Making an award-winning hot sauce is Hard.

John Hard.

Falling in love with the stuff, that was easy.

For Hard.

Columbus born and bred, which is to say brought up primarily on meat and potatoes spiced almost exclusively with salt and pepper, all John Hard had to do was travel to the South and Southwest, ironically for the fire-suppression business founded by his late father, Harold D. Hard. On these business trips, especially the ones that took him to New Orleans, John Hard sampled the local fare and had a sort of epiphany.

John Hard looked into his soul and found: Gumbo.

He discovered there jambalaya and dirty rice and etouffee. Give that man a beignet and some chicory for his breakfast. He came to realize that his heart beat to a zydeco rhythm.

"GARONTEED!" as the late Cajun chef Justin Wilson often said.

"Growing up in the meat-and-potatoes Midwest, it was a real change in culinary styles," Hard recalled recently. "I kind of fell in love with it."

He also fell in love with and married a woman whose parents were from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. On visits to see his in-laws, John Hard would stock up, not only on the cuisine available in the nearby "Big Easy" but also on the ingredients to prepare his own once the couple was home.

Whenever John and Sue Hard got together with friends, "I'd always cook up a big pot of Cajun food," he said.

This, of course, meant that the ingredients he had purchased, particularly hot sauce, never managed to last the full year he'd hoped they would.

As frequently happens in life, one thing led to another.

"You can look at me and see I like to eat," said Hard, far from enormous but not exactly svelte, either. "And no one knows your tastes better than yourself."

Seeking to explore new frontiers in the realm of hot sauces, as well as better prices, and also wanting to teach his children some lessons about business, Hard decided to launch a Web site selling some of the best he was able to find at trade shows. The kids helped pick out the name, CaJohns Fiery Foods Co., as well as the product line.

In 1997, Hard went to the National Fiery Foods Show, an annual gathering definitely not for those meek of heartburn, held since 1988 in Albuquerque, N.M., to find products to sell over the Internet.

Three weeks after launching the site, the first order came in. It was for three bottles.

The second sale was made several weeks later. It was for a single bottle.

Obviously, something in the way of a marketing kick-start was required.

All along, what John Hard had really longed to do was create his very own hot sauce. But manufacturers he met at trade shows were anything but encouraging.

They told him the minimum run for a line of hot sauce was 500 cases. That struck Hard as an astounding figure. Given the traffic the Web site was generating, that sounded like a lifetime supply. Several long lifetimes, in fact.

However, at another National Fiery Foods Show, Hard ran into a contract packager from Indiana who offered to turn out hot sauce in the far more reasonable quantity of 40 to 50 cases. Hard began putting together recipes, using culinary skills learned from his late mother, Marguerite.

"My mother was a very good cook ... ," John Hard said. "That was the old chicken-and-noodles, meat-loaf-and-mashed-potatoes kind of thing."

But, as Hard pointed out, in an existential sense, gumbo is simply chicken and noodles with a few different ingredients and a lot of different spices.

Before jumping into hot sauce, figuratively, Hard consulted fellow fiery foods devotee Chuck Evans of Worthington. Co-author with "The Pope of Peppers" Dave Dewitt of the 1996 book, "The Hot Sauce Bible," Evans got into the business as long ago as 1986.

"I was kind of a pioneer and forged the way for a lot of these companies like CaJohns," said Evans, who still serves as a spokesman for his former company, Chuck Evans' Montezuma.

Evans, Hard recalled, counseled him against making the leap.

"I didn't listen," Hard said.

Evans remembers things a bit differently.

"I said, 'Do you know what you're getting into?'"

Lots of specialty foods get launched, but most sink, and rather quickly, Evans pointed out to Hard. It takes years, not weeks or even months, of a product being on the shelf before it builds any kind of following, according to Evans.

Also, there's only so much hot sauce even the most dedicated "Chile-Head," as they are called in this intriguing little culinary subculture, can consume.

"Let's face it, you can only eat three meals a day," Evans said.

Nevertheless, with their graphically intriguing labels and the "funny and goofy and silly names" so prevalent in the hot sauce field, it can be a fun enterprise, Evans added.

"I enjoy it because I find it is a very unique marketing niche that helps sell products that do not have advertising budgets," he said. "That's where John really became exceptional. He had a number of products and he put a lot of neat labels on them.

"A couple of them I think are really tremendous."

"You can't just have a bland label," Hard said. "There's got to be something that holds their attention and says, 'Pick me up.' "

"The packaging, of course, is wonderful, and the selection of flavors," commented Michael Kast, the owner -- make that "cheesemonger" -- of the North Market's Curds and Whey shop, a place definitely not for the lactose intolerant.

A merchant right next door to Curds and Whey carried CaJohns Fiery Foods Co. products but went out of business, and Kast happily added them to his store.

"I always loved the stuff," he said. "I go out of my way to tell people about it. It just sells itself. Most people make just hot sauces. He makes sauces that can be used for all kinds of different purposes. He has salsa and chili fixings and stuff for making wings, not just little jars of insanely hot stuff, although he has those, too."

Curds and Whey carries about 30 to 40 of the more than 150 different labels offered by CaJohns Fiery Foods.

"If I had more room, I'd carry a lot more," Kast said. "He's very nationally known, but in Columbus, no one seems to be aware of him."

That's the result of a sort of marketing fluke, according to Hard. Most specialty foods start out with a local following that grows into a regional one before the makers try to go national, he said. With CaJohns, his products won awards at national shows and ended up developing a national following, especially in the South and Southwest, without ever making much of a mark at the regional or local levels.

As his hot sauces began to sell and win awards at various shows, Hard heard from customers asking why he didn't also produce a line of salsa. He resisted the idea, at first.

"My opinion was we wanted to be a hot sauce company," he said. "I didn't want to make salsa."

Eventually, in the face of so many requests, he caved in. CaJohns Fiery Foods salsas also began to win awards, and Hard began to realize the move made sense in terms of the bottom line. After all, he pointed out, even the most diehard "Chili-Head" takes a minimum of three months to consume a bottle of hot sauce.

A jar of salsa, on the other hand, can go down the hatch in a single sitting, Hard said.

CaJohns now has 31 different recipes for salsa among its product line.

"What keeps the passion burning in me is the hot sauce," said Hard, who grew up in the Linden area but graduated from Westerville High School after his parents relocated to Minerva Park, where he and his wife now make their home.

CaJohns has become so successful, according to Hard, with sales volumes doubling for many of the early years and the same thing perhaps possible this year, that he not only had a commercial kitchen installed in 2002 in the Harold D. Hard Co. building on Oakland Park Avenue but also sold the fire-suppression firm in May 2004.

This was done, John Hard hastened to say, with the full blessing of his father, who died on Dec. 29, 2003, at age 97.

CaJohns Fiery Foods, which are now sold in all 50 states, has 10 employees, four of them family members. That includes Hard's wife, Sue.

"It's just kind of funny," she said, "because I never ate any hot and spicy foods and now I do, so now John calls me a 'Chili-Head' and I was never one."