Let me see, where do I start? I guess at the beginning. I have been making Big Red’s Salsa for about 30 years. But it started out as Marco’s Hot Salsa. I got the recipe from a good ol’ friend of mine Mark, who copied it from one of his Firemen friends, Marco. The parent company of Big Red’s Salsa is Red’s World Marketing and that was conceived New Years Eve of 1997. When I told my friends Leah and Wally of the name they thought of another company for me and that was Red’s Wear, with a slogan of “Red’s Wear, Wear if you Dare!” Even though I don’t have clothing yet, that’s the start of it all.

As most of my friends can tell you, when I was invited to any kind of party, Birthday, New Years Eve, Boating or basically any type of gathering, the host would say to me, “Red, Red you are in charge of bringing your famous salsa! And don’t bother showing up unless it is in your hands at the door!”
The original recipe called for Peeled tomatoes, Jalapeños, Onions, Garlic and Cilantro, all FRESH!! This made making the salsa about a 1 hour project, as I was to drain and mash the tomatoes, boil the jalapeños in oil and then peel them after the skin was soft. (As a side note, the effect of the oils of the jalapeños on your skin lasted for hours, so you had better not got to the bathroom, or touch your eyes with your fingers!! Boy did that sting! I only did that once.) I continued by chopping the onions and cilantro, crushing the garlic and then finished by adding the balance of the secret ingredients.

This went on for 20 years or so, when another good friend of mine Ken, said “You know Red, when need to supplement our income by selling something on the internet like Beer since we both like Beer!” I told him that he was crazy. But Ken, being the artist that he is, suggested that he would make a Killer label for something if I could come up with a product. So I didn’t do anything until one day Ken told me he had been working hard on the label, so I figured that I had better think of something and quick.

So I thought to myself that maybe I could can my salsa. So I went on the internet and look up a way to can tomatoes, since that was the main ingredient and there it was! So I quickly ordered up my Back To Basics Home Canning kit. I was so excited when it arrived that I made a bee line to the market to get my ingredients. By the way, by this time I had redeveloped the formula to include mainly canned ingredients, except for the onions and cilantro which made everything easier. So following the instruction for canning tomatoes in put a batch of Big Red’s Salsa together. I mixed up everything, then put it into 6 pint mason jars and put them in the steamer for the allotted time, about ½ hour at full steam. Then after that took the jars out to let them cool, and to my amazement the lids actually popped down to create the vacuum seal and conclude the canning process.

I needed a label to identify the 6 jars, as I was going to open 1 ever month for 6 months. (I didn’t want to kill anybody, so I was going to try them each myself first!) My girlfriend Leah, who is now my wife, was pretty handy on the computer, so she suggested that we put an address label on each jar and number them. GREAT! So that is what I did. She made a nice label with a bowl of salsa on them. Well since I had a potential partner in Ken, I offered him a jar, #3 to try. The first thing that he asked me was “Who made the Label?!?” I was a little confused by the question, but told him that Leah did. And with that Ken said that we were through and that he would not participate with me if Leah was involved. Ken said that it was nothing against Leah, but he didn’t trust women in any of his business ventures!! That was OK and Ken is still one of Leah and my great friends. He is actually a good customer of Big Red’s Salsa as well.

Now it was time for the big test. It was in July of 1999 that the first jar was to be tested. I was invited to Glamis with Leah’s cousins and I figured that this would be a perfect opportunity to let other friends try the salsa after I took the first sample. So here I go, with my Frito’s Scoop, (My personnel favorite chip to eat Big Red’s Salsa with to this day!) and to my surprise, the salsa tasted really good! Maybe not quite like the original, but damn good. So I asked Leah’s cousins, Keith and Martha to see what they thought. Martha has Mexican in her blood, so I valued her opinion greatly and she said it needed a little more salt and other than that, it was Great!

It is now March of 2000 and things are rolling along, Leah and I were getting married in a month and I was making Big Red’s Salsa part favors to give away at our wedding on April 1, 2000, when I had an idea to give some of the party favor jars to some of my other friends to try. The first was a friend Bill from the Body Shop I was working at. I gave him a jar to take home and when I came back to pay him, he had eaten ½ the jar!! I asked Bill “Hey Bill where did you get the chips for scooping?” He simple smiled and said that he was eating it with his fingers. I was happy with his compliments on the salsa as he is a big salsa and hot sauce freak. My next victim, I mean tester was my friend Michele who worked for State Farm Ins at the time. Little did I know when I gave her a sample of Big Red’s Salsa, that she also made the best salsa in the world. I thought that this would end my salsa making career. But I fact, that night she called me at home to tell me that her and her husband were fighting over the last little drop and licking the inside of the jar. I was on cloud 9, she made my day and I thought that maybe I do have something here. So now I head into my wedding day with Leah and the Party favors are out and making a big commotion. Wedding guests are fighting over them. My Farmers agent Steve loved it so much that he had his son make a special call to me to say “Great Salsa Dude!” My very good friend Big D of Colorado flew Leah and me up for a late Honeymoon for the 4 of July and we brought some salsa and all his friends loved the salsa. As an added note my friend Jeff from Courtesy Chevrolet was my very first paying customer and has been a regular buying customer every since! In fact I still have his 5 dollar bill!

Now things are moving along well and I have quite a few regular customers and I am trying to find someone to manufacture my salsa for me, so I went to the Salsa Festival in Oxnard, CA. and I talked with the Hollywood Salsa boys that looked like they were having a blast at the festival, so I asked who made their salsa and they pointed to a guy across the way. So I went and visited with Butch and said that it would be no problem for him to manufacture my salsa. So in September of 2002, I sent butch my super secret recipe for Big Red’s Salsa. In a few days he had a sample of the salsa for me to taste! Quite frankly it tasted terrible. Butch tried a few more times to change the formula to get it right. I even had my Chef friend Steve, from Westside Automotive to see if he could help. (Steve has actually made a recipe book for me featuring Big Red’s Salsa). At this point I had a new label made by my Tattoo friend Abadon who also designed my Red’s World Logo a few years earlier. The label had to fit the new jars that Butch suggested that I use. But we had a bigger problem, it was just not working with the way Butch was trying to manufacture my salsa. So I had to move on and make it again myself. Butch supplied me with bottles for a while, and was always trying to get me to buy “His Salsa”, and I would but we needed to get my formula right first. So I think he got tired of me buying only jars from him, so he didn’t sell me them after a few months. So now here I am and I don’t have a source for jars and I am stuck. It took me almost a year to find out the manufacturer of the jars and

I was back in business. With jars in hand I stated making my own salsa again. Then one day my friend Lisa, who owned the Blue Bird Café in Lancaster, who was also using Big Red’s Salsa at her restaurant, hooked me up with another manufacture in Sylmar. I was dealing with Mike the owner, and was invited to meet with his chef to see if they could actually make it my way, which I found out was called “Cold Packing.” So I gladly accepted the invitation and had a ball working with his chef and making my salsa my way. They said they had no problem doing it this way so I waited for a quote on a price for manufacturing my salsa. Mike said that it would be no problem, since he made the private label Hummus for Trader Joe’s and he had down time to prepare the salsa my way! Boy was I excited. So I waited for a quote…. And I waited and waited, and Mike would not return my e-mails or phone calls. Now I am disappointed again and so I wrote kind of a heated e-mail asking him why he couldn’t get back to me with a quote, and he replied to me that “ He was sorry that he couldn’t get back to me on my schedule and we had to quite doing business together!” Well that was funny to me since he said that he was going to get back to me for 4 Tuesdays in a row!! What’s up with that?

So her we go again, I am on my own once again and I am making Big Red’s Salsa. It is now summer in 2005 and I am just lying low, talking to ever one that I know when I pass a business store front in N. Hollywood, called Captain BBQ. How weird is that? There was an e-mail address in the store front so I e-mail in the summer of 2005. The owner I think his was Dominick, told me that he made nothing and that I needed to call a place called Heiden’s Food’s in Fullerton. So guess where my next call was to………Heiden’s. So when I had a chance I spoke with Derek and one of his first questions was if I had ever been in touch with a Food Technologist?? What the heck is a Food Technologist?? So Derek was kind enough to go through the whole process of “Hot Packaging” and that I need a Food Technologist to re-formulate my original formula to met the new standards of manufacturing, and gave me a few names of Chemists that he had worked with in the pasted and was very happy with. So I hooked up with a guy named Barry who has worked for such companies as Campbell Soup, Kellogg, Kraft and Pfizer to name a few. Needless to say I was very impressed with his credentials and I made contact with him.
I made an appointment to meet with him at Heiden’s foods in early January and it was on baby! I gave Barry my original formula and that’s where we started. I was so excited again that maybe this was it!! In a few days, Barry had shipped me my first sample!! I couldn’t wait. I was thinking that this was the start of everything coming together finally. Finally I found someone who actually knew what they were talking about! A professional!

As I received the first sample I had a set up a huge taste test with blindfolds and the whole thing with all my friends and loyal customers at Viking Lithograph!! Stephanie was kind enough to set everything up and the owner Steve was kind enough to let me use his lunch room for the 1st Big Red’s Salsa comparison testing, that I couldn’t stand it!
So here we go, I decided to forget the blindfolds, because you could smell, and see the difference between the original and sample #1. It was terrible; it was almost tasted like soup! I was grate full though that my friends at Viking were kind enough to give me very accurate and honest feedback that I could give back to Barry. I was very unhappy with the way the 1st sample came back, but Barry reassured me that this is where we needed to start and appreciated the comments. Off to sample #2, #3, and #4 and so on. My formula went from lacking a garlic taste, being too sweet, not chunky enough, to turning brown. Each time I got a sample back I asked my friends at Viking to help me out. So finally at sample #8 and 8 months later we have a Manufactures Formula that is about 98% close to the original Big Red’s Salsa. In the words of Viking Lithograph, “It will probably never be the same as the original Big Red’s Salsa, but it was close enough to buy at the store!!” That was good enough for me.

So this now brings you to early 2007, where I found Tim who developed this fantastic Web-site. Hopefully soon I will be able to offer not only the original Big Red’s Salsa, but a hot version, maybe a Verde or Habenero version as well as Grilling Oils, BBQ Sauce and Tri-Tip seasoning!! So keep visiting this site for specials and new product! Thank you… and keep It Red………..RED.