Hi everyone, I'm Deby Jackson, I'm the owner, editor and publisher of That Leeds Mag and today I am talking to Frank J of The Chilli Shop, the hottest shop in Leeds.
Hello everybody
An all round chilli expert, that right?
Well, anyone that says what do you do for a living? I say that "I hurt people for a living".
Sounds about right.
So what is your connection to Leeds, the greatest city in the world?
Well, I love the city and I think it's the hub of the North. Being a southerner, and when I started everything, I just noticed that all the best projects, all the best foody companies, little tiny, risky, beautiful little companies were from Yorkshire, Sheffield the North basically, Liverpool. And Leeds is really an hour away from everywhere isn't it - so close and it's such a big growing city it's an amazing place.
Yeah, there's a lot of the SEO companies in Leeds and print companies in Leeds because of the fact that it's slap bang in the middle of the country, it's brilliant at dispatching everything.
And it has the nicest people. I know it sounds about right. But being a being a Londoner, you go on the Tube, if you talk to somebody on the underground, you're either mad or American. So up here and everyone talks to you and I love talking and interacting with the customers. So it's really refreshing to actually, you know, be welcomed and chat is lovely. Really enjoyed it nice people
So it is the greatest thing in the world?
Well, I'm biased, but yes.
I'm not going anywhere now.
Fantastic. No, no, we're not. So where does your love of chilli come from?
Well, I'm a foodie. I have to stress that. People think I'm a challenge shop. I'm a foodie first. My grandmother, see the dark bits, my grandmother was from a farm in Bologna. And if you've ever been to Bologna is about the food and the wine. She married an Englishman called Frank, my grandfather. And he was the banqueting chief of the Savoy Hotel, organising huge banquets for royalty, George Best, celebrities, you know, the FA Cup winning team would eat there. And so as a little kid, I used to go around his house in London, and he would feed me caviar, petit fours, smoked salmon with lemon on it and I thought he ate that every day. I thought that was his normal food. But he just like loved me because I had the same name as him and I just fell in love with food and flavours and tastes. And then when you get older you discover travel, you go abroad, my holidays to the Caribbean influence my hot food flavours and Thailand and all over the world really.
Loads of different stuff isn't there when you go and it is such a contrast from travelling to what you would eat at home you might have a jacket potato. And then you go somewhere else and then there's all this food it's all different colours, and it's all just yeah, delicious. And you would never have even tried it, had you not visited those places.
I've had several magazines in Brighton where I first started and here in Leeds, say my shop is one of the best places for a first date. I found that bizarre, weird but when I thought about it, if you come in, you are tasting around the world. You're coming around, and you're getting free tastings of something from the Caribbean, something from Mexico, something from America, and then it starts off these little conversations and their attention wasn't on each other. And it was really funny. So it's a funny place to have a date, but it's a hot date.
You find out a lot about a person. Yeah, I guess, so what they like to eat.
Yeah. And would you dare kiss them afterwards?
Yes. You get your face burnt off.
So yeah, so you began your chilli shop journey? in Brighton. You said?
Yeah, I started with a skate park.
No connection, I believe
I went from marketing in London, to living in Scotland and then I came to Brighton. I moved to Brighton when my marriage didn't work and I moved to Brighton because I've always had wonderful dirty weekends in Brighton, love the place. Wonderful place, full of adventure and seaside and clubs and bars and restaurants and food and the little lanes of independents I'm always attracted to little independents. And when I came to Brighton, I'm quite a rebel, when I have an idea. I do it. I'm one of those dangerous people that has an idea and does it whether it's a good idea or not. I'm just gonna do it. And I was walking on the seafront in Brighton and they were some kids tearing off bits of concrete on the old paddling pool between the two piers, really rundown broken, and I told these kids and you know "What you're doing?" They went "Oh, Mum won't let me skate anywhere else. It's too dangerous." And I said, "What about if I turn this into a skate park?" And five weeks later working with a friend called Paul, we built a £50,000 skate park with no money, may I add, no money, we got sponsorship. We came up with ideas and they worked. We built this huge skate park and the council banned me from selling healthy foods to the kids. And kids are very vital, skaters are fit and healthy. I looked it up because I get bored easy. I looked into healthy food.
And there were two and a half thousand farms around the area of Brighton and not a single farmers market. Not one. I'd never been to a farmers market. So I started one. And being a veggie, I started the first vegetarian farmer's market in Europe and my very first stall holder made seriously hot chutneys and jams and sauces. And I challenged him and I said, "Look, what are you local because these are chillis" and he went "Frank, there's loads of us all over the country with polytunnels and greenhouses growing chillis, making really unusual super hot stuff, and nowhere to sell them. We've got nowhere - delis won't take us - we're too hot. There's nowhere to take us. Could you do a chilli festival? You just seem to come along and do things. So I did. Yeah, I started a chilli festival. And this is before Facebook. 10,000 people came in two days. And it was huge.
How did people find out?
Word of mouth, flyers, you know, just word spreads for
marketing.
AA signs up everywhere. You know, the old school marketing. A lot easier now. And then then, when I went to book the stallholders a year later, a lot of them are gone bust. Because they did well at my festival but the rest of the year that couldn't survive. And I'm very into buying local variants of the local economy and I'm very into independents. So, after a couple of years of this festival getting bigger I decided even though I don't like shopping, and I don't like shops, I particularly don't like shopping centres. I'm going to start a chilli shop to keep my babies alive. And basically my shop is a chilli festival in a shop. Yeah, and it's all the bizarre and unusual and foodie and ingredients and things that you know one day you'll seeing somewhere at a festival and you'll love it and you'll never know how to get it again. I'm that shop. I'm that shop. And now things find me. The most bizarre things attract to me like my one of my latest things is a cactus salsa, beautiful chilli cactus, it's to die for. Or gin and tonic lemon marmalade. Beautiful, great excuse to have gin and tonic in the morning. But that's how I started. It started with the skatepark and it started falling in love with my stallholders and seeing them as real people so I look around my shop. And you might see, you know, sauces with funny or rude names or unusual ingredients. But I see Stuart and I see Debbie and I see Dave and they're real people and when you come in, not only will you be talking to me, you're getting the story behind the sauce and integrity and why the sauce tastes better.
Like you would at a Farmers Market getting stuff from the supplier I suppose
You are and it comes a great gift to other people. Yeah.
So what things were you doing in Leeds before lockdown? So February, earlier in the year?
Well, lockdown was interesting. So my shop before was a totally different look. We had 50 free tasters out every day and you come in and you try stuff all heat rated. So it's quite daring people come in just to try stuff. To keep the shop alive because you're a tiny little business paying, you know business rates and rent and everything. So to keep myself alive, I would go along and do festivals. And I would sponsor the chilli eating competition and have a stall. I would do markets and I would do restaurants I'd go do supper clubs and chilli challenges. And basically you're just forever just, just paying the rent and all these events and festivals but also spread the word but markets and festivals spread the word so it was great. And then lockdown here and it was like bang and I saw it I got a very quick mind and I saw it happening and I knew that I was not going to pay the rent. I knew I was not going to and I can lose the shop even though my landlords are really nice. They love me, they're friendly, they're the only ones that would take me you know out if anyone else in Leeds wouldn't even look at me because I'm so different. And then what I did was I bought a huge military ammunition case from a place called Dragon's Bridge, everybody, it's such a cool place. It's a reclamation yard. I could really recommend it - you never know what you're gonna get
Where is that?
Oh yes, hidden away. Yeah, you need to do feature on Dragon's Bridge. You want an old telephone box? You want a full size dinosaur? You want a chandelier?
They've got it now?
They probably haven't. But they did, you never know what's gonna be there. You never know. There was these military gun cases. And I knew that as a business what was going to happen was lockdown was going to absolutely leave me unable to get stock. My stock has got dates on they're gonna go out of date. It was a difficult time. So I took, I have got, you see this sign here? Hot Ones? This is the biggest show on Youtube, it's huge. It's a Chilli Challenge for Celebrities interview. And these sauces are expensive and hard to get almost impossible to get outside of America. And I took 1 to 10 of this lineup, the most sought after sauces and got some black foam and got it fitted inside this military ammunition casing, cut it with a scalpel, they really took hours - if you want a work of art, you'd want this. And I did raffles. That's what saved me during lockdown. I did a raffle. And all my lovely customers saved the shop. Because we raffled this off, and I'm so grateful. I've kept all the raffle tickets that all these people that kept me alive. And every month, even though I didn't say it up front, I'm drawing a ticket every month for another prize to go out
rewarding people for your support.
Yeah, and I did care packages, I designed a sauce called Self-Isolation Hot Sauce. And anybody in Leeds I would do free deliveries and you get a little care package with your name on it in Old English.
You can get a packet of the world's hottest gummy bears, so you can trick your friends, you're fed up, with your family you're stuck with. And I would drop it on their doorstep knock at the door run away. And that's what we do all through lockdown delivering these little packages.
just to make people smile as well.
Yeah. And they didn't expect it. They didn't know. They didn't know they were getting a free gift. But they had no idea, it was just something you don't expect.
Yeah something really nice. And it really helps you get remembered things like that. They absolutely loved it.
Yeah. And I got to so many customers. I made so many people smile and what I didn't realise is, because people were getting their bag with their name on saying care package, a gummy bear, or gummy bears and they're free. They were taking photographs of what they're going to get and putting it on their social media. So their friends were going, "Oh, I want one of those." And then that's how this sort of marketing effects by accident happened
Well social media has been so busy because of lockdown. Because everybody's online, you know, you can't go out. So that's it. So we are so what have you been? What? What's happening now? I mean, what's going to be forever changed for the Chilli-Shop?
I can't have the taste of that anymore. And during lockdown, I could see this happening. And I thought right. You know what, I only had 24 hours to move into this shop when I was given this shop 24 hours. So I didn't. I didn't like the look every day I came in. Really the imagine a perfectionist an artist going, I don't like the look. And I thought right, I'm going to spend the last money I have in the world with some professional slat walls, they're called and it pushed the shop really wide. They come with no instructions. These are professional shop fittng walls, and they have shelves that you could change the height of them all around. And it means I can keep bringing in new ideas and changing things. And so I had to learn from YouTube how to fit and how to be a shop fitter. So during lockdown, I had the most chronic toothache I remember sleeping on the floor in agony so many times. I rebuilt my shop, I designed it how I've always wanted it to be as an experience for the customer. And I've now got a shop where we still do the free tastings but the difference is you ask. Now I get them out the fridge and we put them on a stick and people try it. But it means the shop has got twice as much scope and space and stock as it did before. Even though we just survived. We are stronger than ever now. So and out the back of it. Wow. During lockdown nothing that used to sell sold apart from the best taste in the world - this little little jar of caramelised garlic, I'll have to send you one of these, and this is the best taste in the world. This is the number one thing I've ever sold. Apart from that everything that I used to sell didn't sell. All the expensive items did, the real unusual - the black garlics, the red habanero and black coffee, the golden syrup with fatale chilli, the banana habanero, the chipotle all the things that were unusual started selling during lockdown and I think it's because people were bored. I think I became their dealer, their fix and I was just getting these great reviews and then people were picking up from the reviews and so it's really transformed my shop. Everything is different, everything selling is different apart from the Hot One sauces.
People who used to come in before lockdown should come down and see the store
I want to show them around and you don't have to buy anything, it's my shop
Just come and have a look,
Come and have a taste, come and have an experience. And also, this is the biggest thing I'm proud of, you know, when you get students that are here from from outside the city, and people living here. Whenever they get friends or family arrive, they take people to my shop. Like it's a tourist attraction. And they take them and show them the shop. "Look, Mum, this is The Chilli Shop" and I feel so proud of that, I'm like the unofficial tourist attraction of Leeds.
If someone comes to your house and you give them a really nice sauce or something like that. And if you're the only place that they can get it, or you're where they bought it from. Then yeah, they're gonna say "Dad, this is that sauce I gave you. This is where I got it, come and have a look."
They want a bit of bravado saying, "Look, look, I've got a museum of pain. I've got a museum with the hottest things in the world." Some of them are ex husband level, these are really dangerous. And I have a museum and I've got stories from the museum of the lady that created the chilli shower gel to the thing I can't talk about and some other things.
Just come in and look at my museum and say tell me the story about that one. And I will. There's a mystery. There's a different story every time they come in.
Well, how do you cope with it? If like, I mean, you must have to do some really serious training on your staff, or is it always you?
Ah, that's the secret. I've never hired any. I never. What I do is I choose customers. I see a customer who's so passionate about the shop. And they know almost as much as me they tried everything. They love the shop. They're telling me stuff. And I say to them, would you like a part time job? The trainings done.
Yeah. They already know it. They know really love food and they give the you need them to really embrace it the way you embrace it. So it's your face. Yeah.
So the funny thing about chillis is unlike any other food is that when a chilli hits your tongue, it sends a false message to the brain saying oh my god, I'm in pain. And it tells your brain to create an endorphin. And what an endorphin is is a painkiller. But the side effects of this painkiller is a high, you get happy, you get a buzz. When people come in and they try the tasters they start talking to strangers in the shop.
because they're in a good mood.
And there's a buzz in the shop and I'd love to bottle it I don't know what to do with it sometimes. But I've no idea. Honestly you go to any other shop Just think about it. You go to a shop. When was the last time strangers started talking to you in the shop? In this shop it happens all the time, hourly every day. Customers come in like "Oh, you must try this one" "Oh, I've just tried this" and they laugh at each other. And you think, hang on you didn't know each other a minute ago. There's something going on with the endorphins in the shop and the fact that it's daring and has lots of humour here so just this is all by accident. I don't know what I'm doing. I've never owned a shop and I think that's why my shop's different is I don't have a past experience of this is how a shop should be. And I'm not precious if they buy things if a customer comes in for the very first time, I will give them something free, they will get a free path around. Yeah, do taste and see, there's no pressure, try stuff. Just have an experience.
I said to a friend of mine. I know you've mentioned the hot chilies. I said to a friend of mine I'm speaking to Frank J from The Chilli Shop. "Oh, yeah, yeah, I know him" I said I don't know loads about chilli so like what should I ask him? And he said ask him about Pepper X
What is Pepper X?
Well
you know the first question men ask in the shop ladies are much more intelligent by the way they got much better question What's your hottest? First question well the world's hottest chilli I put it on the back of my flyer now because um, you know people need when they buy a certain level attention value of the flyer they they know it's a world record. Well the hottest killer in the world in the Guinness World Records is called the Carolina Reaper. Yeah, and it's 2.2 million scoville units, which means if we had a bowl, one drop of this chilli in a bowl would need about 2.2 million drops of water to neutralise one drop. That is the current commercially available hottest chilli in the world that's in the Guinness World Record. Then this this show came on YouTube. Yeah Hot Ones in America, interviewing Gordon Ramsay, Halle Berry, Jack Black, you know, really Jeff Goldblum, big stars, Shak, you know, DJ Khaled, proper, big, big cult stars. And what the show noted is after two seasons is that they were using other companies sauces and that everyone wanted they couldn't buy all 10 because it was expensive to buy all 10 to do the challenge at home. So the show thought we need to own the first one (the mildest), the middle one and the hottest one. They wanted their hottest one and cos they wanted the hottest one they wanted a sauce hotter than anyone else. The guy that created the Carolina Reaper hybrid had created a new chilli called Pepper X. And he allowed, he made the Hot Ones Pepper X Sauce called the Last Dab. No one in the world is allowed to sell it, we're not allowed to sell it, but we have it in the shop. So when we do a Hot Ones Challenge Night for the public, we actually have the Last Dab even though it's not for sale. Nobody can get hold of it. So that is going to be the new world record. Totally secret. Nobody's ever seen it
Nobody. Right so you've tried it? Yeah.
Yeah, many times. There's a fridge full of milk next to me.
I mean, I'm happy with kind of a mild. My husband will have the hotter ones, he usually regrets it.
There's if there's a new chilli and I'm getting it Monday called Apollo. Hot Ones have even brought out a hotter sauce. And when you book us for a corporate challenge or party or do you one of our challenges, we're going to have a new hotter version. And that's why I've collected I've got the biggest collection of featured Hot One Sauces anywhere outside of Brooklyn, America. It's taken me three years to get them. Oh, impossible some of them to get. You can actually buy a sauce that's appeared on the show and give it as a present or start a little collection and we do like a little Hot One feature collector's card showing you what season what lineup and if you cannot get these things and it's like it's so famous what this sauce that killed Gordon Ramsay and now you have it or now you're giving it as a present and so I'm selling somebody an experience they can connect with it's not a sauce to me this is not money. This is not a product this is a must have thing. And the reason why I got the Last Dab is that the public love this show. You have to watch it once watch the Gordon Ramsay one. What is so funny is that you watch these celebrities and you inside you think. Could I do that? Well I allow you to find out? You can be that celebrity. That's your 15 minutes of fame. You can film yourself doing it. And I'm allowing people to live the dream, the experiences.
Cool. It's really fun. I just got one more question for you.
Go for it
It's about Christmas dinner. So yes, I'm not going to put it on my Christmas dinner. But the next day when I've got leftovers, leftover turkey or vegetarian option and what what sauce should I put on it?
Well, we talked about it earlier, the caramelised garlic in hot olive oil will save and it basically you could put a tiny tip of this in anything. And the oil releases the heat in slow motion and then traps the caramelised garlic taste. So a little bit of that into anything, anything you want to improve. This doesn't go off doesn't need the fridge. And this is your best friend. I sell it to loads of bands who tour. So I have found the best taste in the world. And I challenge anyone to come along and I can get you to try it. And I will say if I've got a couple coming in, I will say to them, I say one of them will be daring enough. I said look, put this this will be the best thing that's ever been in your mouth. And the other of the couple will laugh in naughty way. And then I will get the other one to try it. And she'll go. Wow, that's amazing. And you can see the disappointment on her husband's face. Very funny.
Sorry. That's really cool.
So I have found I have found the best taste in the world. I'm so proud of that. That's my USP of the shop.
Well, brilliant talking to you.
That's all right. You can find me on Marion Street. I am on the Meriden centre, opposite Taco Bell next to KFC. I am the weirdest shop along the street. So just find me in the Marion Centre in Leeds. ,
Oh yeah, a lot of people already know you.
I know it's like being famous without the money
Watch this video and they know exactly who you are when they come and see you. And then
The next time I see you, we're going to feel me trying something.
Trying some chilli sauce, definitely. I don't want that Last Dab.
No, you're not going to get that. Too expensive anyway.
I don't want to try that one. Yeah.
Fantastic. Frank,
Thank you so much for supporting small little businesses. I really appreciate that. We love the idea of the magazine kicking off again, we need you. All small businesses should get involved with really
Yeah. I mean, like you I'm not from a magazine background. And, you know, and I'm a graphic designer, and I just think, yeah, I need to make this happen. Everybody needs to advertise. I'm trying to give them an easy, affordable platform to do that.
doing a great job. Thank you. Thank you very much.
