A New Amigo

In Bill Fitzsimmons’ mind, hot sauce doesn’t need to scald the taste buds. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be red.

Meet Amigo - the Friendly Hot Sauce. It’s a unique, yellow hot sauce made with carrots, mangos and habanero peppers. 

“It’s friendly because it’s not super hot,” said Fitzsimmons, who makes the sauce in the kitchen at in Collinsville. “I wanted it to appeal to those who don’t like hot sauce."

Today, it’s used and sold at several locations but the story began at another Canton restaurant - The in Canton.

Fitzsimmons said he and his wife Mollie were eating at the restaurant when she planted the seed.

“She told me to figure out a hot sauce that makes food healthy,” Fitzsimmons said.

So he began making a low-salt sauce with ingredients with healthy attributes like antioxidants and Vitamins A and C. 

Soon after he started making it, the couple returned to Flatbread and discovered they no longer had a hot sauce Bill poured on everything. 

So he told the employees about his own sauce and brought some in. It wasn’t long before Flatbread began putting it out for customers.

Flatbread manager Erich Kronschnabel describes the taste as a perfect mix of “sweet and spicy.”

“It’s not a three-alarm hot,” he said, adding that it’s a perfect “match” for the flatbreads.

Kronschnabel said the sauce is also good for the restaurant’s business too and helps bring people back.

“It’s not something you would find somewhere else,” he said.

The Canton restaurant also uses another a related product made by Fitzsimmons called “Bloody Buddy” mix, which is part of the recipe for a signature flatbread Bloody Mary.

Kronschnabel said the products also perfectly fit in with the company’s philosophy for local products and healthy food.

“Part of our thing is we support local businesses,” Kronschnabel said.

It was November of 2008 when Flatbread began carrying the Amigo sauce. From there, Fitzsimmons, who studied psychology and marketing at Duke and has a Master’s of Business with a finance concentration from Pepperdine University, began marketing the product under the FION name.

His first retail client was Granby Village Health in Granby and others followed.

Eventually Whole Foods heard about the product.

 “I was just on cloud nine when I got that call,” Fitzsimmons said.

Fitzsimmons is picky about his ingredients. He said certain types of each fruit or vegetable have to be used to keep the taste consistent. He also believes the healthy aspects and even its color are good selling points.

“It’s the only yellow hot sauce on the market,” he said.

Fitzsimmons makes the sauce at Husk in batches, transports it in food-grade buckets to a bottling company in New Haven and then distributes the product to area customers, which include Granby Village Health in Granby, Whole Foods on Raymond Road in West Hartford and Flatbread Company in Canton.

By day, Fitzsimmons works for Redington, which makes analog and industrial indicators.  But he is serious about.

In the past the product could be a little hard to get your hands on.

Husk owner Jordan Stein generally carries a couple of cases when Fitzsimmons makes a batch.

“I can’t keep it on the shelf,” Stein said. “People buy three or four bottles at a time.”

But this year, Fitzsimmons has hired an employee and hopes to ramp-up production, an effort he began this week with a batch of 200 cases, which contain 12 of the 5-oz bottles of Amigo.

By this weekend, they should be available at Husk, Granby Village Health, and Whole Foods on Raymond Road in West Hartford, Garden of Light in Avon and Whole Foods in Glastonbury. Cost ranges from $4 to $5 a bottle.

He’d like to see the business grow enough to be a non-profit or help raise funds for other organizations.

“Right now it’s non-profit but not in the way I’d like it to be,” Fitzsimmons said.

But for the now the company embodies the FION name - Fun Interesting Original and Natural.

Learn more at Amigosauce.com or follow on facebook.

Fitzsimmons can be contacted at info@amigosauce.com or 209-73-amigo.