Berry Hot began in 2004, with a dinner party and a woman who refused to arrive empty-handed.
The spicy mix came from her father. It was the kind of thing that ends up on everything, eaten at every meal, never written down. She stirred it into strawberry jam, put it in a jar, and took it with her. The jar came home empty. The guests told her to enter it into a competition.
She did. It took first place for Best Ethnic Food of the Americas in Miami that year. The judges kept returning to the same point: the heat never got in the way. It sat behind the fruit rather than in front of it, and it left quickly. That meant it worked on salty things and sweet things alike.
It found its way onto the shelves of Milano's supermarkets in Miami. Then the family moved countries, and the jars stopped.
Three generations on, the same recipe is being made again, in small batches, by hand, in the Netherlands. The peppers are roasted. The fruit is real. Nothing about it tastes industrial.
The heat that doesn't bite back. Still.
Order a jar from the first batch, or see trade and wholesale.