The SFA Hall of Fame
Honoring long-serving members of the specialty food community for their achievements and impact 
2023 Hall of Fame award winner

Dave Hirschkop

Dave's Gourmet Inc
2023
Hall of Fame

It’s one of the strangest calls received at the Specialty Food Association: “Is it within the rules to bring a scorpion to the Fancy Food Show?” asked Dave Hirschkop, 55, former owner of Dave’s Gourmet, San Francisco.

The ever-imaginative entrepreneur had worn a straight jacket at the Show and had, in the early 1990s, been banned from the Fiery Food Show due to the heat in his Insanity Sauce.

Since then, he has built one of the most admired companies in the industry, focusing on pasta sauce and hot sauce.

Burrito Madness in Maryland

At 22, Dave opened Burrito Madness, a taqueria in College Park, Maryland. “I developed hot sauces to mess with the drunk college kids,” he recalls. And a hot sauce business was born.

Dave’s Gourmet joined SFA in 1994 and began exhibiting at the Fancy Food Shows. For its first 15 years, Dave’s was primarily a spicy food company, with hot sauces, spicy peanuts, spicy candy, and Lucky Nuts (one in 10 in the mixture was spicy). Small hot sauce stores, gift stores, and some specialty food stores were its customers. The company continuously experimented with new SKUs, such as flavored mayonnaises and salad dressings, but nothing really caught on. Dave’s even sold Adjustable Heat Hot Sauce, whereby customers could control the heat by turning the cap.

The real growth spurt came in 2008, with the introduction of Butternut Squash Pasta Sauce. “We had been selling Heirloom Tomato Pasta Sauce since 2001 but the Butternut Squash Pasta Sauce was unique and opened many store doors for us. Grocers had as many as 20 red sauces on their shelves but this was something different,” says Hirschkop.

Dave’s Gourmet built its business through a strong distributor network, including KeHE, UNFI, DPI, Renaissance, and others. The company used regional brokers to work with distributors and key accounts, such as Whole Foods, Central Market, Sprout’s, Mollie Stone’s Markets, and many more. Currently, Dave’s Gourmet products are in 10,000 stores nationwide.

“We were a slow-growth enterprise, with quality products and good people. We were always nice and fair with the people who represented us. We could have been more strategic, more metric-driven, but that was not our personality,” says Hirschkop.

In November 2021, Hirschkop sold a majority stake to Gourmerica. He is no longer involved in the business but is definitely “not retired.” He does not know what is next but it will, undoubtedly, be exciting. Scorpions or not.