Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Cmiel.
Jeremy, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started making hot sauce in 2019 with a Ninja blender and some peppers. The first one was a pineapple habanero, mostly because it sounded good to me. After a couple of quick recipe iterations, friends and family started telling me I should sell it. The balance was the thing: sweet pineapple against habanero heat, and people kept coming back for it. That sauce is still in the line today, and it’s still called The OG.
From there I took a slow path, but a path nonetheless. I formed an LLC, worked with a designer to build the Mr. Mustachios identity, and gave the whole thing a name and a face.
At first I only sold through Instagram. Every time I made a blender full I’d post it, which was somewhere between six and eight 5-ounce woozy bottles. I eventually realized that wasn’t sustainable. I was putting in a lot of time for almost no output, so after forming the LLC in 2022 I made the investments to actually scale the batches. I went from six bottles a blender to 50 to 100 bottles per cook.
That same year I started doing farmers markets, beginning with the Northeast Farmers Market every other weekend. Every other weekend was the right rhythm, because the whole operation had to come in and out of my apartment and fit into a four-door Hyundai Sonata: canopy, tent, tables, and every case of sauce.
The markets were where I got real feedback, in person, from people tasting the sauce in front of me. That’s also how the line grew. One sauce became five: The OG pineapple habanero, Rango Tango with mango and habanero, Holy Smokes! built on chipotle and mandarin, The Trio with serrano, jalapeño and lime, and Mental Mustard, which is a habanero mustard rather than a sauce. A few recipes didn’t make the cut and got retired along the way, and I think that’s part of it. Not everything deserves shelf space.
In 2023 I moved to Eden Prairie and picked up the Chanhassen market, but it never matched what I had at Northeast, so I went back there in 2025. This year I stepped away from the weekly market schedule because I got married and something had to give. It wasn’t a total loss for the business. I made a batch of hot habanero honey for the wedding, and it turned out too good to keep to ourselves. It’s a product now, called Marry Me, Honey, made with organic honey from Bee Happy Farms. That collaboration came out of a relationship I built standing at a booth at the Northeast Farmers Market, which is the part of markets you can’t replicate online.
The line keeps pushing past hot sauce. Cowboy Candy has been a hit and people ask for it by name. Ancho-Lada, a smoky ancho chili-lime michelada mix, sold out. We even make a pint glass now.
Where I am today: I’m building co-packer relationships while still making most of the sauce myself and selling through pop-ups and one-off events alongside our online store. Minnesota’s cottage food law lets me sell online but not ship, so co-packing is the unlock. It’s what gets Mr. Mustachios into retail accounts and lets me ship to all 50 states.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It certainly hasn’t been a smooth road.
The biggest obstacle isn’t motivation, it’s structural. Minnesota’s cottage food law lets me sell online but not ship, so as of today I can’t legally send a bottle to someone in Duluth, let alone Chicago. Every sale has to happen face to face. That restriction doesn’t lift until August 2027. Getting past it sooner means moving production to a co-packer, and that means paying for process authority reviews, nutrition panels, barcodes, new labels, and a full production run before a single bottle of it sells. Writing that check on a business that’s still mostly me and a 40-quart pot is the part that keeps me up.
The other thing I’ve learned is how hard it is to stay motivated when there’s so much else going on in your life. Choosing to put more hours into the business is hard when the things competing for those hours are the ones that actually bring me joy: time with my family, time with friends, golf, weekends where I get to work around the house instead of loading a canopy into a car.
Staying optimistic about what’s possible is its own challenge. There’s real competition in this category, and there are a lot of failure stories out there, including from people who got much farther than I have.
Then there are the bad market days. You give up four, five, sometimes more hours, the traffic doesn’t show up, and you go home with almost nothing. What makes it sting is that there’s nothing wrong with the product. Everybody who tastes it at the booth loves it. The sauce isn’t the problem, the math of that particular Saturday is. Reconciling those two things over and over is the constant battle when you’re running a small business alongside everything else.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I make small-batch hot sauce in Minnesota under the name Mr. Mustachios. Seven products right now: The OG pineapple habanero, Rango Tango with mango and habanero, Holy Smokes! built on chipotle and mandarin, The Trio with serrano, jalapeño and lime, Mental Mustard, Marry Me, Honey, and Ancho-Lada, which is a smoky ancho chili-lime michelada mix.
What sets it apart is balance. A lot of hot sauce is built to be a dare, where heat is the whole product and flavor is an afterthought. I build the other direction. The fruit or the smoke or the acid has to work first, and the heat sits underneath supporting it. That’s why The OG has stayed in the line since 2019. It’s a sauce people actually finish the bottle of instead of keeping it on the shelf as a trophy.
The other thing is that it’s still genuinely small batch. I’m cooking these myself in a 40-quart pot, running 50 to 100 bottles at a time, and printing labels in-house. Every bottle that’s gone out has gone out because I made it.
What I’m most proud of is that the growth has come from people tasting it. There’s no ad budget behind this. It’s been farmers markets and pop-ups, one conversation at a time, and it works because the product holds up when someone tries it in front of you. Marry Me, Honey exists because of one of those conversations, with an organic honey producer I met at the Northeast Farmers Market. That’s the whole model.
What matters most to you?
Making something that’s actually good, and being honest about what it takes.
There’s a version of this business where I chase volume, cut the recipe to hit a price, and end up with another forgettable bottle on a crowded shelf. I’d rather grow slower and keep the product worth the money. If someone spends ten dollars on a bottle of my sauce, that’s a real decision they made, and it should be worth it.
The other thing that matters is not letting the business eat everything else. I got married this year. I’ve got family and friends and a Saturday morning that I’d sometimes rather spend on a golf course than behind a folding table. For a while I treated that as a failure of commitment. I don’t anymore. Building something that only works if I personally give it every weekend isn’t building a business, it’s building a job I can never leave. So the goal is to grow it into something that runs without needing all of me, and to be honest that’s harder than making the sauce.
Pricing:
- Hot Sauces: $10-12
- Specialty products (hot honey, michelada mix): $15
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mrmustachios.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mr.mustachiosmpls/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mr.mustachiosmpls
