The Daily Gamecock

Local business Meet Your Cremator sells organic, homemade sauces

Meet Your Cremator doesn't sell urns, but it does sell incredibly spicy hot sauces. Chef Benoit St. Jacques and his wife Diane Gilbert created the business Meet Your Cremator Hot Sauce three years ago. Gilbert and St. Jacques complete every step of the production themselves, from making the sauce to bottling and packaging it. 

St. Jacques, originally from Quebec, Canada, has spent the past 28 years as a chef at Rosewood Market and Deli. He retired from Rosewood Market in mid-October to focus on his entrepreneurial endeavors and further pursue the business he created with Gilbert. 

Gilbert, also a Quebec native, grows all of the pepper plants used to make the hot sauce herself. She has 800 hot pepper plants that she tends on two acres of land north of Columbia. She grows 45 different types of peppers; ghost and scorpion peppers are featured in the orange and yellow sauces. 

DD’s Think Green sauce is milder and the ingredients include jalapeños and a small amount of chocolate ghost peppers. 

“Our mildest is about Tabasco, or a little bit more, and we go up from there,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert and St. Jacques agreed that it is difficult to pick a favorite sauce because it is dependent on what kind food they are consuming.

 “I use the red a lot, because it is not too hot and it goes with everything,” Gilbert said, “but when I eat fish it is definitely the yellow or the green.” 

The intense spicy flavor included in their hot sauces directly relates to the clever wordplay in the business name, Meet Your Cremator.

“Often when I’m cooking I have a lot of time in my head. I knew I had to come up with the names of all the sauces and the name of the company, so it just kind of came to me,” St. Jacques said.  Many of the other names of sauces also include witty puns.  

Gilbert has enjoyed gardening her entire life, but began experimenting with growing hot peppers in South Carolina only eight years ago. 

All the peppers used in the sauces are grown organically.

“Even our spice[s] are organic,” Gilbert said. "Sometimes we cannot find the ingredient we want organic, but when we can we always choose organic.” 

Meet Your Cremator Hot Sauce sells four primary sauces and two curry pastes. The red curry paste is extremely hot and, according to Gilbert, a small amount can flavor a large meal. The green curry paste is milder and is made with lemongrass and ginger roots. 

You can find Meet Your Cremator products at Rosewood Market and Deli, NEST and Vino Garage. They also vend weekly at Soda City and City Root farmers markets. 

“We are very excited because we know it’s a great product; we are proud of it,” Gilbert said.


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