Food and Drink Specialist Rosalind Erskine chats with Sunny Mollah founder of Baba's Sauce at this years Royal Highland Show 2024

The Scotsman

Food and Drink Specialist Rosalind Erskine chats with Sunny  Mollah founder of Baba's Sauce at this years Royal Highland Show 2024

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Roslyn Derskin, Food and Drink Editor at the Scotsman and I'm here at the Scotsman

00:12stand in Scotland's Larger with Sonny from Bama Sauce. How are you? Yeah, great Roslyn,

00:17thank you, great. How have you been getting on this weekend? Very good, very busy event,

00:23early starts, late finishes, but speaking to loads of people, it's been very, very good.

00:29And can you tell me a bit about your product and products? Yeah, so Bama Sauce was actually

00:35my father's recipe. He passed away in 2008 and we found his recipe in a diary and from there

00:43we opened a small takeaway. We just had the sauce as a chilli sauce, we never had a name for it so

00:47we called it Bama's because that's what we used to call him and from there it just started getting

00:51more and more popular so we trademarked it and then just three years ago we got a unit,

00:57we got a factory, we got ourselves salsa certified and we thought well let's start

01:01selling it into the shops. So we went into the shops and it just went boom. We're now in Asda's,

01:08we're stocked in Aldi, we're stocked in Lidl, Home Bargains, we're in CJ Lang's bar,

01:15we've got distributors on board that distribute like Dalziel, they distribute into the butcher

01:20section. We've got loads of independents as well so it's like a sweet and spicy sauce,

01:26it's not a hot sauce, it's more an everyday sauce so it goes with everybody's taste palette so I

01:32think that's why it's so popular. It doesn't just cut off the people that like the hot sauce and

01:37you know the people that don't like the hot sauce, it is for everybody basically.

01:41And so growing up were you aware like obviously your dad would have made this so you would have

01:45grown up with it is that right? I did grow up with it so I grew up with it and all my friends used

01:49to just say oh can we go to your dad's shop to get that sauce but it never had a name,

01:54it was just my dad's sauce so I knew about it when I was younger, I never really knew it. I

01:59remember making it, helping my dad make it but I didn't really think of anything at that time,

02:03I was just kind of helping my dad make another recipe. I never imagined it would be so popular

02:08and I would actually get to this stage where I'd have it in a bottle selling to supermarkets,

02:13it's actually unreal to be honest. And for anyone that wants to know more we've actually

02:18interviewed you in the Scotsman before haven't we? So the interview with the Scotsman was probably

02:22the biggest help that I had from the start. I think from that interview it was the first time

02:29that I'd actually put anything into writing, like I'd experienced the whole thing but

02:37nothing was ever in writing, I never wrote it down the actual story. So to be honest it was

02:42quite emotional you know when an interviewer was interviewing me about everything, asking me about

02:47dad, asking me about mum because you know when dad passed away it was a hard time for all of us and

02:52we found the light at the end of the tunnel when we'd seen the recipe and we thought we'll open

02:57our own wee shop and so that interview that we got with the Scotsman and the report that we got

03:04was probably the best thing that could have happened to us because from there we started

03:09getting contacted from distributors already just from the write-up and then it was easy for us to

03:17then go to other supermarkets and other distributors and say this is the link for the

03:22write-up, this is the whole story, saves me kind of going through it all because they've done it

03:28with so much detail it was the best thing that could happen to us to be honest. It was really

03:33really good. And you still do you still work on this with your mum is that right? Yes so mum makes

03:38the spices, actively does all the spices in the morning and I go in after her with my sister-in-law

03:45Tina who heads the she heads the whole operation with staff and I'm now working on sales even my

03:52older brother Tony if you remember I don't know if you've met him before but Tony does all the

03:58all the technical stuff for me now because we're starting to work together now because it's getting

04:03a bit too much for myself so we're starting to network with other people we're still everything's

04:08in-house so we do everything ourselves so the factory is only for us we don't do any other

04:14products it's just Baba Sauce so I think that's what makes it easier for us and it makes it more

04:19manageable and we know what's going on we're not running before we can walk so we have said no to

04:25a few companies because we just want to take our time and we don't want to take the fun out of it

04:30like right now it's a family business we want to keep it like that we don't want to start outsourcing

04:35and you know getting so big that we can't manage it ourself we don't want to get to that point

04:39we want to enjoy it and I've been in business long enough to know that as much as when you're

04:44flying high it could get dropped and before you know it you've got nothing so we're building our

04:51customers weekly and slowly and I feel like that's the best way it's so good to come to the other

04:56side of Scotland and to know that everybody knows your product it's it's really nice for us

05:01it's a good feeling well thank you very much and yeah I'll be trying some of this later on

05:06yeah no worries thank you very much thank you

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