McIlhenny CEO kicks off One Acadiana’s lecture series Lessons from the Corner Office

You can be the first, you can be the biggest, you can even be arguably the best, but you can’t rest on your laurels in today’s marketing environment.
That’s the message McIlhenny CEO Tony Simmons had for a capacity crowd of businessmen and women last week in the inaugural “Lessons from the Corner Office” series of lectures produced by One Acadiana, formerly the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce.
McIlhenny Company is, of course, maker of world famous Tabasco Pepper Sauce. The company is 148 years old, the product was the first of its kind and today has the biggest slice of the market worldwide, the distinctive diamond-shaped label prompting instant recognition everywhere but maybe a few remote villages in Asia and the Subcontinent.
Such prominence in the market is “the largest benefit and the biggest curse” to the business, said Simmons, the seventh member of the Avery-McIlhenny clan to run the company since Edmund McIlhenny, a New Orleans banker ruined by the Civil War, came home to his wife’s family plantation on Avery Island and began making sauce from an exotic tropical chili found growing by the chicken coop.
While most people know about Tabasco sauce, what do they “know” about it?
“The perception is that we’re so interrelated with heat that they’re scared of the product,” Simmons said.
Tabasco sauce is not about heat but rather about taste, he said. That’s why the hole in the bottle is so small, to dispense a drop at a time. “The last thing we want to do is ruin somebody’s food!” Simmons said.
Other challenges include the “explosion” of competition on the pepper sauce isle of the supermarket, and how to reach the coveted 18-34 age demographic in today’s social media-dominated landscape.
So, Tabasco, long the undisputed king of hot sauce, spends a lot of money promoting the product, Simmons said.
For example, they pay a company to ferret out on the internet users who spend at least $15 a year on other pepper sauces and pop before them an enticing video commercial featuring iconic images of Tabasco’s south Louisiana headquarters.
A lot of the company’s advertising push goes directly toward the food service industry – which buys more Tabasco than home cooks – to put on tables as a condiment but also to season food as it’s being prepared.
And it’s not all advertising, Simmons said. A recent national TV news segment on healthy eating that mentioned Tabasco was the fruit of an ongoing public relations effort, he said.
Promotion must be tailored to different regions and different countries. The model was established in post-World War II Japan. Tabasco had no place in traditional Japanese cuisine but there was in the country a taste for certain “exotic” Western foods, so the sauce was marketed as a condiment for pizza and pasta, and today Japan is the company’s second largest market after the United States.
Simmons said he spends a fair amount of his mornings keeping up with international affairs like the economic woes befalling Greece, Venezuela and Brazil, all of which had been good markets for Tabasco Pepper Sauce.
Another part of his daily duties when he’s on the island is personally checking the pepper mash, which he said he does, in part, to instill in his employees that “nothing is so important to us as the quality of the product.”
Tabasco is made from a species of chili originating in South of Central America – no one is quite sure – district from the cayenne pepper that is the basis of most pepper sauces today. The story is that Edmund McIlhenny, when he was still a prosperous banker, cultivated it as a hobby and made the sauce for his own use.
While the Capsicum frutescens peppers are grown commercially in the tropics for Tabasco, they all come from seeds from plants grown on Avery Island and derived from that sole plant that survived the Civil War next to the chicken coop. Between growing the seed crop and the peppers and aging the mash in white oak whiskey barrels, it takes five years to produce a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
The salt in Tabasco comes from the salt dome that forms Avery Island, which is in Iberia Parish about nine miles southwest of New Iberia and three miles from Vermilion Bay.
“Tony Simmons Talks Tabasco” was held Thursday at Cafe Vermilionville in Lafayette.
One Acadiana will follow this June event with “An Expert’s Perspective” on Aug. 25, featuring James Carville and Mary Matalin. America’s best-loved bipartisan couple. The duo will take center stage to share their unique experiences and views on the current political climate, and field audience questions, for a stimulating and provocative conversation. Registration is open at OneAcadiana.org.