Claire Fitts Georges at Butterfly Bakery of Vermont

Business Focus

Butterfly Bakery of Vermont is a small bakery and food processor that has been making maple sweetened baked goods since 2003. In 2011 they started making hot sauce to sell at the farmers market, in an effort to use the excesses of the market while boosting interest in their farmers market booth. The hot sauces kept selling out, so they have expanded their production year over year and expanded to produce other savory condiments.

Loan Summary

In 2017, owner Claire Georges came to the Vermont Farm Fund for a loan to buy 17,000 lbs of hot peppers and expand to offer a new line of beer and cider based hot sauces. She purchases peppers exclusively from Vermont farmers (and is the #1 purchaser of VT grown peppers) and uses many other locally sourced ingredients as well in her products.

Craft beer based hot sauces at Butterfly Bakery

The Backstory

What Claire discovered along her journey to becoming a major hot sauce producer is that there is a huge overlap in craft beer and hot sauce customers and very few hot sauces that bring the two interests together. The turning point in her beer hot sauce adventures came when John Kimmich, of The Alchemist, fell in love with her Heady Pepper hot sauce and asked Butterfly Bakery to make exclusive batches of hot sauce to sell in their Stowe shop. Since then, they can’t make any beer hot sauce fast enough, and are selling it both in specialty beer stores and specialty hot sauce stores around the country, in addition to local wholesale accounts, monthly subscriptions by mail, and through a stand at the Montpelier Farmers’ Market.

I’m committed to slow, sustainable growth using local ingredients because I want to own the kind of company that I would want to work for and buy from. I buy all of our chili peppers and maple syrup directly from the small-scale Vermont farmers who grow and tend their fields and woods.

In 2017 Butterfly Bakery moved into a new commercial kitchen space in Montpelier to be able to expand production and storage. 2017 turned out to be a great season for hot peppers and Butterfly Bakery ended up purchasing 20,000 lbs from a variety of producers across the state. What do you do with all those peppers? Prep them (wash and remove the stems) then put them in the freezer so that you can make batches of hot sauce all throughout the year, in combination with locally brewed beers.

The Bottom Line

When Butterfly Bakery started more than 15 years ago, they never expected that hot sauce would end up bringing in more than 50% of their business revenue. What started out as a way to use up excess local produce from the Farmers’ Market has blossomed into an up-and-coming niche for beer-based hot sauces that capitalizes on the interest in craft beer while producing a unique product using VT-grown veggies.