Founder Profile: Chasing Community versus Chasing Growth | Down to Ferment
For Down to Ferment founder Sean Kirkpatrick, building a successful food business has meant knowing when to push forward, but also when to slow down.
The start to Down to Ferment will be familiar to many folks. It was COVID, and Sean, a chef and longtime food and beverage operator, had been experimenting with fermentation at home, combining fermented peppers with kombucha to create a hot sauce that was less acidic and more balanced. That experiment eventually became Down to Ferment.
Rather than rushing into grocery stores, Sean and his business partner Ryan took Down to Ferment to farmers markets, taking a community-based approach. Defying even Sean’s expectations, this approach led to significant growth. Today, the company still maintains a presence at 10 farmers markets each week, while also expanding into wholesale, co-packing, events, and a production facility of its own.
That community-first approach has shaped much more than the company’s sales strategy. It has allowed Sean to educate customers about fermentation, hear directly from the people buying his products, and build the kind of loyalty that doesn’t come from simply putting a bottle on a grocery store shelf.
And then came Hot Ones.
When Down to Ferment’s That’s What Shishito Said was selected for the show, the opportunity brought national attention, and a very practical challenge: producing thousands of bottles while maintaining the quality and hands-on process that had built the company in the first place. Sean says the timing was critical. Had the opportunity come a few years earlier, the company wouldn’t have had the capacity to handle it themselves.
But perhaps the most interesting part of Sean’s story is what he wants to do next.
After years of rapid growth, he isn’t immediately looking for the next big expansion. Instead, he wants to plateau, enjoy what they’ve built, and give himself and the business some room to breathe. For Sean, knowing your limits is part of building a sustainable company.
In our conversation, Sean gets candid about building Down to Ferment from the ground up, the San Diego fermentation scene, customer education, Hot Ones, burnout, hiring, and why the relationships built within a niche community can be one of a small business’s most valuable resources.
Watch the interview on YouTube, or read on for our conversation with Sean Kirkpatrick of Down to Ferment.
Down to Ferment Interview Transcript
Charlene
Thank you, Sean, for having me here. I'm with Sean at Down to Ferment. We are at their production facility here in the Midway District in San Diego.
I'm super excited to have this conversation to learn a little bit more about how you've built this company and your roots in San Diego and your growth. So yeah, thank you for your time.
Sean
Thank you for coming down and sharing our story.
So how we got started–I've had a lot of experience in the industry with cooking and being a chef and food and beverage manager, culinary director, executive chef, stuff like that.
It's kind of the same story as a lot of other people's. It started as a COVID baby, where I quit my job with nothing lined up and I was just like, you know what, I'm just going to rip it and see what happens. I was like, “I can start my own company. I can do my own thing.”
Back then I was really, really into fermentation, just getting into the fermentation aspect. I was doing peppers, kombucha, and all sorts of stuff.
I was making the hot sauces and kombucha separately. And then as I started experimenting with it, I put the kombucha in with the peppers, and I was like, “Wow, this tastes actually really good. It's not as acidic. It's not as harsh on the palate. It actually kind of balances everything out.” So it started from there.
And then we're like, let's start in the farmers markets and see what happens. We started at two farmers markets and then three and then kept adding and adding. How do we expand this a little bit more? How do we get a bigger footprint? The thing about me and Ryan is we don't really like to do too much like grocery stores.
That's how a lot of small brands do it: I have a product, I want to get into grocery stores as soon as possible. We wanted to go a different route with it and go farmers markets and start getting the support through farmers markets and doing more and more and more of those. Then we started moving our footprint outwards doing hot sauce events in Albuquerque, Portland. We went all the way to Texas one time to do one. We started from there and then kept growing and doing all that stuff.
Charlene
Yeah. I definitely want to touch on where you guys are at now and learn a little bit more about what seems like rapid growth that's happened, especially with hot ones and things recently. But I'm curious to know about your journey to fermentation as a process. What brought you to that type of cooking?
Sean
The interesting thing is as a chef, I've always been trying to like expand my culinary resume/culinary knowledge. Fermentation was just the thing that I was–I was also at the same time looking at curing meats and doing all that stuff. I just didn't lean into that too heavy.
So I'm always trying to do new things and expand my knowledge with these things. And when I got to the fermentation piece of it, I loved doing the experimentation. So I was like, I think I might have something here.
I was experimenting with it. And then the business side of me, because I was running a lot of businesses too. I was running a catering company, not owning them, but running them, doing all the behind the scenes of the costing and the managing costs and scheduling and doing all that stuff.
I had all the tools that I needed to start my company from the ground up, because I'm like, I have all this knowledge. I know how to manage the costs. I know how to source ingredients. I know how to schedule staff. I know how to do all that stuff. And then the fermentation side of it was just like, that was a huge passion at the time.
I mean, it still is. We still do experimentations all the time with fermentations. And it's one of my things that I've leaned into.
It's kind of like when you get a master's degree in college. I have all the general knowledge about cooking, but I kind of feel like I didn't go to college for fermentation or anything like that. But all the extracurricular research and experimentation and lab work and stuff that I've done with fermentation has put me into that master's niche with fermentation, as far as in a culinary world.
Charlene
I think fermentation is a really interesting thing here in San Diego in particular, from hot sauces, but also the hard kombucha. It’s launched and gained traction here in San Diego in a way that's different from the rest of the country. And what do you think is unique about the San Diego environment? Like what do you think has brought people to fermentation here?
Sean
The interesting thing is, because especially being in the culinary industry in San Diego, San Diego didn't used to be known as much for its food scene.
But I'd argue we're on par, if not better than LA with our food scene now. The food scene in San Diego has just gone off. And we have so many good restaurants in San Diego, so many talented, amazing chefs in San Diego.
And I think it was kind of like a natural progression. O bviously, this is my opinion. I think it was a natural progression of people moving from LA, widening the LA influence and range, because obviously, LA has always been known as a really good food scene. I think it's just kind of migratory.
And then not only that, but we're so close to Mexico and Tijuana. So we have all of those culinary influences too. I don't know if you've ever spent time in the Valle in Mexico, but they have some insane restaurants there.
Culinary goes through trends and progressions and different things. And what really locks trends in is obviously San Diego started as kind of like a beer capital too.
I think Denver was also, or not Denver, but maybe Colorado Springs early on in the craft brew industry. Started those, those rise of craft breweries. But San Diego, I knew at one time had the most craft breweries per capita in the city. And I think it's the fermentation piece kind of just has been a spinoff of the craft brewing.
You start seeing more fermentation on menus, especially pepper fermentation. Like I see a lot of in-house done hot sauce on a lot of menus too. Then kombucha and the kombucha scene, we got JuneShine, Boochcraft, Local Roots, like a bunch of different amazing brands that I think really helped just pump it up once the trend starts trending. Then you're going to have a lot more popping up and a lot more public knowledge of this stuff.
Charlene
Yeah. I do want to tap into that kind of conversation of how the market and people's understanding of fermentation has changed. But one thing I want to touch on is I know how much Down to Ferment is a community rooted company.
You mentioned going down the farmer's market route, rather than going full retail with grocery stores. What what made you choose that direction? What do you think you've learned by going that direction versus another?
Sean
What it really boiled down to was scalability at the time. We didn't have the kitchen space. We started in a commercial rental kitchen. And so I think the scalability piece was definitely a huge factor.
But also it was building a connection with the community first, because if you just insert your product into places without a community background and community support, you're really not going to get a ton of traction. And I've seen that with, with other struggling brands.
Sometimes it works, and viral marketing isn't our thing either. Like we do the Instagram and stuff, but we kind of suck at Instagram. We kind of suck at social media in general. But it's just not our thing. Like our focus is on the passion of the product. Our focus is on the hot sauce. Our focus is on how we get our sauce out to the community and stuff.
We still do 10 farmers markets every single week. We staff those, we do all that. We haven't cut any of them. Keeping that footprint alive in the community, I think is a really big thing and it helps, you’re meeting the people. I used to work a lot at the farmers markets. I can't anymore just because we have this facility. We do a lot of co-packing and stuff. So I can't be everywhere all at once.
But when me and Ryan went out there and did all those farmers markets, we met a lot of our clients. We talked a lot to our clients. It's the engagement with your customer. Placing bottles on a store shelf doesn't really offer a lot of engagement.
They talk about wine, how people pick wine by label now. And it works that way for a lot of different things–hot sauce, condiments in general. The label is what's getting attention, you're not creating the connection to the customer, just putting a product on a shelf.
Charlene
I know for me, my favorite thing is to be able to offer a hot sauce or bring a wine to a party and say, “Oh, I have a story around this. I met the owner, I got to chat with them.
Sean
Exactly. We get that kind of stuff all the time cause San Diego is a huge tourist destination. So we get a lot of people that are buying our products. We also have our product in the airport. They grabbed our product at the airport. And they're like, oh my God, we saw these guys at the farmer's market too.
It’s, like you said, a story. Yeah we want to sell,it's a business, we want to sell hot sauce, but it's also kind of part of our mission of connecting everything. That's why we make everything from scratch. That's why we ferment everything from scratch. We make our kombucha from scratch. It's been a pain to scale up, but it's worth the passion. We're not cutting corners and we're taking everything and making it from the ground up.
Charlene
That authenticity is very meaningful.
I'm curious since it's been five years since you originally launched–
Sean
Five and a half ish.
Charlene
–five and a half.
What do you think has changed about how people understand fermentation or kombucha? Cause I know at least for me personally, that's definitely something that has entered my life in the last, like maybe three, four years. Do you feel like there's been a difference in how people approach their knowledge around that?
Sean
Yeah, I think one of the things about us being a kombucha hot sauce is it throws people off initially. I got that, especially in the first few years. It throws people off a lot a lot of people don't even know what kombucha is. When I first started working a lot of farmer's markets, I had some people say, “What's kombucha?” [pronounced incorrectly] And I was like, “Oh, it's so it's kombucha. [pronounced correctly] It's a fermented tea, blah, blah, blah.”
That’s a piece of when you have kind of a niche, differentiated product in the market. The customer education piece becomes your responsibility. If you can't educate your customer on the reasons why you're doing it this way, then the customer is not going to do their own research there.
That's also the building of the connection, right? That's also the understanding of–Oh, well he does it this way because X, Y, and Z. So I think the understanding of kombucha, as it permeates the market in more ways, people are going to become more educated on it.
People ask us, isn't kombucha vinegar? And it's like no, it's not. Vinegar’s actually brewed in a completely different way from kombucha. They're both acetic acids, but they're produced in a completely different fashion. I can make kombucha into a vinegar by high acid content, but it's not the exact same. Vinegar is made from fermenting alcohol into acetic acid.
Whereas kombucha is made from just sugars into acetic acid. It's a different process and vinegar by law and by definition has to be brewed from alcohol. So again, customer education and understanding.
And when a customer pushes back and is like, “Oh, I don't like kombucha.” I say, well try this instead. You're not going to taste kombucha. The kombucha is there as a piece to balance the flavors.
It's not there to taste like kombucha. It's all about just kind of putting it in their hand and just stepping them outside their comfort zone. That's something you can do at the farmer's market. You can't do that at a grocery store.
Charlene
It's such a common conversation I keep having with people who are running small businesses.
Even for products that are a bit more mainstream now, like matcha, for example. Marketing has to be built around consumer education for a lot of businesses. So I appreciate you touching on that.
What is your inspiration for your sourcing, your recipes or ingredients?
Sean
I don't necessarily have specific inspiration. I draw on certain inspirations…what do I want to make? What am I feeling? I just kind of let things come to me sometimes. Like, for example, so That’s What Shishito Said, our sauce that was on Hot Ones.
That one came to me when I was at a sushi restaurant, Soichi specifically in North Park with a couple of friends. And we were talking about a shishito hot sauce or something like that. We were just spitballing.
We’re also big Office fans. A lot of times, the name comes first and then I build the sauce. Like Beat Your Meat, one of our sauces, the name came first. And then I built the sauce around it.
That’s kind of a fun challenge for me. It's almost harder to make the hot sauce and then name it. It's a lot harder for me to do that because I'm like, well, what do I call this? I don't really have any inspiration. I mean, I'm not that clever. I'm trying my best to come up with a certain name.
So like when we come up with something new, ideally I like to come up with a kind of concept and the name first. And then I build the sauce into that. The shishito sauce is Japanese influences. I've been to Japan a few times. I love Japanese cuisine. Let's lean into shishito and Japanese cuisine.
Then I just build that flavor profile that leans into the name of the sauce.
Charlene
That's great because Down to Ferment obviously has that tongue-in-cheek identity to it. So that's interesting to get a little behind the scenes of the process of where you're building and in what direction.
You mentioned Hot Ones. I want to say congrats. I mean, that's big for any hot sauce brand. How did you feel when you found out that That’s What Shishito Said was going to be on the Hot One season?
Sean
It was kind of crazy. It was literally at the beginning of the year in January. It was like January 2nd.
We got an email invite saying hey, we want to have a Zoom call with you. Because there are certain layers to it and steps that you have to take prior–a lot of emailing back and forth, a lot of checking in, a lot of, “Hey, do you like our stuff?”
So once we got to that point and once we got up to the Zoom call, it wasn't known, but it was felt that this could be big. We're having a Zoom call with them that could be huge.
Then when it happened, they said they wanted to have it in the number one spot. We were like, hell yes. All right, we got it. And then interestingly enough, that's when the–I wouldn't say panic–but that's when the anxiety set in. Now we have to produce thousands and thousands of bottles, and we produce everything ourselves here.
It came at a great time too. We're established, we have this facility, we have the capacity and the capability to do this now. If this came in year two, we wouldn't have been able to do it ourselves. We would have had to meet with a co-packer. We just didn't have the capacity to do it. Timing is everything. Once the excitement dies off, then the anxiety comes–now we got to make sure we do this the right way too.
If it’s not done perfectly or if we have a mistake somewhere, it's a big order, it's a big deal. Those are all the things as a business owner that go through your mind, all the liability that can occur.
Charlene
Have you noticed a change in how customers are coming to you guys post-Hot Ones? Is it changing where people are from geographically?
Sean
We don't have a lot of time to dig into those numbers often, but we have noticed an uptick in online sales for sure. And we also notice we are part of Faire. We've noticed an uptick in Faire and other wholesale.
It doesn't have an impact on a community level. In our farmer's markets, yeah, we have it on our sign now. But realistically, our customers don't really care.
They're happy for us, but they’re like, “Ee already know that sauce.” So it's a happy congratulations, but they're still gonna buy the sauce.
On a more national level, yeah, it's definitely helped. When we go out to do events–we just did the Portland Hot Sauce Expo and the Washington State Hot Sauce Expo. We do a lot of hot sauce expos as much as we can. That definitely helps. It creates a little bit more notoriety. Yeah, we have a hot sauce on Hot Ones right now and then try our other sauces. So it helps engage more people that don't know about us, in many different channels.
Charlene
Okay. Question. Do you think you could handle the Hot Ones lineup like no sweat? Or do you think you would be kind of struggling by the end?
Sean
I have done a Hot Ones lineup before. I wouldn't say no sweat. I like to be a tough guy about it and just be like, oh yeah, I'm good.
But I've tasted a lot of hot sauces in the past five, six years. It does still affect me. But we've made some really hot stuff here before, because we do co-packing too. I don't like eating them, but I do it just to challenge myself sometimes. So no, not no sweat.
The long winded answer is not no sweat. It's, if I get towards eight, nine, ten, you're going to see my eyes watering a little bit. You're going to see a little bit, but I'm just going to have a brave face on.
Charlene
Nice. Well, I want to talk about growth and take a moment to look back. What has surprised you the most in the last five and a half years?
Sean
What has surprised me the most? I think customer loyalty has surprised me the most. The consistent sales we've gotten in farmers markets. We can kind of see how the economy goes, every business can feel it in one way or the other. But we still have a lot of customer loyalty.
Not only that, the customer loyalty through wholesale reorders too. Some accounts we've had, I'm shocked we've had that account for so long. Not in a negative way, I'm just pleasantly surprised that it's still going.
It's key when you're doing your own thing and you have your own product. If the customer isn't purchasing it from this wholesaler, it's very hit or miss. Some clients, I'll be lucky to have, if they get a couple of reorders out of us and then they just move on with a different product.
But having years and years of reorders, it’s awesome. The customer support, both on the business to customer side and the business to business side has been really nice.
Then not only that, but we've gotten to work with some amazing chefs and restaurants in San Diego that we have our hot sauce in. It’s very humbling. I'm proud of what we've built, but it's still sometimes a shock, I can't believe our hot sauce is in that restaurant. You know it’s a crazy feeling sometimes.
I didn't expect to blow up. I really thought that I was going to be doing a couple of farmer's markets a week for years and just pay my bills. But as we kept growing, I realized that we had to just keep pacing with it. If we didn't grow with it and we didn't keep reinvesting our money back into the business, we weren't going to be able to grow to the place we're at now.
Charlene
So what's something you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
Sean
I’m thinking about it because there's so many things! As you learn, there are so many things, like how to make sure you have the right contract with a customer through co-packing or wholesale. Or even like if we do a white label of the sauce, how we price things a particular way for wholesale. I'm trying to think if there's like one glaring, glaringly obvious thing.
My biggest thing is staff sooner. I think a lot of small businesses go through this burnout.
When you're a small business you're doing everything. So the faster you can build into the budget, a staff and labor cost, the easier it's going to be to scale your business. You can't scale your business if you're also working the farmer's market and also making the sauce and also doing wholesale accounts and also doing this. You're not really growing it. You're spreading yourself out in such a thin manner that you're not giving your attention to what really needs to happen.
As a business owner, you need to be working on the business, not in the business.
A lot of business owners will be like, well, I don't have the budget. I don't have the money for that. So it’s a matter of figuring out how to get somebody in place and to train them really well to do this well and sell even 80% of what the owner can do. So get them in there and then you can go work on this.
I can work on getting more wholesale accounts. I can work on a new flavor development I have. And that gives customers more product offerings.
So, if you're spreading yourself out too thin. You're just going to hit burnout really soon and it's not going to be fun. And then you’ll be wondering, “Oh, should I be doing this?” Which we all do anyway.
Charlene
For sure. Well, what about looking forward? Where do you see Down to Ferment going in the next year to five years?
Sean
We have a few things that I can't talk about right now in the works and stuff like that. We have our eyes set on a few things, but the fun thing about capitalism is always like grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. For me and how we run our business, I think we're at a good place to plateau for now because we've had just five years of just rapid growth. And I want to just chill out for a minute, plateau for a little bit, enjoy the fruits of our labor and keep it where it's at.
Then regroup, think about different avenues or other sales channels, because it's been busy. It's been really, really busy and keeping up can sometimes take the creativity and the fun out of it. So for right now, I think after this year, I want to kind of stay steady, maybe add one big account that we've been working on. But yeah, that's kind of like what we have.
Charlene
You can keep your secrets.
Sean
I'll keep my secrets. I can't talk about things that aren't for sure yet, you know?
Charlene
I think it's great to talk about the reality of burnout and to consider that into your business plan as well, both with the staffing side and also just accepting we’re at a good place now. We don't need to stress ourselves out more.
Sean
Exactly. You have to know your limits. And if you don't know your limits, you're going to break your limits and then you're going to break yourself.
I know so many other small business owners that go through this constantly. And I see it and I try to learn from other people's mistakes too. Ilearn from my own mistakes, but I also see how other people are doing things. I'm like, I don't want to do it that way. I don't want to go through that.
Charlene
Were there any resources in the community that were particularly helpful that you would point small business owners towards where you're like, “Oh, this is something that maybe you don't know about that can kind of help support you.”
Sean
Well, when you talk about community and support, it's hard to trump what the hot sauce community does. As we’ve gotten more into events, something I didn't even know was that the hot sauce scene is so big and there's so many makers doing different things. You have makers on a national level and you have makers on a smaller level.
When you go out to these hot sauce expos and hot sauce shows, you network. I've gotten more valuable experience and support from making friends through that niche of the hot sauce community with other makers. Even the equipment that we've gotten, I got it as a recommendation from another hot sauce maker. We just go back and forth and we talk shop. Then you learn they did it this way and it worked really good for them. And you just share that knowledge. It's kind of like that rising tide lifts all boats.
So the one thing that I would suggest to other small business is to network with your industry.
They’re not your direct competition. I mean, they are in a capitalistic sense. But there are so many people out there that are nice and just want to help. They want to talk about their business and are passionate about what they do.
I’ve helped a lot of businesses and they’ve helped me in return–it’s a symbiotic relationship. It doesn’t just have to be that that company is a competitor to you. You can coexist.
Charlene
That spirit of collaboration is something I’ve seen a lot in San Diego. It allows for a presence of these smaller businesses and pop-ups that isn’t always as strong in other cities. It’s a key component of it: viewing others as people who share your passion not just pure competitors.
But I want to close out by asking if there is anything you want to plug to the San Diego community.
Sean
We do our normal PB, OB, Little Italy, Oceanside, North Park, Hillcrest, La Jolla, Poway farmers markets. We’re in several mom-and-pop shops as well. On the first page of our website you will see our location map.
Oh, I’ll plug this. We’re actually test batching our anniversary sauce for our next year, for our six-year anniversary. Every anniversary we do another flavor, another fun thing. It’s our experimental sauce where lots of time and energy goes into it. Sometimes extra aging, or weird ingredients going into it.
Charlene
I will have to keep an eye out for that!
Well thank you Sean!
Sean
Thanks for coming down!
Transcript edited for clarity.
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