They could stand the heat, but time came for this mother-daughter business duo to get out of the kitchen
M
any of us grow up cooking with our parents, stirring and tasting, experimenting with flavours. For Calgary's Natalia Lazic, it was all that and more. “My dad would stick a chili pepper in my mouth when I was two,” she laughs. “I love spicy.” Embracing her family's Yugoslavian roots and her mom Anna's stove-side advice, the registered dietician has parlayed her love of experimenting in the kitchen with a love of all things spicy - and become an accidental entrepreneur in the process. As happens with the invention of many a good thing, the creation of Seven Spice Chili Oil came out of necessity about five years ago, when Lazic's search for a highquality chili oil came up short. “Every item I looked at had crappy ingredients or MSG, which I don't tolerate well,” she remembers. “I thought, why am I looking so hard?” Retreating to her kitchen, the foodie mixed up her own blend of favourite aromatic ingredients - garlic, oil, pepper flakes, coconut and spices - a total of seven ingredients in all: hence the product name. And, voila. What started as jarred offerings of the tasty condiment to friends and family to use as a marinade or in stir fry, stews, soups, and meats, has found growing sales at farmers' markets and in an expanding line of local and across-Alberta retail shops. “I never planned to bring the product to market. Mom was in the background cooking, and for two years we just kept giving out jars as gifts,” she says. “People were asking for cases of the stuff. We were doing once-a-week cooking/jarring sessions when finally, mom said, ‘We can't keep doing this. I'm not cooking anymore.’ That's when things changed. We decided to go all out, saying “maybe we have something here.” Going ‘all out’ for Lazic has meant sourcing product labels, creating a
20 Culinaire November 2023
BY LUCY HAINES
Co-founders of Seven Spice Ltd. Natalia Lazic and her mom Anna. Lazic took a love of spicy and time experimenting in the kitchen to create a chili oil that is heating up the condiment aisle in the local grocery store.
website to sustain online ordering (sevenspice.com) and researching how to expand beyond the family kitchen. One solution was found a few hours drive away, at the Agrivalue Processing Business Incubator in Leduc. The site supports new food businesses like Seven Spice with the equipment, space and workers needed to upscale a business. In a day, the Leduc facility can produce Lazic's monthly requirements of about 4,000 jars of mild, hot and extra hot chili oil (227 g). Lazic credits her advisors from Alberta Agriculture for encouraging her to take the product to farmers’ markets: it has been a boon for sales and a great avenue for growing public awareness about the product, she says. The processing plant was also the site of a ‘lesson learned’, says Lisac. An early batch that went through production was found to have been made with chilis, “with zero heat. Now I always taste the peppers first.” Still, Lazic and the team made the best of it, slapping a ‘mild’ sticker on that batch of jars, and putting that variety into
the lineup. The mild version of Seven Spice variety has now become as popular as the hot. “Another happy accident,” laughs Lazic. Family friend, Renaissance man (spoken word artist, science major etc) and people-person Fred Holliss works many a summer weekend market for Lazic. Another spice lover introduced to the creation early on, Ellis says the product practically sells itself to buyers of all ages—thus far it’s mostly foodies, mostly women - so his job is simply to encourage market-goers to give it a try. “We offer a sample on bread, pasta or rice; it's shelf stable and great at room temperature or warm. Three of four people who try it will buy it, often several jars of it,” Holliss says. “And regulars come back to suggest what they do with the chili oil, from putting it on eggs or roast vegetables, mixing it with soya sauce for a dumpling dip or even with peanut butter for a Thai-style sauce. There's all sorts of hot sauces out there, but we aren't competing in the heat wars, rather
