Stoke the Fire didn't begin with a plan to build a hot sauce company. It began with a small farm, a love of growing food, and a fascination with what could be created from the harvest.
Our roots are in Revelstoke, BC, where we started growing peppers and turning them into sauce in small batches. We were farmers first, and that shaped the business from the beginning. We learned by growing — paying attention to varieties, flavour, weather, soil and the small decisions that determine what eventually comes out of the field.
As demand grew, so did the idea.
We began to see an opportunity to build something different: a food company where agriculture and manufacturing weren't separate worlds. Instead of simply buying ingredients and making sauce, we could grow the ingredients ourselves and build the products around what our land could produce.
That idea eventually brought us to the Similkameen Valley.
Today, Stoke the Fire operates from our seven-acre farm in Cawston, BC, where we grow specialty peppers, garlic and other ingredients for our products. At harvest, those ingredients don't travel across the country or disappear into a long supply chain. They move from our fields into our on-farm production facility, where we turn them into the sauces we sell across Canada.
Seed to field. Field to bottle. All on one farm.
It gives us something increasingly rare in food production: a direct connection between the ingredient and the finished product.
We know the varieties we're growing. We know the soil they came from. We know when they were harvested. And because we're also the manufacturer, we can capture those ingredients when they're at their best and build products around their flavour — not simply their heat.
That vertical integration has become one of the most important parts of Stoke the Fire.
It gives us greater control over quality and traceability, but it also allows us to think differently about how a Canadian food company can grow. Agriculture is unpredictable. Input costs rise. Supply chains change. Climate creates new challenges every season. Growing more of what we use ourselves gives us a stronger foundation and allows us to keep investing in the farm rather than moving further away from it as the company grows.
And that matters to us.
Because the goal has never been to build a brand that happens to have a farm story.
The goal is to build a food company where the farm remains at the centre of the story.
We're still growing. Still experimenting with unusual pepper varieties. Still learning from the land. Still finding better ways to turn a short Canadian growing season into food that can be enjoyed all year.
The scale may be changing, but the idea that started Stoke the Fire hasn't.
Grow exceptional ingredients.
Make something remarkable from them.
And build the company from the soil up.