Brands on the Rise is a regular Ad Age feature spotlighting the marketing and business tactics of successful challenger brands. Read previous installments here.

Truff, a hot sauce brand that began not as a product but as an Instagram handle, is establishing a luxury lifestyle brand in a category that’s never really had one.

Engineered to hit in social media, and wildly successful with influencers and celebrities from its very beginning, the 4-1/2-year-old brand rapidly became a top seller online. Supporting the slick brand with scrappy behind-the-scenes marketing, a more deliberate approach is now helping Truff take on mainstream retail channels, where its current share of the $828 million category is quite small but its influence is very big.

While the average retail price of hot sauces is $2.84, Truff sells for an eye-popping $18.89, according to IRI multioutlet data. Truff lists online prices for its 6-ounce hot sauce at $17.98; NielsenIQ data shows the average price for Truff in retail at $15.27.

Truff is demonstrating to existing brands that there is ample room for innovation and price in hot sauce and is bringing new customers to the category, said Andrew Criezes, general manager, SMB at NielsenIQ. The firm’s studies indicate that Truff over-indexes with Black, Asian and older millennial shoppers that typically weren’t customers of top brands in the space. NielsenIQ’s Brand Score, a performance metric it uses to help retailers assess the relative value brands deliver them, ranks Truff No. 1 in the entire hot sauce category, despite being the 15th-largest brand by sales, and holding a tiny (but growing) 1.2% market share.

“They are growing massively relative to their distribution, and they’re highly effective,” Criezes said of Truff. “For sure, all eyes are going to be on this company.”

Truff co-founder Nick Ajluni said the brand’s goal isn’t to wipe out its larger competitors in hot sauce, but rather to establish a place alongside them—where he feels the brand’s points of difference will help it to stand out.

“We’re big fans of the saying ‘a rising tide raises all boats,’” said Ajluni. “We want the category to grow, we want all these [larger] brands to succeed, because most customers don’t have one hot sauce in their refrigerator—they could have 10. So, we want to be in the fridge with everyone else, and then we’d like to be the sauce of choice.”

From its origins and formulation, to its marketing, pricing and packaging, Truff is undeniably a different kind of hot sauce, turning traditional brand-building on its ear by developing an audience first, then a product for it, rather than the other way around. A similar kind of reverse-engineering carries through to its positioning and use cases, its founders say. Truff’s marketing offers no hint of the message of macho pain tolerance common among craft hot-sauce brands, and unlike mainstream brands that tout their versatility as an accompaniment to foods, Truff would like consumers to think of it almost as a food itself.

“Truff is something you could build your dish around, rather than something that gets added to it,” Ajluni said.

How it Started

Before there was sauce, there was @sauce.

Ajluni, 28, and co-founder Nick Guillen, 31, met through mutual friends at Cal State Fullerton and bonded over a shared interest in entrepreneurship, streetwear, and hip-hop culture. Although they worked on separate projects (Guillen founded a hat company called Kraynium; Ajluni for a time experimented with a powdered beverage brand) they would bounce ideas off one another, taking special interest in brands that could “growth-hack” their way to creating communities on social media sites.

“One of the things we would do is come up with Instagram handles—these single-word names—and we got the word ‘sauce.’ That was the moment where we started to really dig into this new age,” Guillen said. “The word ‘sauce’ has two different meanings. It’s a relevant word within the pop-culture scene [connoting style and attractiveness] but it’s also a food. And so we were trying to create this intersection of the two.”

What would an online community called “sauce” look like? “We started posting really cool things on this account, things we thought would resonate well with the pop culture foodie—so, food porn images, rappers with food, sexy content, women with food,” Guillen said. Within months the account drew an influential group of followers, including rap musicians and Complex magazine.

“At this moment, we decided we could continue to be this online Instagram account that just posts photos, or we could create a brand that would use this as a platform for whatever products and services we wanted to sell,” Guillen said.

After considering everything from salad dressings to barbeque sauce, the duo set out to develop a hot sauce, recognizing the category showed lots of signals of cultural resonance but had yet to have been fully realized by a brand. “Beyoncé was talking about hot sauce,” Guillen noted, and Huy Fong, the brand behind a Vietnamese-style sauce known as Sriracha, was also having a moment.

Examining grocery aisles, Truff’s founders say they discovered a category with established but not particularly exciting brands—like Cholula and Frank’s RedHot—and a lot of interesting “Ma and Pa” sauces that lacked the branding strength to command price. “We didn’t see any top-shelf, Ciroc-esque, Dom Pérignon-esque lifestyle luxury brands,” Guillen said.

Ciroc, Diageo's ultra-premium vodka brand whose celebrity-backed explosion had come just as Guillen and Ajluni came of age in nightclubs, was a particular inspiration. Like Ciroc, which touts a unique formulation (it’s distilled from rare grapes) the Truff founders sought a similar ingredient story that would support differentiation—and a premium price point. Searching for rare and pricey ingredients, they considered caviar and saffron but settled on the black winter truffle—a pungent mushroom variety that high-end chefs treasure. Organic agave nectar, organic cumin and red chili peppers are the other key ingredients, which came together over a long period of experimentation and result in a hot sauce that is not especially fiery as hot sauces go. (Tabasco and Cholula rate higher on the Scoville scale measuring heat; Truff's Hotter Sauce variety is better suited for daredevil palates, at twice the heat of the original.)

The founders describe particular attention to elements like color and viscosity, noting the importance of not only tasting good, but to photograph well as a pour, a drizzle or a splash.

The truffle—an ingredient chefs rarely pair with spicy flavors—also loaned the brand a name, and inspiration for its distinct bottle cap, which resembles a diamond-cut truffle and which Ajluni noted is an “element of virality” on its own. “It’s something you’d post about.”

Tipping Point

Only when the founders were satisfied that they had a product worthy of withstanding the scrutiny and expectations of the online community they had already created for it, Truff debuted on the @sauce account on Dec. 1, 2017. Among its posts that day was a pre-arranged video testimonial from Michelin-star French chef Ludo Lefebvre, who applauded how Truff’s combination of truffles and hot spices “broke the rules” of cooking, while he prepared an omelet using the sauce.

The founders say their preparation—Guillen’s experiences seeding growth for his fashion brand; and Ajluni’s experience in food that aided the formulation—along with their mutual understanding of the online audience they’d developed, helped Truff succeed virtually from day one. 

“In the startup culture, you see a lot of people who create the minimum viable product. It’s ‘good enough' to go to market, or let people try it for the first time,” Guillen recounted. “Nick and I were very disciplined and patient. We had a product we could have taken to market a couple of times but it just wasn’t right. The viscosity and color the first time we ran Truff was all off. We could have launched, but we decided to scrap the whole run, go back to the drawing board, and take the steps necessary to go to market with a product that was ready for the world to see.”

Influencers and celebrities

Content at the @sauce account continued to feature tantalizing food porn and celebrities, only now the photos and famous figures were accompanied by Truff. The testimonial from Lefebvre was the first of dozens of instances where Truff connected to celebrities, helping it to generate some 3 billion organic social-media shout-outs and more than 10,000 five-star online reviews since its founding. Truff calls itself the most-followed hot sauce brand on social media; its Instagram following of 214,000 is about as large as that of the five top-selling hot-sauce brands combined.

In addition to Lefebvre, chefs like Michael Voltaggio, Bobby Flay and Cat Cora have participated in cooking videos for the brand, as has Rachael Ray on her show. In music, Truff has partnered with dozens of artists and producers including Lizzo, DJ Khaled and Belly. Often these take the form of product placement in official music videos—a kind of advertisement Truff founders say no other hot sauce brands have the equity to pull off.

For the video of the song “Die for It” by Belly, The Weeknd, and Nas, the rapper appears on a set of a burning city where a Truff billboard erupts into flames. “If you were to analyze that placement from a consumer end, only Truff would be able to pull something like that off,” a brand spokeswoman said. “With everything that we do, we are focused on building the brand's identity to merge the world of culinary with pop culture, and music videos are one way that we do that.”

Some—but not all—of these activations are paid placements; others only cost the brand samples.

“We spent a lot of time seeding influencers; people who we thought could resonate with the brand, and whose accounts people liked,” Ajluni said. “We shared product with them, never looking at on a transactional basis, but in a real relationship basis. We say, ‘We love your account, you don’t need to post, but we made a cool product we'd love for you to check out.’”

Another significant voice for the brand has been Oprah Winfrey, who in 2018, and again in 2021, included Truff in “Oprah’s Favorite Things,” her influential annual list of holiday gift recommendations.

Moving beyond DTC

Truff’s founders say they financed the brand’s early growth on their credit cards. The company, Sauce Ventures LLC, raised what Ajluni described as “a small amount of capital,” to help finance its inventory and website, helping fuel direct-to-consumer sales and e-commerce. Amazon lists Truff as the current No. 2 selling hot sauce on its “Amazon Best Sellers” list (Mike’s Hot Honey is No. 1). An Amazon spokesperson declined to specify whether that list reflected unit or dollar sales, saying only the list reflects “recent and historic sales.”

Truff is taking a cautious approach to selling to those beyond the immediate reach of its social channels. In brick-and-mortar retail, that meant focusing first on high-end boutiques, department stores and upscale natural food stores like Erewhon Market, where the founders could be certain its price points would be honored. Today, Whole Foods Market—where Truff calls itself the chain’s top-selling hot sauce—accounts for nearly 40% of Truff’s retail sales, according to NielsenIQ.

Getting the word out beyond the virtual world is a matter of being resourceful, Ajluni said, carefully choosing partnerships that introduce Truff to other brands' audiences and, ideally, efficiently building its online community at the same time.

While the brand did not share what it spends on marketing, “if you saw our lifetime budget you’d snicker,” Ajluni said.

“We’re scrappy and always have been,” he added. “We use creative, and a kind of a guerilla approach, to do a lot with a little. You're not going to see us run Super Bowl commercials or national TV campaigns, or anything like that, but we like to do things in such a creative way that it becomes earned.”

A single Taco Bell location in Newport Beach, California last August promoted Truff Nacho Fries and a Loaded Truff Fries Burrito. Taco Bell said the single-store test represented a “pulse check” on consumer response and that it would consider a larger rollout (no word on that yet). For Truff, pairing with a national brand got its name out there; the promotion itself drew widespread media coverage and more positive online reviews. “It was an example of blanketing the country and getting eyeballs, but in a very thoughtful and targeted way,” said Ajluni.

Other collaborations in recent months include a mac and cheese dish with Noodles & Company; a pizza collaboration with GoPuff; a video featuring young television chef Nick DiGiovanni cooking with Truff and Kraft Heinz’s Bagel Bites; and an online giveaway with the pretzel chain Auntie Anne’s.

Additional ad campaigns are focused on ways to demonstrate Truff’s support of popular restaurants in a format local media find hard to resist. In Philadelphia, the brand ran outdoor advertising to promote voting for the restaurant with the city’s best cheesesteak, and the winner, John’s Roast Pork, received a $10,000 cash prize from Truff. A similar promotion began this spring in Chicago, seeking that city’s best pizza.

“These are cool ways to get the city together and get them talking, get the Internet going, and get the news to cover it,” Ajluni said.

What experts say

Susan Harrow, a media trainer and author who has developed a specialty in getting authors and book publishers the attention of Oprah Winfrey—“the original influencer” as Harrow describes her—said she was impressed with Truff’s approach to marketing.

“They have great branding in that it’s consistent across all mediums. It comes off as designer food. And it’s consistent on all fronts in terms of being gorgeous, slick, gourmet,” Harrow said. “And I think they’re brilliant in doing these videos that show you how to use the product in a lot of innovative and interesting ways. They offer recipes and restaurateurs who speak for them, so they’ve done a great job in the referral and recommendation market that we’re in today.”

Harrow said her perusal of the Truff brand online revealed what she would consider only one drawback—she didn’t get a sense right away that the brand had a charitable purpose. “One thing that consumers really want from their brands today is a message of giving back, especially food brands, with food insecurity being such an issue today,” she said.

(The brand has participated in charitable endeavors, including a red-labeled product to support (RED), the AIDS charity, pledging $50,000 to a fund supporting health programs in sub-Saharan Africa).

Competitors in the space—top-selling brands like McCormick & Co.-owned Cholula and Frank’s RedHot; McIlhenny Co.’s Tabasco; and TW Garner Food’s Texas Pete, may see Truff as something of an ally in supporting price and growing the category—at least for now, said NielsenIQ's Criezis. But it may only be a matter of time before Truff's growth might encourage those brands to protect share behind “copycat” brands or even express interest in an acquisition.

“When it becomes meaningful from a revenue perspective, oftentimes brands will look for an acquisition,” said Criezis. “Look at Coke's acquisition of BodyArmor recently; or Mondelēz buying the vegan chocolate brand Hu, which was all over Whole Foods.”

What's next

Truff’s move to retail was important not only to take advantage of its rapid growth but also to develop efficient trade channels for new products the company has since developed. These include Truff-branded mayonnaises, pasta sauces and truffle oil—all of which share the truffle ingredient story, the slick packaging design and chef-sanctioned online content of the hot sauce. The difference? They’re smaller sellers but heavier items—and therefore more expensive and inefficient to ship.

“When you’re shipping glass, online is not your first choice,” Ajluni said. “So the grocery store is where the market is.”

Guillen said the brand wouldn’t likely stray into categories that deviate from the inspiration of the Instagram community that gave birth to Truff. Longer term, he envisions a brand that’s earned a big audience—but still “got sauce.”

“I think we want to continue to let Truff's voice, and Truff's brand, be cool,” he said. “We want this to be a brand that if Nick and I are on the golf course in 40 years, our kids and grandkids are using it. It’s become a household staple.”