Passion for hot sauce kindles business.

Byline: RETAIL NOTEBOOK By Joe Mosley The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Nick Lindauer's latest Internet enterprise is truly en fuego. It's red hot, smokin' and - to sum things up - more than a little warm.

Lindauer, a 23-year-old on-line entrepreneur, sold his body jewelry Web site a few months ago to launch a new one devoted to the procurement of his first love - hot sauce.

We're talking chili. Cayenne. Habanero. Jalapeno. Even wasabi, and other mysterious implements of gastronomic torture.

"The first hot sauce I tried, I started sweating and got that little endorphin rush," Lindauer says, figuring that must have been about 15 years ago. "Which is how people get addicted to it."

Which Lindauer readily admits to being.

He graduated from Tabasco to Cholula to a full-on collection of obscure brands.

And then in February, he launched his Web site - SweatNSpice.com - and the venture's success can be measured in degrees Fahrenheit: he began with 20 labels and is now at 300 and growing; his website is getting an average of 500 to 600 hits a day, generating close to a dozen sales; those sales are turning over an inventory of about 250 bottles of hot sauce a week.

Most of the sauces go for $6 to $10 a bottle, and SweatNSpice offers free shipping for orders of $75 or more.

The business is close to becoming a full-time job for Lindauer - who figures he's just a few classes short of a business degree at the University of Oregon - though he still has a day job at TrafficLeader, a Eugene-based Internet marketing company.

He's self-taught in things of an Internet nature, has built the website himself and knows enough to have gotten the site indexed on Google and other Internet search sites.

"You can put a site up on the Web, but unless you set it up right, no one's going to find it," Lindauer says.

He figures as sales build, there's potential for his hot sauce business to support another four or five full-time employees.

In 3 1/2 months, SweatNSpice.com has grown to the point he has cleared an estimated net profit of $1,700 so far this month, Lindauer says.

"But most of it actually turns around and goes back in, so we can get new sauces and more variety," he says.

Lindauer buys from a wholesaler and from several manufacturers. And he specializes in the hard-to-find.

"If it's still being made, we can find it," he says. "Even if it's not, if there are a few bottles left, we can get them sometimes."

The biggest seller on the SweatNSpice website is Dave's Insanity Sauce, which registers a far-from-cool 51,000 units on the Scoville scale. That's how the zing is measured in fiery foods, Lindauer explains - and it essentially means that a single unit of the Insanity sauce would have to be diluted with 51,000 units of water to be completely neutralized.

As a more familiar reference point, Tabasco sauce registers 2,500 Scoville units.

But get this: Blair's 6 A.M., another sauce featured on Lindauer's site, sets the high mark at 16 million Scoville units.

"But extracts like those are food additives," he says. "Anything over about 500,000, you don't want to put directly in your mouth. If you did get the extract (directly in your mouth), you're not going to burn yourself inside, or anything. You'll probably get sick and vomit right away."

Which may explain why the folks at Blair's have vowed to make only 999 bottles of their potion.

But the hot sauce business - and Lindauer says there's "a whole underground culture of fiery foods" - is more than just fire-breathing and belly-burning.

There's a humorous side, as well.

Take, for example, Crazy Jerry's Brain Damage Hot Sauce (description: `The hot sauce that ain't for wimps or people with really high IQ's.'). Or there's Nuclear Waste Sauce (description: `You must admit, this is far more cost-effective than burying it in the Nevada desert.').

And at the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, is the most self-evident of sauces - Colon Cleaner Hot Sauce.

Retail Notebook runs Thursdays.

CAPTION(S):

Dave's Insanity sauce is featured on the SweatNSpice.com web site.