Belfast entrepreneur Tim McCarthy is celebrating a decade since the creation of his culinary creations, which have piqued the interest of a renowned critic.

“Then obviously there’s legislation, there’s all the stuff to do with moving food across borders. There are food standards, there are food hygiene legislation certificates, and you’re starting from scratch, which I found very difficult.

“I’ve always been very passionate about food. I’ve always cooked. I’ve always developed recipes domestically at home because we’re all vegetarians in our house.

“Getting into the food business, sometimes, in the early days, I thought: ‘What in the name of God am I doing here?’

“From what started as an enjoyable side hustle, standing in the kitchen, experimenting with ingredients, turned into eight, ten hours a day staring at a computer screen, filling in forms.

“If you want to do a market, you’ve got to be fully insured for a start — risk assessments, all that.”

Tim remembers standing in his kitchen at home trying to process “30 kilos of mangoes” for the sauces, knowing he couldn’t make a profit at that time because the capacity wasn’t achievable.

“I had to bite the bullet when I went ‘Right, I’m going to do this properly.’ I needed to outsource the production of the sauces because I started winning awards, building up on social media, getting a loyal following of repeat customers, and building up my Instagram profile.

“I was unsuccessful because he won the Golden Forks, but to get that far, out of 14,000 products submitted from all over the world, down to the last couple of people, was just an incredible experience.”

The Blackfire range is vegan-friendly and allergen-free, with most products also gluten-free.

“It was twofold. My daughters are obviously vegetarian, but one of them is coeliac as well, and she finds it very difficult to eat out or get takeaways, so that’s one of the reasons we do a lot of cooking,” Tim explains.

“The other [reason] was having met so many people at food events and meeting people who are allergic to pineapples, which isn’t one of your main allergens, but you just go: ‘My God, people are sensitive to everything.’ I think it’s a by-product of modern living and environmental reasons, by and large.

“You find people who are allergic to the strangest things, and I just thought I’m going to make these as clean as possible, keep as few ingredients in them as possible.

“Because if you look at my competitors, sometimes they’ve got 25 different ingredients in a hot sauce when you only need six because your palate can only discern three flavours simultaneously. So loading them with all these other things is an absolute waste of time.

“I thought, if I’m going to cut out all these extraneous ingredients, let’s cut out allergens, make them vegan-friendly and kind of put them out to as many people as possible.”

“A woman came up to me the day I launched it at a food event downtown, and she said: ‘Oh, a bonfire chipotle, what does that taste like?’

“I say: ‘Oh, it tastes of burning tyres and effigies of the Pope.’ She looked at me as if to say, whoa, and I started laughing, and then she started laughing. So I thought a bit of humour goes a long way here, so I continued with the names of the Belfast people.

“We’ve got the Hot House, which is named after the Hothouse Botanic Gardens because it’s got a very tropical flavour with pear and ginger. The Botanic is the green sauce, [after] Botanic Gardens in Belfast.

“When I was starting, I was determined not to make super-hot novelty sauces because the hotter you make something, the more you compromise on flavour.”

He then received an email from a group of customers requesting “something really hot” for Christmas gifting.

“One night, I had a couple of gins, too many, and I came up with this idea: ‘Let’s make a hot sauce called Pain in the Hole,’” Tim laughs.

“I made a batch of it, and it tasted lovely but extremely hot.”

Coupled with a gift box containing a small tub of Sudocrem, the limited-edition gift was gone within minutes from his site.

The next month, Tim received a call from restaurant reviewer and writer Jay Rayner, who had heard about the Pain in the Hole sauce and wanted Tim to appear on his show, The Kitchen Cabinet.

“They recorded it on a Tuesday night in the Lyric Theatre.

“It went out on Saturday on Radio 4, and my phone didn’t stop pinging with sales — and it was mostly people in England,” says Tim.

“It has just been going [since then], and people love it. And it won a Great Taste award because it’s all about the flavour.”

With luxury labels knocking on Blackfire Foods’ door interested in its products, Tim’s working on future-proofing his brand, offering a look that makes it “contemporary” and “sexy” when on a shelf against other hot sauces.