Food and Drink Specialist Rosalind Erskine chats with Sunny Mollah founder of Baba's Sauce at this years Royal Highland Show 2024
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00:00Hi, I'm Roslyn Derskin, Food and Drink Editor at the Scotsman and I'm here at the Scotsman
00:12stand in Scotland's Larger with Sonny from Bama Sauce. How are you? Yeah, great Roslyn,
00:17thank you, great. How have you been getting on this weekend? Very good, very busy event,
00:23early starts, late finishes, but speaking to loads of people, it's been very, very good.
00:29And can you tell me a bit about your product and products? Yeah, so Bama Sauce was actually
00:35my father's recipe. He passed away in 2008 and we found his recipe in a diary and from there
00:43we opened a small takeaway. We just had the sauce as a chilli sauce, we never had a name for it so
00:47we called it Bama's because that's what we used to call him and from there it just started getting
00:51more and more popular so we trademarked it and then just three years ago we got a unit,
00:57we got a factory, we got ourselves salsa certified and we thought well let's start
01:01selling it into the shops. So we went into the shops and it just went boom. We're now in Asda's,
01:08we're stocked in Aldi, we're stocked in Lidl, Home Bargains, we're in CJ Lang's bar,
01:15we've got distributors on board that distribute like Dalziel, they distribute into the butcher
01:20section. We've got loads of independents as well so it's like a sweet and spicy sauce,
01:26it's not a hot sauce, it's more an everyday sauce so it goes with everybody's taste palette so I
01:32think that's why it's so popular. It doesn't just cut off the people that like the hot sauce and
01:37you know the people that don't like the hot sauce, it is for everybody basically.
01:41And so growing up were you aware like obviously your dad would have made this so you would have
01:45grown up with it is that right? I did grow up with it so I grew up with it and all my friends used
01:49to just say oh can we go to your dad's shop to get that sauce but it never had a name,
01:54it was just my dad's sauce so I knew about it when I was younger, I never really knew it. I
01:59remember making it, helping my dad make it but I didn't really think of anything at that time,
02:03I was just kind of helping my dad make another recipe. I never imagined it would be so popular
02:08and I would actually get to this stage where I'd have it in a bottle selling to supermarkets,
02:13it's actually unreal to be honest. And for anyone that wants to know more we've actually
02:18interviewed you in the Scotsman before haven't we? So the interview with the Scotsman was probably
02:22the biggest help that I had from the start. I think from that interview it was the first time
02:29that I'd actually put anything into writing, like I'd experienced the whole thing but
02:37nothing was ever in writing, I never wrote it down the actual story. So to be honest it was
02:42quite emotional you know when an interviewer was interviewing me about everything, asking me about
02:47dad, asking me about mum because you know when dad passed away it was a hard time for all of us and
02:52we found the light at the end of the tunnel when we'd seen the recipe and we thought we'll open
02:57our own wee shop and so that interview that we got with the Scotsman and the report that we got
03:04was probably the best thing that could have happened to us because from there we started
03:09getting contacted from distributors already just from the write-up and then it was easy for us to
03:17then go to other supermarkets and other distributors and say this is the link for the
03:22write-up, this is the whole story, saves me kind of going through it all because they've done it
03:28with so much detail it was the best thing that could happen to us to be honest. It was really
03:33really good. And you still do you still work on this with your mum is that right? Yes so mum makes
03:38the spices, actively does all the spices in the morning and I go in after her with my sister-in-law
03:45Tina who heads the she heads the whole operation with staff and I'm now working on sales even my
03:52older brother Tony if you remember I don't know if you've met him before but Tony does all the
03:58all the technical stuff for me now because we're starting to work together now because it's getting
04:03a bit too much for myself so we're starting to network with other people we're still everything's
04:08in-house so we do everything ourselves so the factory is only for us we don't do any other
04:14products it's just Baba Sauce so I think that's what makes it easier for us and it makes it more
04:19manageable and we know what's going on we're not running before we can walk so we have said no to
04:25a few companies because we just want to take our time and we don't want to take the fun out of it
04:30like right now it's a family business we want to keep it like that we don't want to start outsourcing
04:35and you know getting so big that we can't manage it ourself we don't want to get to that point
04:39we want to enjoy it and I've been in business long enough to know that as much as when you're
04:44flying high it could get dropped and before you know it you've got nothing so we're building our
04:51customers weekly and slowly and I feel like that's the best way it's so good to come to the other
04:56side of Scotland and to know that everybody knows your product it's it's really nice for us
05:01it's a good feeling well thank you very much and yeah I'll be trying some of this later on
05:06yeah no worries thank you very much thank you