Meet ‘Pepper’ Baumer, The Man With Hot Sauce In His Blood

Forbes Daily Briefing · Jul 10, 2026 · 6m

Every week at the Crystal Hot Sauce factory, just north of New Orleans in Reserve, Louisiana, two train cars full of mashed cayenne peppers arrive on the tracks just outside the plant’s back door. The peppers are then pumped into four 20,000-gallon mixing tanks where the mash ferments under the sweltering Louisiana sun into a slurry. After water and salt are introduced, the slurry is ground into hot sauce that’s poured into glass at 125 bottles per minute. “We are New Orleans in a bottle,” says Alvin Adam “Pepper” Baumer, the third-generation owner and CEO of Baumer Foods, maker of Crystal…