Originally, I had an idea in my head of what I wanted, but it was my partner, who has a background in graphic design and editing, who suggested I create a storyboard. That storyboard ended up being filled with images, feelings, songs, food – everything related to what I envisioned Old Bones to be. And then she basically articulated that into the hand-drawn image that we’re using today.

Each sauce has its own, specific label. Like everything else we do in the company, all the design is done in-house by us.

Over the years I’d developed a smoking method that was a little back-pocket secret of mine. I had been looking at a lot of the sauces on the market, looking for a sauce that I'd like to eat. I found a lot of the smoked sauces on the menus available in stores tasted really synthetic and had a chemically smoked flavour to them. So, I started using a smoking method that I'd been using for a couple years, and it worked really well.

I then spliced that with the natural flavours of the habanero chilli, which are actually really, really, citrusy. And by using a little bit of chef trickery, I was able to enhance the citrus flavour of the habaneros.

We don't have a lot of heat in the Habanero sauce. It's an entry-level sauce for 'hot sauce' beginners, and you actually get to taste the full flavour of a habanero without it blowing your socks off.

I have focused on pushing the flavours forward rather than heat. I know a lot of people like heat, but I'm not naturally a chilli-head. I wasn't trained to like chilli, so it was a learning experience for me. It started slowly, and I’m easing my way into it, and working my up to hotter chilis, but I think once you get past the heat element of it all, chilli’s actually have a lot of beautiful and natural flavours.

At the moment we've just got our single sauce in both a regular and hot version, but we also have a bunch of products coming out later in the year.

We've just moved into a kitchen in Alexandria, in Sydney. So now I have a lot more time (and space) to do R&D. So far, we've had probably two or three new products come out of our R&D sessions. We’re in the throes of finalising those products, and they'll hopefully hit the market in the next couple of months.

In the past I’ve worked in a hotels and have learnt a lot about cooking food in bulk. So, all of our sauces, believe it or not, are made by hand in our kitchen. The other day I did a batch of about 250 litres of sauce - which is pretty huge for a one-man job.

While I make the sauce myself, the rest of the crew come in and help with bottling and packaging. We've all got to hit it hard and manage to make quite a lot of sauce in a small amount of time.

Every time we introduce a new menu item or a product, it has to be able to be made to a very high standard. I can't take three or four weeks to make a single bottle, so it’s important that we can make things quickly – while also making sure the sauce is unbelievably good.