Product Design How This ShlinkedIn Sponsor Ruined My Life: An Exposé on 717 Pickle Hot Sauce

If you want my honest truth, I really hate pickle hot sauce. I'm doing it for the brand deal but I've decided to turn over a new stone. I've never liked pickles and now I just have two bottles of pickle hot sauce sitting at home with the third gifted to my parents. Every time I bring people over, I offer them a variety of sauces and make sure I list Pickle Hot Sauce just for the hopes that they pick it and really like it but everybody just either passes over it, makes a disgusted face, or question my sanity as to why I even have pickle hot sauce in the first place. Furthermore, the Pickle Hot Sauces that were shipped to my place were packaged very unprofessionally as it included items such as a slab of marble, a stolen library book, and so much more. You can find the entire video on demand through my Twitch channel. Not only was I very confused and bewildered at what this was, but 717 Pickle Hot Sauce had the audacity to send a third bottle! I bought two bottles out of hesitation and they decided to send a third. Enough of that though, it's time we talk about the taste of pickle hot sauce.

 

There is nothing special about Pickle Hot Sauce. If you were looking for a hot sauce that spices up your collection, might as well buy the countless variations of sweet to sour hot sauces from Hot Ones, yeah the YouTube series featuring many celebrities. Pickle Hot Sauce not only is unusable in any dish due to its lacking and sour tastes, but the disgusting combination of peppers alongside pickles work poorly as a dipping sauce.

 

Using common hot sauce metrics here are my ratings amongst these measurements:

 

Heat: 1/10. I thought it was supposed to be a hot sauce. There's no heat at all. My body does not warm up once eating pickle hot sauce. Not even a sweat!

 

Spice: 1.1/10. Sure, there is a little bit of spice from the peppers but it's all flavors that can be substituted with the countertop pepper shaker.

 

Capsaicin After Effects: 0/10. No lingering spiciness. If anything, the only after tastes are the sourness from pickles.

 

Flavor: 4/10. Sure! Pickles! There's a good population of the world who love pickles. But that's about it. Pickle juice and pickle sauces exist out there already, no need to reinvent the wheel.

 

Uniqueness/Characteristics: 2/10. Even your diner Cholula is more unique than 717 Pickle Hot Sauce. It is just a weird combination of pickle flavors and peppers.

 

Scoville Units: 5,000-7,500. Thank goodness there's a scientifically objective system of measurement we can use here to back up the poor quality of 717 Pickle Hot Sauce. And to note, it's a surprise that they're even listed on Wikipedia. Let's use the higher end 7.5K SHU to be nice. 7.5K brings Pickle Hot Sauce to a heat level over your classic diner hot sauces past Frank's Red Hot, Cholula, and Tabasco. But these are the little leagues! If you're looking for hot sauces with higher heat, then you'd be buying hot sauces in the millions of SHU.

 

Look, I'm trying to be nice here. 717 Hot Sauce sponsors ShlinkedIn. They were kind enough to send me a third bottle despite my hesitation and $8 shipping on all orders (a steal). I like to think they're trying to do good for their customers but at the end of the day the product stands to represent the brand and company and it does not do it well.

 

I wanted to leave this part out to be nice to the folks over at 717 Hot Sauce, but for you readers, I feel like you deserve to know: Pickle hot sauce is nothing new. It's not novel, it's not revolutionary. It's been around for as long as hot sauce itself has been. Take for example dill pickle hot sauces. There are hundreds of these out there with much higher scoville units with much better tastes. You could even make pickle hot sauce in your very own kitchen! 

 

Lastly, let's talk about the N in the "ONE" in the "SEVEN ONE SEVEN" naming. How was a backwards "N" able to slip through branding so easily? For all we know, they probably just found a nice domain name "picklehotsauce.com" and decided to make a product out of it. Bad. Move.