There is little dispute, the COVID-19 pandemic was tough on businesses, particularly those in the hospitality sector.
Restaurants, for instance, needed to rely on takeout and delivery service to survive – many didn’t – or shut down completely, resulting in the layoff of workers.
Joe and Stefania Hopkins were among those workers, but rather than sit back and hope for the best, the pair decided to go into business for themselves.
“Both of us got temporarily laid off from our jobs," Stefania tells ThoroldToday. "I was in brand marketing management and [Joe] was in culinary management. We thought, this is probably the best time to do what we've wanted to do for quite some time now.”
“We always wanted to get into some kind of food ourselves,” Joe adds. “We didn't know it was a food truck or takeout or something but during COVID those weren't really options.”
So, the couple turned to what they knew best – sauce – and that's how That Guy’s Sauces was born.
As a chef, Joe had developed his own pizza sauce with a recipe so secret, he would go to the restaurant where he worked at the time on his days off to prepare it without prying eyes.
Stefania, meanwhile, relied on her roots in a large Italian family and its recipe for pasta sauce. The latter is infused with fresh basil leaves, setting it apart from sauces produced by conglomerates. It’s something Stefania learned from her childhood, where she’d be the one to add the leaves to the sauce when it was being made.
“It was always the children's job to do that,” she says. “It’s like aged wine. The longer it sits with the basil, the better it is.”
After it sits and simmers, the pasta sauce is then bottled into one-litre containers.
“It certainly feeds a family of four,” Joe says.
And as it turns out, the pizza and pasta sauces were just the start for the couple. Since then, they've added a line of barbecue sauces – Original Sweet, Smokey, and Savoury, Chipotle, and Mango Habanero – as well as a Blueberry Ghost Pepper Pie Hot Sauce to their product offerings.
“With our barbecue sauces, we don't use tomato paste or ketchup as a base,” Stefania says. “We actually incorporate a version of our tomato sauce [minus the basil] into them, so they're very savoury. Really flavourful.”
The hot sauce, meanwhile, is gluten-free.
That aspect of their sauce was not by design but rather a happy accident, Joe says.
“During COVID, we couldn't find regular Worcestershire sauce. They only had a gluten-free option, so we used it. It didn't change the flavour or anything, so we just stuck with it."
The couple got their big break when grocers Sobeys and Foodland wanted to add That Guy’s Sauces to their store shelves.
“Luckily, Sobeys and Foodland have the absolute best program when it comes to local,” Joe says. “I can't say enough good things about how welcoming their stores are for local [products].”
And as more people have discovered That Guy's Sauces, sales have gone up, increasing 53 per cent in the last year, Joe says.
To meet demand, the couple are producing 400 bottles daily at their location on Pine Street South. As the business continues to grow, Joe says they want to update to pedal-operated semi-automated bottling equipment to speed up the process.
In addition to Sobey’s and Foodland, That Guy’s Sauce offerings can also be found at Metro, Food Basics stores across Ontario and Your Independent Grocer stores in Niagara-on-the-Lake and Fort Erie (Ridgeway). A full listing of retailers that carry the couple’s products and an online store can be found at thatguyssauces.com.
Prices are $5.99 for pizza sauce (original and with garlic), $6.99 for the barbecue sauces, $7.99 for the hot sauce and $8.99 for the pasta sauce.
