot codes required to be present on products before consumers can get their hands on them? According to Unleashed, an inventory management software,
Thanks to lot numbers and lot tracking, it’s possible for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to track, trace, and access information about their products at any stage of the the supply chain. Lot codes not only provide traceability, but they help to stay organized, identify issues, reveal trends, and prevent product adulteration and conterfeit.
When Chef David Heatley first reached out to our Sneed experts the main concern was finding a coder that would meet the expectations of the local Chicago health department. Since their product volume was still relatively small, it wasn’t necessary or possible to implement a traditional continuous inkjet printer; rather the team over at Chef Healtey’s Hot Pepper Farm was looking for a much simpler coding solution. The SNEED-JET® Titan T6 Portable Handheld printer proved to be the right fit for Chef Heatley since it could produce prints on the fly and virtually anywhere.
Adding lot codes doesn’t have to be complicated; in fact with the SNEED-JET® Titan T6 you can print at any angle, on endless surfaces, with a variety of ink colors, without having to worry about ink spills, smudged prints, etc.