February 22, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Ed Currie is an American chili pepper breeder who is the founder and president of the PuckerButt Pepper Company. Here's his remarkable story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And to get our podcasts, and I urge you to
do so and subscribe. Go to Apple, Spotify or iHeartRadio
or wherever you get your podcasts. Our next storyteller is
an American chili pepper breeder who's the founder and president
(00:32):
of the pucker Butt Pepper Company. And by the way,
you've probably seen him on Hot Ones, on cable, Hulu
or wherever you get your television. Let's take a listen
to Ed Curry.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
All right, I'm smoking Ed Curry. I'm the president, owner,
mad scientist and chef at the pucker Butt Pepper Company.
And I'm known for making hot sauce and known for
breeding peppers. I've read the Pepper X, which is the
current world record, and I'd read the Carolina Reaper, which
was the world record for thirteen years. Those are the
(01:08):
peppers people know about. But there's a whole lot more
common now. You know, people often ask how did I
get into doing plans? And you know, that's that's really
a story that goes all the way back to my childhood.
I grew up in New York and we were fortunate
enough to be one of the houses on the block
that had a yard. And my mother made beautiful gardens
(01:31):
and that was rare for New York City, and you know,
we would go out as little kids and help her
in the garden. It wasn't really anything of interest. It
was more of, hey, let's hang out with mom. And
then we moved to Valley Forts, Pennsylvania. And when we
moved there, we had a very big glte. I mean
(01:52):
it was huge, and the gardens got bigger and bigger
and got I got more interest in it. And one
of the things my mother started showing me how to do.
She would get different colors from flowers by crossing tubers
or by adding nutrients into the ground that caused the
(02:14):
flowers to come out not what they did the year before.
So that really I was a smart kid, and that
kind of piqued my interest into, oh, this looks kind
of cool. Maybe I can do this, you know. And
then we moved to Michigan. But by that time, essentially
I was a full blown attic. I had been drinking
(02:35):
through my childhood. I got a lot of trouble in
elementary school and junior high drinking and doing drugs and
smoking when you're not supposed to be. So that got
me interested in, well, if I can breed you know, flowers,
if I can do stuff with that, what can I
(02:56):
do with pot? You know, at the time, the only
real source for any knowledge on pot was a magazine
called High Times. And you know, I tried crossing different
screens of pot that came in, but those were high
school attempts. Those were kid attempts, not really science attempts.
(03:20):
Even though I knew what I was doing, I really
didn't know what I was doing, if that can makes
any sense. My parents got me off of college at
a very young age because, as I said, I was
a smart kid, you know, so I was ahead of
grade of everybody else. I went to college on my
I think it was my seventeenth birthday. It was kind
(03:43):
of funny because my dad gave me a case of
Heineken Dark, a case of Heineken Light, and told me,
if I wanted to continue living the lifestyle I was living,
I better find something to cure heart disease or cancer,
because that kills our fami, lady, and you're going to
die pretty young, you know. And you know, I took
(04:05):
that to heart because I wanted to keep on partying,
That's plain and simple. So I went to a place
called the library trying to research who didn't have heart
disease or cancer. I found a study that showed that
people up in the equatorial band, whether they're Westernized or not,
(04:27):
had very very low heart indices of heart disease or cancer.
I mean almost is ill. At the time. There were
five indices I could find that were common in all
those different cultures, and the one that I could standardize
in a lab was capsaicin. So that really piqued my
(04:47):
interest in peppers. I always liked hot stuff, you know.
Growing up in New York in a half Italian family,
I was exposed to pepper flakes and pepperccini and cherry
peppers and things like that, but nothing really hot. So
during one of my trips back home, I went to
a place called The West East, which was a restaurant
(05:13):
that was run by a Vietnamese family, and I told
them I wanted the hottest thing they had. They said no, no, no, no,
you know. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, let me try.
And when I ate that, it threw me for a loop. Okay,
but it also made me feel really good. It kind
of got me high, you know. And I kept on eating,
(05:35):
and I kept on drinking those Thai coffees, and I
kept on eating, sweating and snodding. I asked them where
I could get those peppers, and they gave me a
bag full of peppers, but they also gave me a
little pepper plant. It was a Vietnamese bird pepper, and
that was my first exposure to what I thought was
(05:57):
a hot pepper, which now I would say is a
mile pa. I'd pop them like candy, you know. But
the very first thing I did was go back to
my dorm room and I fed them to other people
I knew, just to watch their reactions. But you know, again,
the addiction was taking a toll on my life, and
(06:17):
I kind of, you know, I saw an angel, I thought,
you know, looking back on it, I hadn't decided that
I didn't want to live anymore, but I really, you know,
I I I still didn't want to kill myself, if
that makes any sense.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And you've been listening to the founder and president of
the Pucker but Pepper Company, and that said Curry, and
he's telling a heck of his story about his early
life and the problems he had with alcohol and drugs,
but also the curiosity had and the affection he had
for this thing called peppers. He had discovered and learned
to love peppers from his Italian side of his family,
(07:00):
but not hot peppers. I'm half Italian and we love peppers.
We put peppers in everything, but not the kind that
he's talking about. That had to happen when he walked
into a Vietnamese restaurant and discovered the true nature of
hot And of course he was also descending into a
dark place, and he was thinking of ending his own life,
but not actually thinking about going through with it. When
(07:22):
we come back. More of the story of Ed Curry
here on Our American Stories. Lee Hibibe here the host
of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
(07:44):
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give, and we
(08:09):
returned to our American stories. Let's return to Ed Curry
and he is the founder and president of the pucker
Butt Pepper Company.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So I had decided one night in a blizzard to
open up all the doors and windows, and I put
a massive amount of drugs and alcohol in front of me.
I was ready to, you know, just put myself to sleep, essentially,
and I saw an angel. It was an angel, okay.
(08:40):
And I know that because I went looked for footprints
and there were no footprints in the snow, all right.
And that angel told me to go to a place
called Brighton Hospital. And I knew where Brighton, Michigan was,
So I loaded up my te top Camaro and drove
out in a blizzard looking for this place. But when
(09:00):
I got there, it was a rehab hospital. And I
told him I didn't need to stay there, you know,
they talked me into stay in. Oh sorry, I gotta
try something hot. We're cooking a project here. I think
it's good. Whoo, I think it's real good. Whoa Uh.
(09:28):
So I wound up staying thirty three days at that hospital.
Funny sidebar about this. When I was about seventeen years old,
I went to my neighbor's house, but his mom and
dad had gotten divorce and his mom worked really far away.
(09:49):
So we go down and sit around his kitchen table
and do bong hits and drink whatever was in the
liquor cabinet and just have fun. And she walked in
on us and she said, one day, you guys are
all going to wind up where I work. She turned
out to be the director of the hospital I went at,
(10:10):
and she she was a counselor there when she told
us that, And she told me, she said, I told
you back in nineteen seventy nine you were going to
wind up here, and you did, you know? So I'm
starting to study peppers in college and We're coming up
(10:31):
on first semester finals. Now I got a bunch of
people in my room with a keg of low and
Brow Dark, and we're doing bondheads and other various things.
I think, well, I think a few of us popped
some mushrooms. And one of the girls who was in
the room for part of her final, she had to
(10:53):
ask people what they wanted to achieve in life. And
she went around the room and someone said they were
going to be a doctor or someone said they were
going to be a lawyer. He did turn out to
be a lawyer. You know. There were like twelve of
us in there, and this was the week before Thanksgiving,
so it was like the Tuesday or Monday before Thanksgiving
(11:14):
of nineteen eighty one, and I said, I am going
to make the hottest pepper in the world. She wrote
that down, all right, ed Curry, hottest pepper in the world.
We fast forward to two thousand and seven, we had
(11:38):
remained friends. I called her up and I talked to
her into moving down to South Carolina and helping me
run this blooming business. And about two weeks later she
produced the notes from nineteen eighty one showing that I
was going to make the hottest pepper in the world.
(12:00):
And I had already given Winthrop University what became the
Reaper to test, and at the time it rated the
hottest that was ever measured at one point two seven
five million Scoville units. Let me explain what a Scoville
heat unit is for you, and that's the measurement we
(12:21):
use to see how hot a pepper is. In the
early nineteen hundreds, a guy named Wilbur Scoville came up
with this scale, and it was a very subjective scale.
It was how much of a liquid it took to
dilute a pepper until you couldn't feel any of the heat.
But see, for me, I don't feel any of the
(12:44):
heat from ailipino, so that would be zero to me,
whereas you might be five thousand ounces to not feel
any of the heat. So that was the Scoville heat
scale for a long time. But then science caught up
with the needs of like the medical community, you know,
because like capsaicin is, capsinoids are used in a lot
(13:09):
of things medicinally and have been since their early nineteen hundreds, sportscreams,
you know, Bengay, that kind of thing. So to standardize it,
they came up with a machine called an HPLC, a
high performance liquid chromatic RAP. But that's where the science
comes around. So anyway, getting back to I got clean, okay,
(13:32):
and I couldn't go anywhere. I was in some legal trouble,
and I needed something to do with my day because
essentially I had to go to a bunch of meetings,
a bunch of rehab, a bunch of everything. So I
started messing around with peppers, but again really just to
hurt people who I knew from rehabing in meetings. It
(13:55):
was fun, you know, and then like my sponsor at
the time, he was like, hey, you're getting high off
of these things. And there's some fact to that. When
you eat cap sasin in any form, hot, sauce, whatever, peppers,
there's a nerve receptor that only mammals have, TRVP one
(14:19):
that reacts with the cap sasin to send a chemical
signal to your brain saying you're on fire. Don't eat this,
but if you put it on your skin you get
the same reaction. But it's just a brain trick. There's
no actual heating peppers, but because your brain thinks you're
on fire, it also releases a huge amount of don't
(14:41):
mean an endorphin into your system, kind of like a
runner's high. So you either get a fight or a
flight response. Some people don't like what's going on, so
they're the ones who run around chug and milk, you know,
throwing up, crying or are you going to fight response?
You know, and you kind of like what's going on?
(15:03):
You do it again. You know, there's nothing you can
stop for the physiological Like I just ate some hot
my saliva is running, my nose is running, my eyes
are watering, my skin kind of flushed. You know, that's
just physiological reactions from the base brain. Nothing you can
do about that. But I'm an addict in recovery, Okay,
(15:27):
my body kind of likes that feeling, so my body
goes to the fight response. So I kind of noticed
early on that even though a lot of people had
reaction to eating peppers, those in the recovery community went
back for seconds. Now, through the late eighties early nineties,
(15:49):
I had moved back and forth between Michigan and Carolina
half a dozen dozen times, trying to change my circumstance.
But wherever I went, I was there, So the same
thing happened no matter what. But I loved South Carolina,
and I loved the dirt in South Carolina, and I
(16:10):
loved the history of South Carolina. And I kept on
going back.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
And you're listening to Ed Curry, and he's the founder
and president of the pucker Butt Pepper Company, And my goodness,
what a complicated life he's leading. There's a blizzard one night,
he's in college, and there he is, well, he's just
downing a massive amount of pills and drugs and in
the end, as he put it, he was just trying
(16:36):
to go to sleep permanently and it didn't happen. As
he put it, he saw an angel, and he said
it was a snowy day and there were no footprints,
and that angel told him to go to a rehab
his friend's mother had told him he'd end up in
many years before. And for those of you who think,
O an angel, you know what? A load of you
(16:56):
know what? Well, there are people who believe it and
don't tell Edgarrurry he didn't see an angel.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
And then of course.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
There he is with that pepper obsession and for some reason,
well he just likes hot and really hot. And hearing
about the psychological effects and the physiological effects is remarkable,
and how some personalities deal with heat and another doesn't,
and how the body produces well chemicals.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In response to that heat.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
It's fascinating, and of course it fascinated Ed Curry and
saved ug Curry. It's very clear that this obsession saved
him from narcotics and alcohol and drugs. When we come
back more of the story of Ed Curry, the founder
and president of Pucker but Pepper Company here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories, and
(18:11):
we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president of
the puckerbut Pepper Company, sharing his story. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
So the very first thing I did when they told
me I could leave the state of Michigan was I
called my parents. I had to humble myself. I'm a
thirty what seven thirty eight year old man. I had
to humble myself and say, Mom and Dad, can I
come and live with you? And to my surprise, they
(18:43):
said yes right now. I didn't realize there were going
to be a ton of roles I really didn't like
when I got there. They didn't trust me at all,
and they had every right not to trust me. But
I called a buddy of mine who had been one
of my best friends since I was fourteen. He immediately
packed his family and his two small children, you know,
(19:04):
his wife and two small children up, came down and
packed me up and moved me down to South Carolina.
I was gotten within forty eight hours of the court
setting me free. When I got here, it was November,
so there really wasn't much I could do as far
as planting or anything. Like that. But the one thing
(19:27):
that did happen was I met a young lady okay,
and I asked her fridge for her name, and she
was like, who wants to know, looking straight at me,
and I asked her for her phone number, and she
was like, not a chance in hell. She like in
front of me, she called me a funny little man.
(19:49):
And she was rude to me, seriously rude to me.
But in one of the events for the group that
I met her in, I heard her say I wish
someone would make so and I got together all the
stuff to make some salsa and I made peach mango
salsa and she asked who made the salsa, and I
(20:10):
was in Okay, she doesn't like me saying this because
she's a Christian Southern woman. But in the springtime she
moved me into her house. Okay. I had officially asked
her to marry me already. But we were walking in
the beach in Hilton Head and I took all the
silver out of the inside of the pack of a cigarettes,
(20:34):
all the silver, and while we were walking, I formed
a ring out of it. And I got down on
my knee on the beach in Hilton Head and I said, Linda,
would you form a limited liability corporation with me? And
she said what I said, will you form it now?
(20:55):
I'll see with me. And she was like, what are
you trying to say? Are you trying to tell me
to get married? And I was like yeah. And she
wore that band of cigarette wrapper for the rest of
the weekend. You know, it was really really cool. But
she moved me in in the springtime and she went
(21:17):
away for some conference and I went to home depot
and bought five gallon buckets in bulk, and I bought
a ton of dirt. And when she came home, every
square inch of her yard was filled with peppers and
peppers and tomatoes. And she was like, what are you doing,
(21:37):
you know? And I said, well, I'm going to build
a greenhouse back here. She was like why. And I
told her. God has put in on my heart that
I need to do peppers. I've been doing stuff with
peppers since eighty one. I'm going to make the hottest
pepper in the world. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm
going to cure heart dise And she's like, well, if
(21:58):
that's what you want to do, that's what you do.
She had no idea how much fruit would come off
of all those plants. So she's like, what are we
going to do with this? And I said, We'll make
hot sauce and salta and give it to our friends,
you know, make Christmas presents and stuff. And we started
giving that stuff away. And the next year after we
(22:21):
got married, we were giving a lot of stuff away, okay,
and she said people will buy this and I said, no,
they won't, and she proved me wrong. We went to
a local farmer's market and we sold a lot of
hot sauce and a lot of salsa in one day,
and she said, let's form a business. And that's when
(22:41):
we formed our first hot sauce business. And I decided
that we weren't going to have enough volume in peppers,
so I asked the neighbor. I said, hey, if I
plant peppers in your yard, because he was always like,
what do you do? I said, if I do this
in your yard and pay your electric and water bill,
will you be cool with that? He was like, oh,
(23:03):
that's fine with me. And then another neighbor saw that
and I made the deal with that. So the second
year we had three yards in the neighborhood filled up
with you know, approximately five six thousand plants. The next
year we had seven yards filled up with about twenty
(23:23):
thousand plants. You know, it just kept on growing from there.
The end of two thousand and six is when I
saw my first farm land and we planted that in
two thousand and seven. Again, it was all about really
hurting people. And I had a few contacts in the
medical community and they were like, they were taking samples
(23:47):
of peppers, but you know, I was saying, this is
the compound we need to look at. You know, I
knew the science behind it, and you know they were
just doing low level research, spare time stuff. Not real.
Let's see, two thousand and seven we started the farm
and in two thousand and six I had gotten my
first store front, okay, and we were selling a lot
(24:12):
of hot sauce, a lot of hot sauce. But it
was crappy hot sauce. I really wasn't doing it right.
You know. We were selling a mason jars sometimes in woozies.
You know, I was designing labels. They look like two
year olds had done them. Things like that. But I've
got this really hot pepper. Okay, and I've been hearing
(24:34):
people with it for a couple of years and we're
we've been getting it tested over at Winsor University and
one of the grad students who's testing my stuff said,
you know, you're beating the current Guinness World record right now.
And I was like, oh, I had no idea, you know,
no idea. All she goes, actually, your first s beat
(24:56):
the Guinness World Record. But now that the plant's becoming stable,
why don't we get some data and why don't you
do a world record? And her name was Luquisha. I
wasn't even looking for a record. All the people who
worked for me at that time were in recovery, okay,
(25:18):
and they were all every single one of them was
a character and all had trouble finding direction. And we
were the biggest group of misfits you could ever find
in your life. If there was a mistake to be made,
we made that mistake, okay. And sometimes we didn't learn
(25:40):
from those mistakes. We just made them again and again,
trying to prove ourselves right. You know. But Luquisha graduated
in two thousand and nine and she published a poster
as part of her gradu You know, they do projects.
She published a poster showing a bunch of data on
(26:02):
what was at the time called HP twenty two B
showing that it was the hottest thing in the world,
and the Internet went crazy. People were calling me liars,
people calling me a thief. People. You know, there was
one group that was like, this can't be. We don't
(26:23):
know who this guy is. But what happened with that
is I also went to the real experts, reached out,
and the real doctors reached out, and the real scientists
reached out, and in talking to them, they figured out
that I knew a little bit about science, you know,
and I told them what I was doing, and a
(26:45):
lot of researchers were very interested in the medical benefits
that I purported for peppers and showed them through research
since the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
When we come back, more of the story of Ed Curry,
the founder and president of pucker Butt Pepper Company here
on our American Stories. And we continue with our American stories,
(27:40):
and we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president
of the pucker Butt Pepper Company, sharing his story. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So business is growing, I'm getting a lot of international
recognition from all the press. I was invited to participate
in something called the Charlotte Ventures, and when I went there,
I didn't feel like I belonged, but they picked me
to be in the finals. And the first lady who
(28:16):
went up is like, I have four hundred and some
researchers in my facility. She was a doctor. We've discovered
a pinprick test for breast cancer to get rid of mammograms.
It's ninety percent accurate, and we want to use the
money to get two more researchers and get this to market.
(28:37):
And I I'm looking at, you know, around me, and
everybody's in doctor uniforms, you know, and it's a big
auditorium full of people. And the next guy goes up
and he's like, I have developed a process with nano
robots to deliver chemotherapy into cancer cells, and there's only
ten percent of it, you know, and I want to
(28:59):
use the money to do more field tests, you know,
and blah blah blah. And the next verson gets up
and they're like curing some eye disease. And the next
person gets up and they're curing some other disease. And
then it was my turn and I went up and
I was like, my name's smoking Ed Curry. I invented
(29:20):
the hottest pepper in the world, and I don't belong here.
And I walked off the stage, you know, and I
got third place. I got third place. I couldn't believe
it because they had the judges were looking at all
the data, not just our speech. But that got me
in touch with doctors who are really interested, Like that
(29:42):
doctor with the nano robots. He goes, you used to
be fat, and I was like, yeah, I used to
be fat, you know. He goes, I remember you. You said,
pepper scure cancer. Let's figure out why. And that got
me in touch with people who were doing als, which
got me in touch with people who were doing obesity,
which got me in touch with it. All of a sudden,
(30:04):
all these people in the medical community were listening to
the things I was saying, looking at the research I
had done. You know, you can look up all this
stuff online. I mean, there's a key on a capsianoid
that causes an autoimmune sequence in cancer and kills the cancer.
It causes it to kill itself. Delivery method is the problem.
(30:26):
Not everybody elite a stupid hot thing like this all
day long, okay, And it's up to the medical community
to come out with something. We'll see what comes of it.
But anyway, twenty eleven, a funny thing happened through a miracle,
absolute miracle, God story. My wife and I were in
(30:48):
the delivery room as our daughter was being born. We
adopted a baby girl. Two years later, the same miracle
happened and we had a baby boy. But in between
then I had worked for the banks and my bank
got bought by another bank, and I was planning to
take a leave of absence, and the day I was
(31:10):
leaving for my leave of absence, I got let go.
So I found myself without a job, without any income
except for the pepper business, which was not making enough
money to sport itself. It got to the point where
I was borrowing money for payroll, always paying back but
(31:32):
robing Peter to pay Paul essentially. So my wife was like,
you need to work full time in the pepper business
and make that profit. And I was like, okay, I
made you a promise, baby that I would not I'm
going to find a regular job because I promised you
until all the debt was paid back, I would not
stop working and she relieved me of that promise and
(31:53):
I went full time in the pepper business. See beforehand,
I was working at the bank from like four or
five morning until you know, two or three in the afternoon,
and then driving to the farm and working the farm
and then go in and make an odd sauce at night.
Between the two jobs, I was running about eighteen hours
a day. So we're still growing but struggling. I had
(32:17):
like twenty nine employees. I really didn't need them all,
but you know, people needed jobs. The downturn in the
economy caused my friends to need jobs, and I hired
them all. And I was sitting at a thing called
the Southern Women's Christmas Show, looking around at the people
who were working with me, trying to decide who I
(32:37):
was laying off by payday because I had two weeks
to pay them all the money I opened if I
laid them all, and my phone kept on buzzing. I
finally I looked down and the phone was ringing, and
it was someone from Guinness, and it's like, congratulations, Ed,
(32:59):
you're officially amazing. You have the Guinness World Record for
the hottest pepper in the world. And I started weeping.
I literally got down on my knees and started weeping
and praising God. And someone thought I was having a
heart attack, and they called the little EMS unit, and
this EMS golf cart thing came around the corner and
they were like, who's having an heart attack? And I
(33:21):
was like, no, I'm crying, man, It's okay. It's okay.
Tears of joy, you know, not sorrow. But from there
on it has been every day has been a journey.
That's an absolute miracle, whether it's good or bad. I've
been able to grow this business to the point where
we were playing a whole lot of major manufacturers, and
(33:44):
I mean major manufacturers, Fortune five hundred companies with the
products they need to make the products. Say have I
got to meet my friends at Hot Ones. We make
sauces for them, and they make a lot of hot sauce,
and my sauces are going worldwide as the hottest and
(34:05):
the mildest sauce. No one will believe me, but my
goal isn't about making the hottest pepper in the world,
because there's hot top peppers that we've made that just
taste like crap, so you can't use them for anything.
It's more about the flavor and the heat and economies
(34:25):
of scale. There was a national distributor making a wing sauce.
They were using eleven fifty five gallon drums of salt
mash to make this wing sauce. And I showed their
head chef, who's right here in the same hometown. You
can replace fifty five gallon drums with a five gallon
of Carolina Reaper and get the same heat and better flavor.
(34:49):
And they did the experiment, and then they bought Reaper. Okay,
because of the economies of scale, they're saving the cost
of eleven fifty five gallon drums. It had to do
with a big business saving money on the product that
they were selling a lot of. And see pepper X.
(35:12):
It's three times higher than the Reaper. So now if
I approach that company with pepper X, they can cut
their cost in a third. Right now, I'm a dad
to a ten year old and a twelve year old.
If you had told me that was going to happen,
(35:32):
I would have told you you were out of your mind.
I was not meant to have children, right, even though
I was clean, I really didn't grow up until I
was married to Linda. For like six years, seven years,
I was still a child inside. I had to learn
what it was to be a man, and then I
had to be taught what it was to be a
(35:52):
real man and a husband and a boss and a leader.
Had to seek out or God put in my life
men who could teach me those things. So now I
can support my family and be a father and a
husband to my family. When you add up all the people,
(36:16):
it's a lot of people, and some of them even
call me a father figure, you know. And then my
community that I live in, which I support by donating
everything I can and having our company do everything I can.
Then my church community, which I support one hundred percent.
I am just the only word, thoroughly blessed to have
(36:43):
gotten on this journey, built this business, and be in
the position I am today. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
If it all disappears tomorrow, I'll still be a happy
man because I know that's God's will for my life.
But hopefully I keep this going for another twenty three years.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Had a terrific job by the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
Ed Curry. He's the president and founder of the pucker
Butt Pepper Company. And what a story he told. My goodness,
he was on a ledge, he was out there. It
was the birth of his daughter. He'd adopted a child
two years earlier. He was working in a bank while
(37:24):
dabbling with a part time pepper business that wasn't really
even meeting its bills, or just barely. And then he
gets to notice from his bank that legit job he
kept to be an honest man, and he thought he
was going to give him a leave of absence, and
it turned into a layoff. And what did he do? Well,
Thanks to his wife who had faith in him, he
turned that part time pepper business into a full business.
(37:46):
But even there he was teetering until he got that
call that he was indeed the holder of the record,
the Guinness record for the hottest pepper in the world.
As he put it, he has a thoroughly blessed life,
so much many Americans do. They're crooked lives in the
sense that they aren't straight lines they live but crooked ones.
And and Ed is a perfect example. Ed Curry's story
(38:09):
a classic American story. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And to get our podcasts, and I urge you to
do so and subscribe. Go to Apple, Spotify or iHeartRadio
or wherever you get your podcasts. Our next storyteller is
an American chili pepper breeder who's the founder and president
(00:32):
of the pucker Butt Pepper Company. And by the way,
you've probably seen him on Hot Ones, on cable, Hulu
or wherever you get your television. Let's take a listen
to Ed Curry.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
All right, I'm smoking Ed Curry. I'm the president, owner,
mad scientist and chef at the pucker Butt Pepper Company.
And I'm known for making hot sauce and known for
breeding peppers. I've read the Pepper X, which is the
current world record, and I'd read the Carolina Reaper, which
was the world record for thirteen years. Those are the
(01:08):
peppers people know about. But there's a whole lot more
common now. You know, people often ask how did I
get into doing plans? And you know, that's that's really
a story that goes all the way back to my childhood.
I grew up in New York and we were fortunate
enough to be one of the houses on the block
that had a yard. And my mother made beautiful gardens
(01:31):
and that was rare for New York City, and you know,
we would go out as little kids and help her
in the garden. It wasn't really anything of interest. It
was more of, hey, let's hang out with mom. And
then we moved to Valley Forts, Pennsylvania. And when we
moved there, we had a very big glte. I mean
(01:52):
it was huge, and the gardens got bigger and bigger
and got I got more interest in it. And one
of the things my mother started showing me how to do.
She would get different colors from flowers by crossing tubers
or by adding nutrients into the ground that caused the
(02:14):
flowers to come out not what they did the year before.
So that really I was a smart kid, and that
kind of piqued my interest into, oh, this looks kind
of cool. Maybe I can do this, you know. And
then we moved to Michigan. But by that time, essentially
I was a full blown attic. I had been drinking
(02:35):
through my childhood. I got a lot of trouble in
elementary school and junior high drinking and doing drugs and
smoking when you're not supposed to be. So that got
me interested in, well, if I can breed you know, flowers,
if I can do stuff with that, what can I
(02:56):
do with pot? You know, at the time, the only
real source for any knowledge on pot was a magazine
called High Times. And you know, I tried crossing different
screens of pot that came in, but those were high
school attempts. Those were kid attempts, not really science attempts.
(03:20):
Even though I knew what I was doing, I really
didn't know what I was doing, if that can makes
any sense. My parents got me off of college at
a very young age because, as I said, I was
a smart kid, you know, so I was ahead of
grade of everybody else. I went to college on my
I think it was my seventeenth birthday. It was kind
(03:43):
of funny because my dad gave me a case of
Heineken Dark, a case of Heineken Light, and told me,
if I wanted to continue living the lifestyle I was living,
I better find something to cure heart disease or cancer,
because that kills our fami, lady, and you're going to
die pretty young, you know. And you know, I took
(04:05):
that to heart because I wanted to keep on partying,
That's plain and simple. So I went to a place
called the library trying to research who didn't have heart
disease or cancer. I found a study that showed that
people up in the equatorial band, whether they're Westernized or not,
(04:27):
had very very low heart indices of heart disease or cancer.
I mean almost is ill. At the time. There were
five indices I could find that were common in all
those different cultures, and the one that I could standardize
in a lab was capsaicin. So that really piqued my
(04:47):
interest in peppers. I always liked hot stuff, you know.
Growing up in New York in a half Italian family,
I was exposed to pepper flakes and pepperccini and cherry
peppers and things like that, but nothing really hot. So
during one of my trips back home, I went to
a place called The West East, which was a restaurant
(05:13):
that was run by a Vietnamese family, and I told
them I wanted the hottest thing they had. They said no, no, no, no,
you know. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, let me try.
And when I ate that, it threw me for a loop. Okay,
but it also made me feel really good. It kind
of got me high, you know. And I kept on eating,
(05:35):
and I kept on drinking those Thai coffees, and I
kept on eating, sweating and snodding. I asked them where
I could get those peppers, and they gave me a
bag full of peppers, but they also gave me a
little pepper plant. It was a Vietnamese bird pepper, and
that was my first exposure to what I thought was
(05:57):
a hot pepper, which now I would say is a
mile pa. I'd pop them like candy, you know. But
the very first thing I did was go back to
my dorm room and I fed them to other people
I knew, just to watch their reactions. But you know, again,
the addiction was taking a toll on my life, and
(06:17):
I kind of, you know, I saw an angel, I thought,
you know, looking back on it, I hadn't decided that
I didn't want to live anymore, but I really, you know,
I I I still didn't want to kill myself, if
that makes any sense.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And you've been listening to the founder and president of
the Pucker but Pepper Company, and that said Curry, and
he's telling a heck of his story about his early
life and the problems he had with alcohol and drugs,
but also the curiosity had and the affection he had
for this thing called peppers. He had discovered and learned
to love peppers from his Italian side of his family,
(07:00):
but not hot peppers. I'm half Italian and we love peppers.
We put peppers in everything, but not the kind that
he's talking about. That had to happen when he walked
into a Vietnamese restaurant and discovered the true nature of
hot And of course he was also descending into a
dark place, and he was thinking of ending his own life,
but not actually thinking about going through with it. When
(07:22):
we come back. More of the story of Ed Curry
here on Our American Stories. Lee Hibibe here the host
of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
(07:44):
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give, and we
(08:09):
returned to our American stories. Let's return to Ed Curry
and he is the founder and president of the pucker
Butt Pepper Company.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So I had decided one night in a blizzard to
open up all the doors and windows, and I put
a massive amount of drugs and alcohol in front of me.
I was ready to, you know, just put myself to sleep, essentially,
and I saw an angel. It was an angel, okay.
(08:40):
And I know that because I went looked for footprints
and there were no footprints in the snow, all right.
And that angel told me to go to a place
called Brighton Hospital. And I knew where Brighton, Michigan was,
So I loaded up my te top Camaro and drove
out in a blizzard looking for this place. But when
(09:00):
I got there, it was a rehab hospital. And I
told him I didn't need to stay there, you know,
they talked me into stay in. Oh sorry, I gotta
try something hot. We're cooking a project here. I think
it's good. Whoo, I think it's real good. Whoa Uh.
(09:28):
So I wound up staying thirty three days at that hospital.
Funny sidebar about this. When I was about seventeen years old,
I went to my neighbor's house, but his mom and
dad had gotten divorce and his mom worked really far away.
(09:49):
So we go down and sit around his kitchen table
and do bong hits and drink whatever was in the
liquor cabinet and just have fun. And she walked in
on us and she said, one day, you guys are
all going to wind up where I work. She turned
out to be the director of the hospital I went at,
(10:10):
and she she was a counselor there when she told
us that, And she told me, she said, I told
you back in nineteen seventy nine you were going to
wind up here, and you did, you know? So I'm
starting to study peppers in college and We're coming up
(10:31):
on first semester finals. Now I got a bunch of
people in my room with a keg of low and
Brow Dark, and we're doing bondheads and other various things.
I think, well, I think a few of us popped
some mushrooms. And one of the girls who was in
the room for part of her final, she had to
(10:53):
ask people what they wanted to achieve in life. And
she went around the room and someone said they were
going to be a doctor or someone said they were
going to be a lawyer. He did turn out to
be a lawyer. You know. There were like twelve of
us in there, and this was the week before Thanksgiving,
so it was like the Tuesday or Monday before Thanksgiving
(11:14):
of nineteen eighty one, and I said, I am going
to make the hottest pepper in the world. She wrote
that down, all right, ed Curry, hottest pepper in the world.
We fast forward to two thousand and seven, we had
(11:38):
remained friends. I called her up and I talked to
her into moving down to South Carolina and helping me
run this blooming business. And about two weeks later she
produced the notes from nineteen eighty one showing that I
was going to make the hottest pepper in the world.
(12:00):
And I had already given Winthrop University what became the
Reaper to test, and at the time it rated the
hottest that was ever measured at one point two seven
five million Scoville units. Let me explain what a Scoville
heat unit is for you, and that's the measurement we
(12:21):
use to see how hot a pepper is. In the
early nineteen hundreds, a guy named Wilbur Scoville came up
with this scale, and it was a very subjective scale.
It was how much of a liquid it took to
dilute a pepper until you couldn't feel any of the heat.
But see, for me, I don't feel any of the
(12:44):
heat from ailipino, so that would be zero to me,
whereas you might be five thousand ounces to not feel
any of the heat. So that was the Scoville heat
scale for a long time. But then science caught up
with the needs of like the medical community, you know,
because like capsaicin is, capsinoids are used in a lot
(13:09):
of things medicinally and have been since their early nineteen hundreds, sportscreams,
you know, Bengay, that kind of thing. So to standardize it,
they came up with a machine called an HPLC, a
high performance liquid chromatic RAP. But that's where the science
comes around. So anyway, getting back to I got clean, okay,
(13:32):
and I couldn't go anywhere. I was in some legal trouble,
and I needed something to do with my day because
essentially I had to go to a bunch of meetings,
a bunch of rehab, a bunch of everything. So I
started messing around with peppers, but again really just to
hurt people who I knew from rehabing in meetings. It
(13:55):
was fun, you know, and then like my sponsor at
the time, he was like, hey, you're getting high off
of these things. And there's some fact to that. When
you eat cap sasin in any form, hot, sauce, whatever, peppers,
there's a nerve receptor that only mammals have, TRVP one
(14:19):
that reacts with the cap sasin to send a chemical
signal to your brain saying you're on fire. Don't eat this,
but if you put it on your skin you get
the same reaction. But it's just a brain trick. There's
no actual heating peppers, but because your brain thinks you're
on fire, it also releases a huge amount of don't
(14:41):
mean an endorphin into your system, kind of like a
runner's high. So you either get a fight or a
flight response. Some people don't like what's going on, so
they're the ones who run around chug and milk, you know,
throwing up, crying or are you going to fight response?
You know, and you kind of like what's going on?
(15:03):
You do it again. You know, there's nothing you can
stop for the physiological Like I just ate some hot
my saliva is running, my nose is running, my eyes
are watering, my skin kind of flushed. You know, that's
just physiological reactions from the base brain. Nothing you can
do about that. But I'm an addict in recovery, Okay,
(15:27):
my body kind of likes that feeling, so my body
goes to the fight response. So I kind of noticed
early on that even though a lot of people had
reaction to eating peppers, those in the recovery community went
back for seconds. Now, through the late eighties early nineties,
(15:49):
I had moved back and forth between Michigan and Carolina
half a dozen dozen times, trying to change my circumstance.
But wherever I went, I was there, So the same
thing happened no matter what. But I loved South Carolina,
and I loved the dirt in South Carolina, and I
(16:10):
loved the history of South Carolina. And I kept on
going back.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
And you're listening to Ed Curry, and he's the founder
and president of the pucker Butt Pepper Company, And my goodness,
what a complicated life he's leading. There's a blizzard one night,
he's in college, and there he is, well, he's just
downing a massive amount of pills and drugs and in
the end, as he put it, he was just trying
(16:36):
to go to sleep permanently and it didn't happen. As
he put it, he saw an angel, and he said
it was a snowy day and there were no footprints,
and that angel told him to go to a rehab
his friend's mother had told him he'd end up in
many years before. And for those of you who think,
O an angel, you know what? A load of you
(16:56):
know what? Well, there are people who believe it and
don't tell Edgarrurry he didn't see an angel.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
And then of course.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
There he is with that pepper obsession and for some reason,
well he just likes hot and really hot. And hearing
about the psychological effects and the physiological effects is remarkable,
and how some personalities deal with heat and another doesn't,
and how the body produces well chemicals.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In response to that heat.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
It's fascinating, and of course it fascinated Ed Curry and
saved ug Curry. It's very clear that this obsession saved
him from narcotics and alcohol and drugs. When we come
back more of the story of Ed Curry, the founder
and president of Pucker but Pepper Company here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories, and
(18:11):
we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president of
the puckerbut Pepper Company, sharing his story. Let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
So the very first thing I did when they told
me I could leave the state of Michigan was I
called my parents. I had to humble myself. I'm a
thirty what seven thirty eight year old man. I had
to humble myself and say, Mom and Dad, can I
come and live with you? And to my surprise, they
(18:43):
said yes right now. I didn't realize there were going
to be a ton of roles I really didn't like
when I got there. They didn't trust me at all,
and they had every right not to trust me. But
I called a buddy of mine who had been one
of my best friends since I was fourteen. He immediately
packed his family and his two small children, you know,
(19:04):
his wife and two small children up, came down and
packed me up and moved me down to South Carolina.
I was gotten within forty eight hours of the court
setting me free. When I got here, it was November,
so there really wasn't much I could do as far
as planting or anything. Like that. But the one thing
(19:27):
that did happen was I met a young lady okay,
and I asked her fridge for her name, and she
was like, who wants to know, looking straight at me,
and I asked her for her phone number, and she
was like, not a chance in hell. She like in
front of me, she called me a funny little man.
(19:49):
And she was rude to me, seriously rude to me.
But in one of the events for the group that
I met her in, I heard her say I wish
someone would make so and I got together all the
stuff to make some salsa and I made peach mango
salsa and she asked who made the salsa, and I
(20:10):
was in Okay, she doesn't like me saying this because
she's a Christian Southern woman. But in the springtime she
moved me into her house. Okay. I had officially asked
her to marry me already. But we were walking in
the beach in Hilton Head and I took all the
silver out of the inside of the pack of a cigarettes,
(20:34):
all the silver, and while we were walking, I formed
a ring out of it. And I got down on
my knee on the beach in Hilton Head and I said, Linda,
would you form a limited liability corporation with me? And
she said what I said, will you form it now?
(20:55):
I'll see with me. And she was like, what are
you trying to say? Are you trying to tell me
to get married? And I was like yeah. And she
wore that band of cigarette wrapper for the rest of
the weekend. You know, it was really really cool. But
she moved me in in the springtime and she went
(21:17):
away for some conference and I went to home depot
and bought five gallon buckets in bulk, and I bought
a ton of dirt. And when she came home, every
square inch of her yard was filled with peppers and
peppers and tomatoes. And she was like, what are you doing,
(21:37):
you know? And I said, well, I'm going to build
a greenhouse back here. She was like why. And I
told her. God has put in on my heart that
I need to do peppers. I've been doing stuff with
peppers since eighty one. I'm going to make the hottest
pepper in the world. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm
going to cure heart dise And she's like, well, if
(21:58):
that's what you want to do, that's what you do.
She had no idea how much fruit would come off
of all those plants. So she's like, what are we
going to do with this? And I said, We'll make
hot sauce and salta and give it to our friends,
you know, make Christmas presents and stuff. And we started
giving that stuff away. And the next year after we
(22:21):
got married, we were giving a lot of stuff away, okay,
and she said people will buy this and I said, no,
they won't, and she proved me wrong. We went to
a local farmer's market and we sold a lot of
hot sauce and a lot of salsa in one day,
and she said, let's form a business. And that's when
(22:41):
we formed our first hot sauce business. And I decided
that we weren't going to have enough volume in peppers,
so I asked the neighbor. I said, hey, if I
plant peppers in your yard, because he was always like,
what do you do? I said, if I do this
in your yard and pay your electric and water bill,
will you be cool with that? He was like, oh,
(23:03):
that's fine with me. And then another neighbor saw that
and I made the deal with that. So the second
year we had three yards in the neighborhood filled up
with you know, approximately five six thousand plants. The next
year we had seven yards filled up with about twenty
(23:23):
thousand plants. You know, it just kept on growing from there.
The end of two thousand and six is when I
saw my first farm land and we planted that in
two thousand and seven. Again, it was all about really
hurting people. And I had a few contacts in the
medical community and they were like, they were taking samples
(23:47):
of peppers, but you know, I was saying, this is
the compound we need to look at. You know, I
knew the science behind it, and you know they were
just doing low level research, spare time stuff. Not real.
Let's see, two thousand and seven we started the farm
and in two thousand and six I had gotten my
first store front, okay, and we were selling a lot
(24:12):
of hot sauce, a lot of hot sauce. But it
was crappy hot sauce. I really wasn't doing it right.
You know. We were selling a mason jars sometimes in woozies.
You know, I was designing labels. They look like two
year olds had done them. Things like that. But I've
got this really hot pepper. Okay, and I've been hearing
(24:34):
people with it for a couple of years and we're
we've been getting it tested over at Winsor University and
one of the grad students who's testing my stuff said,
you know, you're beating the current Guinness World record right now.
And I was like, oh, I had no idea, you know,
no idea. All she goes, actually, your first s beat
(24:56):
the Guinness World Record. But now that the plant's becoming stable,
why don't we get some data and why don't you
do a world record? And her name was Luquisha. I
wasn't even looking for a record. All the people who
worked for me at that time were in recovery, okay,
(25:18):
and they were all every single one of them was
a character and all had trouble finding direction. And we
were the biggest group of misfits you could ever find
in your life. If there was a mistake to be made,
we made that mistake, okay. And sometimes we didn't learn
(25:40):
from those mistakes. We just made them again and again,
trying to prove ourselves right. You know. But Luquisha graduated
in two thousand and nine and she published a poster
as part of her gradu You know, they do projects.
She published a poster showing a bunch of data on
(26:02):
what was at the time called HP twenty two B
showing that it was the hottest thing in the world,
and the Internet went crazy. People were calling me liars,
people calling me a thief. People. You know, there was
one group that was like, this can't be. We don't
(26:23):
know who this guy is. But what happened with that
is I also went to the real experts, reached out,
and the real doctors reached out, and the real scientists
reached out, and in talking to them, they figured out
that I knew a little bit about science, you know,
and I told them what I was doing, and a
(26:45):
lot of researchers were very interested in the medical benefits
that I purported for peppers and showed them through research
since the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
When we come back, more of the story of Ed Curry,
the founder and president of pucker Butt Pepper Company here
on our American Stories. And we continue with our American stories,
(27:40):
and we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president
of the pucker Butt Pepper Company, sharing his story. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So business is growing, I'm getting a lot of international
recognition from all the press. I was invited to participate
in something called the Charlotte Ventures, and when I went there,
I didn't feel like I belonged, but they picked me
to be in the finals. And the first lady who
(28:16):
went up is like, I have four hundred and some
researchers in my facility. She was a doctor. We've discovered
a pinprick test for breast cancer to get rid of mammograms.
It's ninety percent accurate, and we want to use the
money to get two more researchers and get this to market.
(28:37):
And I I'm looking at, you know, around me, and
everybody's in doctor uniforms, you know, and it's a big
auditorium full of people. And the next guy goes up
and he's like, I have developed a process with nano
robots to deliver chemotherapy into cancer cells, and there's only
ten percent of it, you know, and I want to
(28:59):
use the money to do more field tests, you know,
and blah blah blah. And the next verson gets up
and they're like curing some eye disease. And the next
person gets up and they're curing some other disease. And
then it was my turn and I went up and
I was like, my name's smoking Ed Curry. I invented
(29:20):
the hottest pepper in the world, and I don't belong here.
And I walked off the stage, you know, and I
got third place. I got third place. I couldn't believe
it because they had the judges were looking at all
the data, not just our speech. But that got me
in touch with doctors who are really interested, Like that
(29:42):
doctor with the nano robots. He goes, you used to
be fat, and I was like, yeah, I used to
be fat, you know. He goes, I remember you. You said,
pepper scure cancer. Let's figure out why. And that got
me in touch with people who were doing als, which
got me in touch with people who were doing obesity,
which got me in touch with it. All of a sudden,
(30:04):
all these people in the medical community were listening to
the things I was saying, looking at the research I
had done. You know, you can look up all this
stuff online. I mean, there's a key on a capsianoid
that causes an autoimmune sequence in cancer and kills the cancer.
It causes it to kill itself. Delivery method is the problem.
(30:26):
Not everybody elite a stupid hot thing like this all
day long, okay, And it's up to the medical community
to come out with something. We'll see what comes of it.
But anyway, twenty eleven, a funny thing happened through a miracle,
absolute miracle, God story. My wife and I were in
(30:48):
the delivery room as our daughter was being born. We
adopted a baby girl. Two years later, the same miracle
happened and we had a baby boy. But in between
then I had worked for the banks and my bank
got bought by another bank, and I was planning to
take a leave of absence, and the day I was
(31:10):
leaving for my leave of absence, I got let go.
So I found myself without a job, without any income
except for the pepper business, which was not making enough
money to sport itself. It got to the point where
I was borrowing money for payroll, always paying back but
(31:32):
robing Peter to pay Paul essentially. So my wife was like,
you need to work full time in the pepper business
and make that profit. And I was like, okay, I
made you a promise, baby that I would not I'm
going to find a regular job because I promised you
until all the debt was paid back, I would not
stop working and she relieved me of that promise and
(31:53):
I went full time in the pepper business. See beforehand,
I was working at the bank from like four or
five morning until you know, two or three in the afternoon,
and then driving to the farm and working the farm
and then go in and make an odd sauce at night.
Between the two jobs, I was running about eighteen hours
a day. So we're still growing but struggling. I had
(32:17):
like twenty nine employees. I really didn't need them all,
but you know, people needed jobs. The downturn in the
economy caused my friends to need jobs, and I hired
them all. And I was sitting at a thing called
the Southern Women's Christmas Show, looking around at the people
who were working with me, trying to decide who I
(32:37):
was laying off by payday because I had two weeks
to pay them all the money I opened if I
laid them all, and my phone kept on buzzing. I
finally I looked down and the phone was ringing, and
it was someone from Guinness, and it's like, congratulations, Ed,
(32:59):
you're officially amazing. You have the Guinness World Record for
the hottest pepper in the world. And I started weeping.
I literally got down on my knees and started weeping
and praising God. And someone thought I was having a
heart attack, and they called the little EMS unit, and
this EMS golf cart thing came around the corner and
they were like, who's having an heart attack? And I
(33:21):
was like, no, I'm crying, man, It's okay. It's okay.
Tears of joy, you know, not sorrow. But from there
on it has been every day has been a journey.
That's an absolute miracle, whether it's good or bad. I've
been able to grow this business to the point where
we were playing a whole lot of major manufacturers, and
(33:44):
I mean major manufacturers, Fortune five hundred companies with the
products they need to make the products. Say have I
got to meet my friends at Hot Ones. We make
sauces for them, and they make a lot of hot sauce,
and my sauces are going worldwide as the hottest and
(34:05):
the mildest sauce. No one will believe me, but my
goal isn't about making the hottest pepper in the world,
because there's hot top peppers that we've made that just
taste like crap, so you can't use them for anything.
It's more about the flavor and the heat and economies
(34:25):
of scale. There was a national distributor making a wing sauce.
They were using eleven fifty five gallon drums of salt
mash to make this wing sauce. And I showed their
head chef, who's right here in the same hometown. You
can replace fifty five gallon drums with a five gallon
of Carolina Reaper and get the same heat and better flavor.
(34:49):
And they did the experiment, and then they bought Reaper. Okay,
because of the economies of scale, they're saving the cost
of eleven fifty five gallon drums. It had to do
with a big business saving money on the product that
they were selling a lot of. And see pepper X.
(35:12):
It's three times higher than the Reaper. So now if
I approach that company with pepper X, they can cut
their cost in a third. Right now, I'm a dad
to a ten year old and a twelve year old.
If you had told me that was going to happen,
(35:32):
I would have told you you were out of your mind.
I was not meant to have children, right, even though
I was clean, I really didn't grow up until I
was married to Linda. For like six years, seven years,
I was still a child inside. I had to learn
what it was to be a man, and then I
had to be taught what it was to be a
(35:52):
real man and a husband and a boss and a leader.
Had to seek out or God put in my life
men who could teach me those things. So now I
can support my family and be a father and a
husband to my family. When you add up all the people,
(36:16):
it's a lot of people, and some of them even
call me a father figure, you know. And then my
community that I live in, which I support by donating
everything I can and having our company do everything I can.
Then my church community, which I support one hundred percent.
I am just the only word, thoroughly blessed to have
(36:43):
gotten on this journey, built this business, and be in
the position I am today. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
If it all disappears tomorrow, I'll still be a happy
man because I know that's God's will for my life.
But hopefully I keep this going for another twenty three years.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Had a terrific job by the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
Ed Curry. He's the president and founder of the pucker
Butt Pepper Company. And what a story he told. My goodness,
he was on a ledge, he was out there. It
was the birth of his daughter. He'd adopted a child
two years earlier. He was working in a bank while
(37:24):
dabbling with a part time pepper business that wasn't really
even meeting its bills, or just barely. And then he
gets to notice from his bank that legit job he
kept to be an honest man, and he thought he
was going to give him a leave of absence, and
it turned into a layoff. And what did he do? Well,
Thanks to his wife who had faith in him, he
turned that part time pepper business into a full business.
(37:46):
But even there he was teetering until he got that
call that he was indeed the holder of the record,
the Guinness record for the hottest pepper in the world.
As he put it, he has a thoroughly blessed life,
so much many Americans do. They're crooked lives in the
sense that they aren't straight lines they live but crooked ones.
And and Ed is a perfect example. Ed Curry's story
(38:09):
a classic American story. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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