PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — With the catering industry mostly on hold through the COVID-19 pandemic, a Phoenixville caterer paused his business to start a new one.
Now he's finding success through a new line of barbecue sauces, hot sauces and mustards that he created while his event jobs got cancelled this year.
When the events that John Alff was hired to cater were cancelled, he turned Vesta BBQ and Catering into Vesta sauces.
"The first one was called 'Smooth Operator.' It's just a mild barbecue sauce," he described, "and then I have a spicy version of that called 'Steam Heat' and then I started getting into fermenting some hot sauces so I have a 'Crazy Train,' which is peppers fermented with salt, and then I started playing on that with adding different flavors like garlic, honey."
But since Alff, who is married to an attorney, wanted to follow all regulations, his hot sauce business took some time. First he had to get them approved by a food lab, which was slow during the pandemic with everyone working from home.
"Then you send that paperwork to the Department of Agriculture and then they approve you to actually sell the sauce," he detailed.
And like every other parent during the pandemic, he had to find time for himself.
"It's a lot of late nights, so my kids will be in bed by 8 p.m. and then I'm bottling hot sauce at my (commercial) kitchen until 2, sometimes 3 in the morning," he said.
Eventually, Alff's goal is to get back to catering, "and have events again but for the time being, I'm definitely enjoying making the sauces and playing around with different flavor combinations."
For more on Vesta's barbecue sauces, listen to the KYW Newsradio original podcast What’s Cooking on the Audacy app.