A Pepper Shortage May Hurt Hot-Sauce Supplies

Hot-sauce lovers may soon find their favorite Caribbean bottles harder to come by. As the BBC reports, the Scotch bonnet pepper—backbone of the region's sauces—is in short supply, pinched by back-to-back hurricanes, heavy rains, disease, and pests that growers and manufacturers say are driving up costs and limiting exports. Sauce producers including Walkerswood and Gray's Pepper report canceling or cutting orders and watching prices spike—Gray says Scotch bonnets briefly cost about 10 times their usual price after Hurricane Melissa slammed Jamaica last year, with overall increases of up to 50% in two years. Jamaica is a primary source of the peppers.

Some farmers have abandoned the delicate pepper for hardier, more lucrative crops like sweet potatoes, even as demand in the US, UK, and beyond keeps rising. To cope, companies are stockpiling peppers, experimenting with hardier hybrids, and, in Walkerswood's case, backing genetics research to toughen the classic yellow Scotch bonnet. The pepper has a unique combination of heat and fruitiness, explains a post at Chowhound, and substitutes often fail to replicate. The closest may be the habanero.