u/CarterGee

First off, I love chili crunch / chili crisp / whatever you want to call it. So I started making some in my free time. Slowly my friends started asking for it after dinners at our place. Then I started making little jars for them. And that led me to wanting to sell at my neighborhood farmers market in Noe Valley, San Francisco. Unfortunately, we didn't classify as a food item that could be made under California's Cottage Food Act.

Instead giving up, I decided that I would triple down and do everything I needed to do to make a shelf stable condiment that California would let me sell. Well... That ended up being a journey. Did you know that's actually, like, really hard to do?

We spent a year on food safety paperwork so we could legally sell a jar of chili crunch - which we officially were able to do today! With (truly) minimal marketing, we shipped 100 preorders, 25 more the first morning.

Even though I'm full time at Google and my husband works in FinTech, we've found the time to make chili crunch out of a shared commissary kitchen on Treasure Island. Two of us, no employees. I like to joke that we can find the time to do this because we don't train for marathons or go on long bike rides.

The product itself a Californian take rather than a traditional Sichuan / Asian one — and that' really important for us to be upfront about because we're two white dudes. We aren't trying to imitate, but rather create something we love in a uniquely western style.

We use an unreasonable amount of garlic slices and shallots fried in avocado oil. Uniquely, we also found a process to de-seed each of our five different chili peppers, so what you get is texture and aroma instead of straight heat and leathery seeds. Also important is that we went with a old-timey newspaper branding vs what you'll normally see on the shelf (ie, dragons, lanterns, grandmas, etc)

Candidly, the recipe turned out to be the easy half. To sell it legally in California:

• LLC, DBA, and insurance
• Better Process Control School acidified foods course from University of Michigan
• Sourcing of all the shipping products / jars (ULine is... basically the only option)
• CA Food Manager Safety Certification
• Lab-validated water activity (0.339 — that's what makes it shelf stable without acidifying it)
• CDPH Processed Foods Registration
• Leased time in a licensed commissary
• HACCP plan with four critical control points
• Label compliance: ingredient order, net weight, allergen advisory, date labeling
• Facility inspection
• And, if I'm being totally transparent, one email (read: desperate plea) to my District Supervisor

It all took about a year before a single jar was for sale.

But, like I said, today we launched! And we're really excited to see where it goes. We've learned so much along the way to get to this point — and I hope I get lucky enough to have the opportunity to learn how to scale this up. We've started approaching smaller grocery stores and have our first pop-up tomorrow. Getting into farmers markets takes a LOT longer than I thought it would, but we're still trying there!

For those wondering, we spend about 6hrs per week getting our ingredients, making, and jarring which gives us about 125-150 jars.

Pricing was difficult, but I have to say a combination of Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT helped us find a sweet spot we're happy with. "Calculating cost-per-jar" is kind of the perfect task for AI and it saved us a ton of time.

Happy to answer anything on the regulatory side. It's badly documented and I ended up working most of it out from primary sources. So if you have any questions, let me know!