How New Jersey’s Hank Sauce built a recipe for success
secret sauce noun
1. A quality, ability, or practice that makes something or someone successful or distinctive.
2. A sauce that adds an important element to a dish.
In business terms, a “secret sauce” is that one unique factor that sets something apart from the rest. It’s the element that distinguishes creativity and reinforces originality. But what if your secret sauce is, in every sense, a secret sauce? Well, then you bottle it up in your garage, sell it out of your seaside restaurant, and eventually turn it into a multimillion-bottle company.
At least, that’s what Hank Sauce did.
Hank Sauce was born out of Brian “Hank” Ruxton’s love for cooking. Before starting at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida in 2006, Ruxton was working as a cook in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. “When I first started making the sauce, I never even thought about turning it into a business,” Ruxton says. Shortly after he moved in with his two college roommates—longtime friends Matt Pittaluga and Josh Jaspen, who also hail from South Jersey—he began sharing with them his homemade hot sauce, known today as Herb Infused Hank Sauce.
“We weren’t hot sauce fans at all,” says Pittaluga, “which is really kind of the irony of the whole thing.” But when your roommate is a professional cook, you’ll eat whatever he makes—and it didn’t take long for Ruxton’s homemade sauce to become a staple in their college house. “Josh and I would find ourselves dipping our fingers in the Tupperware jar in the fridge any time he’d make a little bit of excess.”
In October 2010, a school project inspired the friends to view Hank Sauce as more than just Tupperware-worthy. Pittaluga was about to graduate with a graphic design degree, and for his final project, he needed to build up the branding and marketing for a hypothetical business.
“I just figured my buddy is making this sauce,” Pittaluga says. “We could probably throw it in a bottle, and I could bring some to class, and I might get some extra points.”
“Extra points” translated to a lifelong career shift. Pittaluga shared bottles with his classmates, and by the next class, everyone asked how to get more. It proved to be a pivotal moment for the crew, who realized they could build something much bigger than a school project. “From that time forward, we never looked back and had our sights set on creating a national product,” Ruxton says.
After graduation in 2011, Pittaluga, Ruxton, and Jaspen moved back to South Jersey, and that summer Hank Sauce made its first appearance at the Sea Isle City Farmers’ Market.
“People were all about it,” Pittaluga says. “The responses were overwhelmingly positive, and we were selling a really good amount of it even at a one-day-a-week farmers’ market.” At the same time, Pittaluga was working for a local pizzeria and started handing out hot sauce to customers. “It got to the point where people were calling the pizzeria and asking for the sauce.”

“WE WEREN’T HOT SAUCE FANS AT ALL,” SAYS CO-FOUNDER MATT PITTALUGA, “WHICH IS REALLY KIND OF THE IRONY OF THE WHOLE THING.”

All Good Things Must … Start in a Garage
After the successful consumer response, the group turned up the heat on the marketing side and asked local restaurants if they’d be interested in carrying Hank Sauce. “We figured at 23, we’ve got nothing to lose,” Pittaluga says. Their first client, a seafood restaurant in Sea Isle City, said yes.
What do Disney, Google, Amazon, and Hank Sauce all have in common? Growing in a garage. “We were making the sauce in my parents’ garage that summer,” Pittaluga says, “which we knew was not sustainable.” By fall 2011, Hank Sauce’s budding success added another major ingredient: a restaurant. Conceptually, the space would serve dual purposes—a restaurant in the summer season (with Ruxton in the kitchen) where they could market their growing product, and a commercial bottling location from Labor Day to Memorial Day. Today, thanks to the brand’s growth, the hours have expanded into the off-season as well.
Hank Sauce has four original flavors—Herb Infused, Cilanktro, Camouflage, and Hank’s Heat; the latter three were developed about a year after Herb Infused fully launched. “The core four were all spawned from the original,” Pittaluga says, adding that Ruxton’s dad used to grow cilantro, which is how Cilanktro was established (and named with a nod to the founder as well as the herb). But the popular Camouflage flavor was born by accident.
“On one of our first runs, we messed up a batch of Cilanktro,” Pittaluga says. “We just couldn’t afford to throw it out, and it was really good—a little tangier, a little more vinegar to it.” The sauce had a hidden heat, and Camouflage hit the market. Eventually, requests for hotter sauces started coming in, and Hank’s Heat was introduced—a similar build to Herb Infused, but with the addition of habaneros.
By 2014, the guys were continuing to sell the sauce locally when a buyer from Shop Rite discovered them at another farmers’ market—and their trajectory for success once again shifted as stores wanted to carry the sauce. “We didn’t even have bar codes on the labels or anything yet,” Pittaluga recalls. “We had a lot to learn.”
Within a few years of offering their products in grocery stores, Hank Sauce had reached the point where the lack of bottling space was inhibiting its growth; the guys were delivering to hundreds of stores regularly by 2018—in their own vans—and they couldn’t take on any more accounts despite interest from places like Whole Foods. “We weren’t really able to grow because we didn’t want to over-promise and under-deliver,” Pittaluga says. It was time to seriously consider establishing a packaging plant.
In 2018, Hank Sauce opened Myrtle Packaging in Millville, a space that Pittaluga’s father, a commercial fisherman, helped them secure; they named the location Myrtle after his father’s first commercial fishing boat.

New Sauces, Same Team
Today, Hank Sauce is still introducing new hot sauce concepts, some of which have become staples online and in local stores. Once-special releases like Iceman, Honey Habanero, and Exit 17 are now available year-round, but specialty sauces still launch every year, made with locally sourced peppers whenever possible but also with varieties grown elsewhere in the United States and Mexico. And Ruxton is still the mastermind behind creating flavor concepts, saying his “favorite part” of the Hank Sauce journey is “without a doubt” seeing how “creative and happy” customers are with each sauce.
The restaurant has grown to be instrumental in developing new sauces. “It’s like having a built-in focus group,” Pittaluga says. “When we experiment with something new, or when Hank [Ruxton] comes up with a new recipe or a new idea, we’ll put it on a menu item or leave a bottle out on the counter for people to try.” The feedback helps determine how successful an idea might be.
Even celebrities like Drew Barrymore have shared their love for Hank Sauce on social media, and the level of notability still surprises the Hank Sauce founders. “Seeing how genuine she was is a perfect testament to our brand because that’s really how we built our brand,” Pittaluga says, referring to the domino effect of people trying the sauce, liking it, and sharing it organically with others.
Hank Sauce has been available nationwide for the last few years, with the three college friends still leading the business and no outside investors. “We’re sending sauce to every corner of the country,” Pittaluga says, but he adds there could be a day where more products hit the market. “Expanding outside of hot sauce is definitely something we would like to experiment with in the future.”
Pittaluga credits the entire Hank Sauce team for the brand’s continued success, but he hasn’t forgotten where it started. “Coming from making 20 ounces at a time in a Tupperware to knowing there’s a couple million bottles of sauce out there is definitely something that we’re extremely proud of,” he says.
HANK SAUCE RESTAURANT
8605 Landis Ave., Sea Isle City
609.486.5132
hanksauce.com




