​The annual pepper festival in Keremeos, British Columbia is in late September. Both George and I have been actively involved in that event since it started. In fact, up until last year we were the organizers of the Hot Pepper Eating Contest that wrapped up the day long festival. September 16, 2017 was the date for the 16th annual Similkameen Sizzle – the name of the pepperfest.
 
We knew early in our vending season this year that we would be attending Sizzle and about a month ago we decided to focus on pepper and spicy items just for this event. Typically we take a cross section of our products to each venue. Sizzle would be the first one this year where we specifically targeted our products to the event. This was also the first time we have vended there where we were just there as vendors – we could just concentrate on JamBusters!
 
It was a few days before the event when George and I decided to enter something in the annual Hot Sauce Contest. We have won three awards since we started JamBusters! at this pepper festival and we are quite proud of them so it made sense that we would enter something this time around. We kicked around ideas and finally settled on entering a brand new product – one made specifically for the event. I had a recipe I was using for my current line of jellies and we chose to create something we called Ghost Pepper Jelly.
 
The rich red colour of the jelly features small pieces of red bell and ghost peppers in suspension. I really like how the jars look when there are bits of peppers, onions or fruit that appear to be floating in the jelly. It’s something I have put a great deal of effort into perfecting and sometimes I won’t sell jars that don’t meet my personal standards of appearance. George says it’s a good thing that I am kind of picky about that because we do receive a lot of great comments about the visual look of our products.
 
Anyway, the Ghost Pepper Jelly was entered into the Hot Jelly Category of the Hot Sauce Contest and we spent the day vending. It was an awesome sales day for us as we stayed open later than we ever have before and we also broke our previous single day sales record. The record was set last year at Sizzle!
 
Late in the day the award winners were announced and while I was serving a customer at our vending booth I asked him to pause a moment so I could hear the results. George was somewhere else in the park and when the JamBusters! name was announced I got the fellow I was serving to watch our booth as I headed up to get our award. George met me on the way. It was great to earn another award for an item we only just produced days ago – and sold out of later in the day.

It has been so busy lately I’ve fallen behind a little on my blogging! We recently finished our busiest August to date vending a total of seven days. We added the Oliver Indoor Flea Market to our Saturdays and kept the OK Falls Community & Farmers Market in place on Sundays. Also, this August we did not take a week off for a holiday. That made for a very active vending cycle for us.
 
Plus, it put me in the kitchen a lot more in order to keep adding inventory. We saw some very good sales days in both venues and that really ate away at our product lines. It was also in late July when we decided to alter the salsa varieties we had been carrying. By referencing the Scoville Heat Chart it made a little more sense to step up our salsas by pepper variety rather than adding more or less of a type or mixing pepper types.
 
We have a total of seven different ‘heat levels’ in our salsas. We start at our Virgin Salsa which has no heat then move all the way up to our hottest one The Grim Heater which contains Ghost peppers. The idea behind changing the pepper ingredients was to focus on just different levels of heat resulting from the hotter variety of peppers. This allowed us to introduce different peppers into the mix including the Hot Portugal and the Hungarian Hot Wax peppers. The change also produced some really flavourful salsas based on the flavour of the various pepper varieties.
 
With this goal in mind, we chose to ‘blow out’ the existing salsa inventory. We had a great response to that in the last weekend of July and finished it with another strong day of sales in early August. The momentum that came from that sales event carried us through August with some very good days. Also, we were beginning to see even more repeat customers coming to us – and requesting products by name – at both the Oliver Indoor Flea Market and the OK Falls Community & Farmers Market.
 
We finished August off with an unusual encounter. Following our last August date in Oliver we drove into Osoyoos on the way home to get a tire looked at that was giving us problems earlier in the day. We ended up bumping into a pair of online friends from the Vancouver area who happened to be camping nearby. George chased them down once I was able to park the car and we ended up serving ‘try-before-you-buy’ taste samples in the parking lot of a downtown business.
 
The pair, Jason and Mindy, had been followers of JamBusters! for some time but had never had the opportunity to sample our products. They ended up buying items out the back of the car in our makeshift mobile store. It was a fun and interesting way for us to finish off what was quite honestly an amazing month for JamBusters!