Property Search
Cars Online
Buy DVDs online
Local sleepovers
Book flights online!
Work money smarter
Wine of the Week
Life Insurance Quote
Online Dating
Save on your insurance
Houses for sale
Go shopping!
Convert anything 
Henrie's Recipes
Tabasco spices up Katrina rations
Charles Hoskinson
Posted Thu, 15 Sep 2005
Over the past 15 years, Paul McIlhenny's family business has sold more than 250 million tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce for US military rations.
Those one-eighth ounce bottles of a Louisiana culinary and cultural icon have followed US troops from Kuwait and Iraq to Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and back to Kuwait and Iraq.
Now they are back home, part of the rations passed out to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
"One of our goals is to defend the world against bland food," said McIlhenny, the 61-year-old chief executive of the McIlhenny Company.
He admits to mixed feelings about Katrina, which devastated the city in which he was raised and left him caring for dozens of evacuees, but offered a new chance to show off the company's signature product, a blend of hot peppers, salt mined from the island and vinegar.
"It's good news, bad news for us. It's a mixed blessing," he said.
McIlhenny is the great-grandson of Edmund McIlhenny, the New Orleans banker who invented Tabasco sauce after the US Civil War and began making it commercially in 1868.
The storm missed the McIlhenny family homestead at Avery Island on Louisiana's southwestern coast, but its path through the state left every house on the island filled with displaced family members and employees of the company's New Orleans office.
"That was probably the biggest shock to us, the number of Avery-McIlhenny family members who descended on the island from New Orleans," he said.
"I came back Labor Day and both my homes here on the island were full."
But Katrina also brought opportunity. More than 23 million of the military rations, known as "meals, ready to eat," or MREs — each with its own bottle of Tabasco sauce — have been distributed to Katrina survivors and relief workers.
"That's a serendipitous benefit to us," McIlhenny said. "We're delighted to have our product used for any and all."
The company has pitched in with its own aid program, raising money to help those displaced and sending its mobile kitchen out to feed rescue workers.
Beyond Tabasco... to shelter
Meanwhile, McIlhenny also is occupied with finding housing and workspace for employees from the company's New Orleans office.
Retail brand manager Jan Carroll was flooded out of her suburban New Orleans home along with her husband, Scott, and 20-month-old daughter, Ellie. They are staying in a modest cottage originally built in the 1920s as housing for workers who picked the peppers grown on the island.
"We left with very little — some clothes, medicines and some toys for Ellie," she said.
"As things go, we're being really taken care of."
Carroll is one of eight McIlhenny Company employees and their families brought to the island, said Martin Manion, vice president for marketing and himself one of the evacuees.
He expects he will never be able to return to his New Orleans home, which was located close to one of the levees overwhelmed by Katrina's fury.
"We've expanded the term 'extended family' to everybody on this island, because they've really been nice to us," he said.
When Katrina struck, the company was renovating a building in New Orleans for new offices. That building survived the storm, and McIlhenny said he's not changing his plans to move in.
"It's been extremely traumatic for all of us. But I'm an optimist, and I think it'll all dry out," he said.
"I think the city will come back."
AFP
