And so it begins!

Hey! Arjun here, Co-founder of Pico Sauces.

Since this is the first blog in our new series - Sauc'd: tasty stories right from the source - I thought I'd start by filling you in on the thinking behind the blog, and why you will (hopefully) have a great time reading my future blog posts...

See, over the last 7 years we have been entirely focused on building and expanding our food start up - Nilgai Foods - which is based out of Mumbai, India (now with sales offices in London and Delhi too). As an experience, this has brought us into contact with people and places that I could never have imagined having grown up in London. 

India is one of those places where anything can happen, and everything normally does happen to you on a daily basis. No one ever said starting a business in India would be easy, but equally no one ever said it would be quite this hard. The up side to all this, however, is that the last 7 years have been filled with countless stories that I hope to share with you in this blog.

Who knew, for example, that the humble onion trade is in fact controlled by a vegetable-hoarding mafia, ready to quadruple the price of India's beloved bulb at a moment's notice? Or that we would need to dry out our chillies at the back of a military compound to keep Maoist guerrillas away from our prized crop? Imagine the panic when we switched on the grinder for our first ever batch of India's spiciest chilli sauce and had to evacuate the factory for 6 hours while we waited for the suffocating fumes of powdered ghost pepper to settle down. 

Now that we're launching in the UK and Singapore this month, it's time to share all of these stories with you so that you know what we've had to go through in order to get these sauces all the way over to your kitchen table. If you like what you're reading, please share the blog with your friends, leave your comments below and of course buy some of our amazing chilli sauces and chutneys!

That's all for now. It's time to get Sauc'd!