Dat'l Do-it Offers Sample Pack of Pepper Products

During the Holiday season, thousands of lucky people tore into red and green wrapping paper to find a Wonder Box of Hot Love.Now, now, before you get excited, that's a sample pack of hot datil pepper products from Dat'l Do-it. The St. Augustine, Fla.-based company bottles sauces, vinegars, dips and pickles, among other things, flavored with the potent datil pepper. A close relative of the Habanero, the datil is said to be one of the world's hottest and rarest peppers. Dat'l Do-it founder and chief pepper picker Chris Way discovered the little hotty in the kitchen of his first restaurant. What began as a condiment accompanying menu entrees launched yet another enterprise for the Way family.Having experienced the difficulties of trying to sell into the highly-competitive supermarket channel, the 16-year-old company has decided to go a new route. "We've really shifted the focus of our business in the last couple years to go after gift sets and holiday business," says Way.This year, five specially packaged gift sets of sauces and oils were designed in-house and sold into mass merchants in time for the holiday shopping season.Packed in limited-edition boxes, with cut-outs revealing the engaging alligator on the label, the gift packs double as their own P-O-P. Vice President Ruth Ann Causey says, "We tried to develop something that is unique and attractive but also very bold, that will jump off the shelf and catch the attention of the customers."The Wonder Box of Hot Love combines three bottles of hot sauce with two jars of mustard in a black box sprinkled with multi-colored peppers. And, of course, the famous alligator cowboy riding a bucking pepper.Two of this year's gift sets feature a new product, GargOils flavored oils. "With the oils we were trying to get off the gator theme and go a different route," Causey says. The GargOil gift boxes are printed to resemble the stone from which Medieval gargoyles were carved. "We're trying to diversify in some way so we don't always have the same type of packaging," she adds.In the past, gift sets were developed with no particular store in mind. Now, however, that may be changing. "We did a black box especially for Target this year," Causey says, and the gray GargOils box ended up in Wal-Mart. The company will sell the gift sets into smaller outlets, but will not offer the same package to competing accounts."Here in the Southeast Dat'l Do-it is pretty strong in the grocery stores," Way says, "but when we start getting out of our neighborhood it becomes just another product on the shelf." While collectors throughout the country may covet the labels and seek to add them to hot sauce collections, to grocery shoppers Dat'l Do-it is just one of hundreds of cleverly designed pepper bottles adorning the shelves.Way avoids the competition altogether by looking for new markets and taking the product out of the cooking aisle and into the gift aisle at such stores as Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, Belz and TJ Maxx. With gift sets, Way says, "we're getting an opportunity that previously wasn't available to us to expose our products to several hundred thousand people."When designing a new gift pack, Way says, "we try and get one big hit for each item. By March or April we'll know how many gift sets a particular store is going to take and then we have the next six months to go out and sell additional boxes to smaller stores and catalogs. So if Wal-Mart orders 65,000, we may ultimately end up running 120,000 [units of one package.]"Dat'l Do-it works with Dusobox Corp., Orlando, Fla., and Jacksonville, Fla.-based Rex Packaging. Both companies "are as involved in making our packaging a success as we are," says Way, who himself designs most of the packages. After bouncing ideas off Causey, Way sends the scribbled concepts to an artist friend who roughs them into two-dimensions. From there the ideas go to a graphic artist for final computer renderings.Paradise Plastics, Plant City, Fla., produces the plastic trays inside the boxes. The glass bottles are labeled by Brand Label, Jacksonville, Fla.The company plans to introduce five new gift packs in January for the 1998 Holiday season. "We're constantly under pressure to come up with new and different things to keep people interested in buying from us instead of someone else."

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