NC-made sauce featured on 'Hot Ones'

"It turns out that they were coming from North Carolina. And this was around the same exact time that I found a co-packer that was willing to do smaller quantities," Carbone said. "They're also located in North Carolina, pretty close to the farm that the peppers came from. So, it kind of seemed like fate."

Carbone began selling Sauce Bae commercially in 2019 and has since been on the popular show "Hot Ones," which features celebrities being interviewed while eating chicken wings topped with progressively hotter sauces. Schoolboy Q, Kristen Bell, Trevor Noah, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Adam DeVine were among those who tasted his sauce on the show.

Sauce Bae has two sauces - both pineapple habanero made with turmeric. One includes a little ghost pepper to give it some additional heat. It features turmeric, which Carbone credits as a great anti-inflammatory food that helped him deal with ulcerative colitis.

"Overall, my goal was to make a hot sauce that tasted better than the ones that were available at the time. I wanted to make it trendy so that way the marketing was more playful, but I wanted to make it healthier for you," Carbone said.