Fire Down Below Ltd

Despite now living more than 13,500 kilometres from their families back in the Caribbean, a homemade jar of pepper sauce helps ease Avin Panchorie and Candice Armoogam's homesickness.

It also adds a bit of spice to their bank balance, with the hot sauces the Trinidadians create in their New Plymouth kitchen now sold all around the country and exported overseas. Some have even ended up in restaurants back “home”.

Avin and Candice founded Fire Down Below, their chilli sauce business, in early 2021. It started as a passion project but, over time, grew a life of it's own. Fire Down Below is based in New Plymouth, Taranaki and uses only locally sourced ingredients and materials, From the peppers and carrots to the bottles and labels, everything is either grown or made in New Zealand.

Instead of being sweet, theirs are savoury. And, though not as fiery, they are very similar to the ones they grew up eating back home in Trinidad, where every home has a jar of their "family recipe" sauce in the kitchen with plastic spoons next to it for visitors to give it a try.

The couple, who had been living in New Plymouth and working in the oil and gas industry for just a few months, ran out of the hot sauces they'd had sent over from home. This was a problem.

“We kind of put it in everything, even if you're having a sandwich,” Armoogam said.

They gave some locally available sauces ago, but they weren’t doing the trick. They were too sweet and had a distinct lack of chilli punch.

“So we decided to make some good old Trinidad pepper sauce," Panchorie said.