Shuug Is The Middle Eastern Hot Sauce The Condiment Aisle Has Been Craving

Forbes

3 days ago

Shuug hot sauce
From the explosion of chili crisps to Molly Baz's Ayoh! and adding mustard to your Chomps meat stick, condiments are taking on newfound glory today.
A walk down the condiment set at a grocery store is a sea of spice, but in terms of international flavors, options are pretty limiting to Mexican and Asian flavors.
Yoni Awad adds a splash of green to that white space, prioritizing convenience along with a blast of Middle Eastern flavor with his Yemeni zhoug hot sauce brand, Shuug.
Shuug founder Yoni Awad
Yosi And Yoni
Awad launched Shuug as a way to help his father, Yosi, whose Middle Eastern food brand, Yosi Kitchen, is a success in its own right. With a large presence in New England, Yosi Kitchen products, ranging everywhere from tabouleh and baba ghanoush to falafel and hummus, filled a gap in Middle Eastern cuisine in the region. 'His mom taught him everything,' Awad says.
Yosi Kitchen thrived in catering and food service, and even gained a retail presence in many stores including Whole Foods Market throughout the region in the late 2000s. But as new generations began to reshape the grocery landscape, Yosi Kitchen, which is still in business today, was searching for a new voice. 'The branding was very bad,' Awad says. 'You just need a refresh, something niche,' he told his dad.
Yoni came in to make Yosi Kitchen a more marketable product behind a modern brand. During the few months he took to think about how to make a dent in the business, he would glance at the condiment section at grocery stores and realize there was nothing that represented his culture, despite growing up with a plethora of Middle Eastern dips and sauces. There are other emerging brands, like New York Shuk, which have done a commendable job at adding delicious shelf-stable Middle Eastern flavors to grocery stores. But Awad wanted to focus on a convenient format, something he felt could really speak to a younger demographic, whereas New York Shuk's dips are packaged in jars. The use-occasion is different.
He would start by focusing on one product to start the rebrand: his family recipe of zhoug.
Shuug hot sauce
Shuug Zhoug
Awad took the recipe for Yosi Kitchen zhoug and reformatted it into Boston Round squeezable bottles–packaging that was portable enough to throw in your bag because you can no longer eat tacos without it but classy enough that you could display it at a dinner party, connecting with people as you enjoy the unique spice. 'The whole idea is that growing up, for every meal, especially with my dad and his mother and brothers, they all sat together,' he says. 'People from the neighborhood would walk over.'
Shuug hot sauce
Zhoug is comparable to a chimichurri, but less chunky and packed with lots more spices. Shuug's zhoug has a scotch bonnet and poblano pepper base along with jalapeño, cilantro, lemon and olive oil. 'It's normally jarred and it doesn't look appetizing..It's like a cilantro, stemmy paste,' Awad says. The first step of westernizing a product for today extends to the product itself. It needs to taste incredible.
He knew the name needed to change too. 'Yosi Kitchen just didn't have a good ring to it,' Awad says. 'It was good in maybe 2009, but it's a different age now.' He would have some fun with the wordplay around 'zhoug,' given its range of spelling decisions around the world: zhoug, shug, skhug, schugg–realizing that he could use that concept for his brand. 'People pronounce and spell it the way they want anyway, let's just make the easiest spelling out of them all.'
Finally launching in 2024, Shuug becomes an instant pantry staple once anyone becomes a customer. 'The initial reaction was astonishing. I didn't expect to get all these retail orders,' Awad says. 'I've always had this entrepreneurial spirit…It made me feel like I'm actually getting closer to building a company that I get to spearhead.'
Shuug zhoug and harissa
'Welcome To The Family'
One of the first retailers to sell Shuug is Heat Hot Sauce Shop, the online store for die-hard hot sauce fanatics, carrying about 700 varieties of craft hot sauces. Founder Dylan Keenen tells me that his community had been asking for a Middle Eastern hot sauce, but he had trouble finding anything to offer. 'The moment I saw his sauce I jumped on it,' Keenen says. 'It really fills a gap. It's just a well-made product and there isn't really anything like it.'
Shuug zhoug and harissa
Shuug plays off of the growing interest in the fusion of international flavors. 'Over the past couple of years, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food has really started to blow up,' says Awad. He gives a lot of credit to fast-casual chain Cava, which has its own version of a zhoug sauce, for its growth. 'They Americanized it, but they still have hints of all the flavoring.'
Keenen is also bullish on Shuug because of its shelf-stability. 'That's often a challenge for this kind of sauce,' he says. 'That's one reason you don't see the style out there as much. It's just harder from a food safety perspective to make a fresh tasting sauce, but he really did.' The fact that Shuug doesn't need to be refrigerated during the shipping process makes it a more attractive option for retailers and allows for lower D2C shipping costs.
Shuug harissa hot sauce
Shuug is beginning to create a whole line of hot sauces. The second variety, a harissa, just launched this Spring. With a base of guajillo peppers, it's also made of bell peppers, tomato paste, arbol chilis, roasted red pepper and lemon–and it's got a more intense kick to it than the zhoug. 'We're into the whole thing,' Keenen says. 'Anything he makes, we're going to pick up.' A third sauce is also coming from Shuug later in 2025, rounding out a trio of colorful, fresh hot sauces, all family recipes.
Awad is also a member of the music industry and plans to fuse Shuug into that world too, largely envisioning it having a presence near food stands at music festivals. 'I want to be the Red Bull of hot sauce,' he says. At the end of the day, Shuug is about fostering community, and will really have a place at the figurative table of any gathering.
Shuug has plans to expand into other grocery categories too, beyond hot sauces, something reflective of a new era of Yosi Kitchen that speaks to ever-evolving consumer desires. Yosi Kitchen filled the gap in the Northeast. Now Shuug is filling it across the country. 'I'm trying to put a spotlight on my family heritage,' says Awad. 'That's at the core of everything."