Meet Your 2026 Hot Sauce Competition Entrants

Austin’s hottest tradition, the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival, returns on Sunday, Aug. 30, 3-9pm. The venue is new – this year, we’re moving the action to Radio/East – but everything else is what you’ve come to expect from this late summer rite of passage: excellent tunes, tasty food truck bites, cold drinks, and, of course, blistering hot sauces. Attendees can sample and take home commercial bottler hot sauces at the festival and vote for their favorites in the People’s Choice Awards from 3-7pm before awards are doled out (5pm: Individual & Restaurants; 7:45pm: Commercial & People’s Choice).

Check out this year’s competitors below, and get all your burning questions answered, including how to buy tickets ($20 pre-sale / $25 at the door), at our Hot Sauce Festival online hub.

COMMERCIAL:

Aji Pepper Sauce Brand

Alberto’s Food Products, Inc.

Apicklelypse

Bindu Bites

Boerne Brand

Cain’s Hot Sauce

FREAKY FERMENTS

Goodburn Sauce Company

Jaime’s Spanish Village

Mad Man Sauces

Mikey V’s Foods

Old Bones Chilli Co LLC

Poor Vida Hot Sauce

Savir Foods

Sizzlin Seeds

Stanky Sauce

t0tsauce

Tasty Amy’s

Undead Pepper Co

Wicked Provisions Hot Sauce

RESTAURANT:

El Patio

ELDORADO CAFE

Fairways Cantina

GUPPYS-Indian Fried Chicken

Industry

Posse East

Tacobaby

Tacodeli

Veracruz All Natural/Veracruz Fonda & Bar

VIVO Modern TexMex

Yellow Ranger

INDIVIDUAL:

Anders Dowd

Angelika Gritzka

Brian Alexander

Brian McCabe

Bud Spaar

Dr. Trevor Hale

Ember Duckworth

Eric Wheeler

Jeff Cox

Julie Oliver

Maria Cochran

Mark Alexin

Mark Kobdish

Marvin Perez

Mary Welch

Sal Solano

Tina McMillin

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