There are literally thousands of different monthly product clubs available online today. The subscription box service, beginning mainly with clothing boxes circa 2012, has exploded in popularity over recent years to deliver everything from monthly curated wine selections, cheese boxes, gadgets, cosmetics and more. Sadly overlooked, however, is the wildly popular hot sauce industry- until now. Fuego Box is a new monthly subscription box service that offers hot sauce aficionados the ability to receive curated monthly deliveries of the best new small batch and craft hot sauces from around the world.
Featured in global hot sauce publications such as Pepperheads for Life, UrbanDaddy, The Chilli Geeks, and Uncrate, Fuego Box is taking the chilli enthusiast world by storm. The hotheads behind the Fuego Box service scour the globe every month to locate and test the perfect hot sauces for their boxes.
Free from insane heat rating gimmicks or cliche sauces, the testing team at Fuego Box employ their highly refined palettes in focusing on highly refined, balanced and dynamic tasting sauces with appropriate heat levels. With a goal to deliver to you the best hot sauces you’ve never heard at prices far less than retail, of, Fuego Box is fast becoming one of the most popular subscription boxes online.
In this article we’ll provide a breakdown of how the Fuego Box subscription works, with examples of some of their previous boxes and an analysis of their overall quality and features to help you decide whether Fuego Box is the best way for you to get your flavor burn on.
Who Are Fuego Box?
Founded by a passionate and mysterious hot sauce enthusiast Mike Adams, Fuego Box is fuelled by a desire to provide the tastiest and spiciest hot sauce combinations on the planet. Adams attests to an obsession and almost encyclopedic knowledge of hot sauces, with his early interest for hot sauce piqued by the Californian hot sauce Tapiatio, which then evolved to a passion for Cholula, Crystal and Thai Siracha sauce. With his foray into the hot sauce world taking him as far as Africa, tasting Bhut Jolokia and African Fatalii Peppers, Adams has taken a global tour of all of the hot sauces created by the human race.
Through his extensive experimentation with hot sauce, Adams developed a taste for locally-made, hand bottled, small batch craft hot sauces that he chose to share with the rest of the world. Hot sauce, in its myriad forms, has been an essential part of human cuisine for thousands of years, with the first cultivation of chilli peppers occurring in Mexico, Central America and South America over 6000 years ago. The spiciness of hot sauce is caused by a neurotoxin created by the various spice plants used in the manufacture of hot sauces, called capsaicin, and other capsaicinoid compounds.
Interestingly, the presence of capsaicins in chilli plants and other spice plants is a defense mechanism designed to deter herbivores from consuming said plants, but in humans, has the opposite effect. The neurological stimulation caused by hot sauce and capsaicins is a piquant and pleasant sensation to many, with the “heat” effect of each chilli product rated with a measurement technique known as the “Scoville Scale”.
Where other hot sauce recommendation services or sites focus on delivering only the hottest sauces highest on the Scoville Scale, using ingredients such as ghost peppers and other extremely spicy plants, Adams has created the Fuego Box to deliver a balanced combination of sauces from all ranges of the scale, creating a balanced taste experienced every month.
How does Fuego Box Work?
Fuego Box customer simply sign up via the Fuego Box website, and once every month will receive a customized, curated collection of hot sauces from around the world to excite their taste buds. The first Fuego Box each customer receives contains either one full sized hot sauce or three full sized hot sauces, depending on the subscription level selected. Each monthly subscription box includes a mini tasting notebook with comprehensive information on the hot sauces contained within, with details on the batch creation, origins, and Scoville Scale rating of each sauce.
Shipping on selected Fuego Boxes is free, and Fuego Box provides a guarantee that the total price of the sauces in the Fuego Box will always be less than the retail price for each sauce. Fuego Box does not use extract based sauces in their subscription service, adhering to the idea that natural, full bodied hot sauces derived from full capsaicin botanicals deliver a far greater taste experienced than chemically-induced heat. The hot sauces included in the Fuego Boxes are selected each month via a hot sauce tasting party that occurs every month in Los Angeles, where a mix of amatuer and professional hot sauce experts from around the world are invited to participate in the testing- Fuego Box customers are even able to participate by submitting an application via the Fuego Box website.
Fuego Box Pricing & Availability
Fuego Box provide three separate levels of pricing to provide hot sauce at all price points. The first level, labeled “Dip Your Toe In”, is priced at $12.95 USD monthly and offers one carefully selected hot sauce shipped every thirty days. With a monthly fee structure, the Dip Your Toe In subscription level is pay as you go and provides the most flexible payment structure, with a $5 shipping fee and the ability to cancel at any time.
The second level of subscription, Sauce Addict, provides three sauces shipped monthly at a price point of $29.95 per month. This level offers free shipping within the United States, and can be cancelled at any time. The third pricing level, Sauce Lover, is almost identical to the Sauce Addict level, but is billed quarterly instead of monthly. Paying for a full year of the Sauce Lover option provides a discount of $2 per month, making it an excellent gift choice.
If you’re looking for the perfect gift for the hot sauce lover in your life, or have a passion for small batch, craft hot sauces and want to try offerings from all around the world, the Fuego Box is the best and only option for curated monthly hot sauce delivery.
