On those days when the folks at Alabama Sunshine are making their XXX Black Label hot sauce, the fumes from those fiery red habanero peppers can get so intense that they have to fling open the doors and crank up the fans to keep from coughing and wheezing.
“Those are pretty strong peppers,” says Charlotte Smith, who, as the matriarch of the Alabama Sunshine family, is fondly known as “Mama Sunshine” around the western Alabama town of Fayette, the hometown of Alabama Sunshine. “The habaneros get at the base of your throat, and you feel like something is choking you.”
Depending on your heat threshold, Alabama Sunshine offers eight varieties of hot sauces, from the relatively tame Original Red Jalapeno on the low end of the Scoville scale to the tear-inducing Ghostly Sunshine at the high end.
All of their sauces are available online and at more than 300 grocery stores across Alabama and in parts of Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee.
“We’re (in stores) from Milton, Fla., over near Pensacola, all the way over to Mississippi and up and down the Gulf Coast -- Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Loxley, Fairhope -- all the way up into the edge of Tennessee,” Garvin Smith, Charlotte’s husband, says. “We tell everybody we’re all the way from the panhandle of Florida up into the Spring Hill, Tenn., area.”
In addition to its hot sauces, Alabama Sunshine also produces a line of barbecue sauces, jams, jellies, salsas and relishes.
“Everything we make has a little bit of spice to it, even the jellies and the jams,” Garvin says.
Alabama Sunshine's lineup of hot sauces ranges from the relatively mild Original Red Jalapeno sauce on the low end of the heat scale to the tear-inducing Ghostly Sunshine on the high end. (Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
A homegrown business
The Alabama Sunshine story goes back about 60 years, when another Smith – Fred Smith, no relation to Garvin and Charlotte – started growing jalapeno peppers as a hobby on his farm outside Fayette.
Soon, he began experimenting with a homemade hot sauce that he gave away to his friends and family, and as his fanbase grew, he began making 50 to 100 gallons of hot sauce a year.
After his wife, Sally, complained that all those containers were taking up too much space in her storage room, Fred found a bottle supplier and started selling his hot sauce in 1994.
He called it Alabama Sunshine.
“Fred always said it was just something that came to him,” Charlotte Smith says of the name. “He said he believed it was given to him by the Lord.”
Although they weren’t related, Fred Smith and Garvin Smith knew each other from working together at the Arvin Automotive Industries plant in Fayette for several years.
Garvin was later transferred to Arvin’s headquarters in Columbus, Ind., where he and Charlotte lived for 18 years.
Their son, David, who was entering the eighth grade at the time, moved with them, but their daughter Julie, who had graduated from high school, stayed in Alabama to go to college.
After Garvin and Charlotte retired from their respective jobs, the family moved back to Alabama in 2010 and relocated to Northport, where David worked for automotive supplier ZF, which makes front axles used by Mercedes-Benz at its nearby Vance plant.
David, who is deaf, always wanted to be his own boss, though, and he often joked around with Fred Smith about one day buying Alabama Sunshine from him.
Finally, Fred Smith called his bluff.
“David had always told Mr. Fred that if he ever decided to get out of the business, he wanted a chance to buy it,” Garvin Smith recalls. “About nine years ago, he came to us and asked if David was really serious.”
Fred Smith also wanted to make sure his homegrown business stayed in Fayette, a small town of about 4,000 people that is also home to another Alabama-made food brand, Golden Eagle Syrup.
“Fred lived here most all of his adult life and started the business in his garage and had a little field by his house where he grew the peppers,” Garvin says. “It was just a sentimental thing to him.
“It was a local business that he had started, and he wanted to see it stay here, if at all possible.”
So, in the summer of 2016, David Smith and his sister, Julie Smith Madison, who taught preschool in Fayette County, signed the papers and bought Alabama Sunshine.
Fred Smith passed down his recipes, and he walked David and Julie the entire process – from growing the peppers to bottling the sauce. (Fred Smith died last year at 87.)
About two years after they bought the business, David and Julie moved Alabama Sunshine from a small, 2,500-square foot space to a building three times that size on Columbus Street in downtown Fayette. It includes a showroom to display and sell their products in the front of the building and production and storage facilities in the back.
Fred Smith, right, started growing jalapeno peppers as a hobby, and in 1994, he and his wife, Sally, launched their brand of Alabama Sunshine hot sauces.(Photo courtesy of Alabama Sunshine)
From seed to sauce
Alabama Sunshine, as the Smiths like to say, is a “seed to sauce” operation.
It’s an all-in-the-family business, too.
David grows the peppers on a 160-acre farm about 15 miles north of Fayette that has been in the family for four generations. He lives in the house his grandfather built and where his father grew up.
At the production facility, he oversees the process of washing, stemming, chopping and cooking the peppers to make the various sauces, as well as the bottling, labeling and packaging operations.
(Husband and wife Jonathan and Jackie Hollis, two part-time employees who work in the kitchen and on the assembly line, are friends with David from the Deaf community.)
Julie, meanwhile, takes care of much of the administrative work, from dealing with the Food and Drug Administration to managing Alabama Sunshine’s social media accounts.
She also developed the recipe for Alabama Sunshine’s White BBQ sauce, their second-best-selling product behind the Original Red Jalapeno hot sauce.
(While she’s still very much involved with the family business, Julie is temporarily living in Ocala, Fla., where she has an administrative role at the World Equestrian Center.)
Although they are retired, Garvin and Charlotte are what they call “full-time volunteers,” and they help at the Alabama Sunshine facility almost every day.
The family ties run even deeper, as David and Julie’s cousins, Janet Moore and Cheryl Moore, make the sweet-meets-spicy jams and jellies, including a Spicy Strawberry Jam, a Sassy Pineapple Jam, a Spiked Vanilla Peach Pepper Jam and a Zesty Kudzu Jelly.
Alabama Sunshine also makes a Hot Buttered Pecan Jam that features another Alabama food brand, Priester’s Pecans in Fort Deposit.
“They’re one of our better customers,” Garvin Smith says. “They buy a lot of our products and sell them out of their store there.
“At the same time, we buy pecans from them to go into the products that we sell,” he adds. “It’s a unique relationship. We’re suppliers and customers of each other.”
Siblings Julie Smith Madison and David Smith, pictured here on their pepper farm outside Fayette, bought Alabama Sunshine in 2016.(Photo courtesy of Garvin Smith; used with permission)
Bringing even more heat
Later this year, Alabama Sunshine hopes to add another spicy sauce to its lineup that would bring even more heat than their ghost pepper-fired Ghostly Sunshine sauce.
David Smith planted some Carolina Reapers – which have been called the World’s Hottest Pepper – in his pepper garden last summer, and he’s working on a new hot sauce recipe that he plans to submit to the FDA for approval.
“We’re going to make a batch just to see what we think of it and make sure our process is what we want it to be,” Garvin Smith says. “We’ll probably do that sometime this summer.”
But they’ll have to do it without Mama Sunshine.
“We haven’t made anything with the Carolina Reapers yet, but I have drawn the line,” Charlotte Smith says. “I’m not going to be here that day. They’re too strong.”
Alabama Sunshine is at 221 Columbus St. East in Fayette, Ala. The phone is 205-904-9043. For more information, go here.
