Tabasco Debuts Its New Salsa Picante Hot Sauce, Made Specifically for Tex-Mex Food

How many 150-year-old American brands can you name? Probably not too many. Coca-Cola? Necco? Pepsi? But there’s one brand that has them all beat, and that’s McIlhenny, makers of Tabasco. That little green-labeled bottle with the bright red hot sauce is an American institution, but the company has expanded beyond its flagship product into more international styles in recent years and has just announced another addition to its portfolio: Tabasco Salsa Picante, a Mexican-style hot sauce meant to be paired with Tex-Mex food. 

“Innovation has always been a priority for us, and we’ve been experimenting with this style of sauce for a while now,” Lee Susen, chief sales and marketing officer at McIlhenny Company, said in a statement. Representatives from the company point to data indicating that Latin and Tex-Mex food are dominating dining trends in 2024, with millennials and Gen Z now outright preferring those cuisines over Italian food for the first time.

In other words, it’s the perfect moment for a longstanding hot sauce brand to venture into Mexican-style products, and company reps confirm that Salsa Picante will be part of McIlhenny’s permanent lineup. 

The spice-averse among you might be thinking, “Hot sauce is hot sauce, right?” But the fact that this is McIlhenny’s first “Mexican-style” condiment illustrates just how vast the hot sauce landscape has become — or how vast it always was, its global variety now reflected a bit more in American grocery store aisles.

McIlhenny, founded in 1868 in Louisiana, has been producing Original Red Tabasco Sauce for more than 150 years; that small bottle’s presence on diner tables worldwide is basically a given. The simple recipe consists of only tabasco peppers, vinegar, and salt. Because of this, its consistency is nearly as thin as water, and just a small dribble onto whatever you’re eating will lend a concentrated hit of acid and a puckery flavor. It’s powerful stuff, even though some hot sauce connoisseurs might consider it a little one-note.

In subsequent decades, McIlhenny has expanded its pepper sauce portfolio to include Habañero, Jalapeño, and Chipotle varieties, each offering different characteristics from the different pepper plants. 

These vinegar-based pepper sauces, however, account for only a small fraction of the world’s hot sauces. In recent years McIlhenny also began producing its own version of Sriracha sauce, a condiment developed in Thailand in the 1940s and most widely sold in the U.S. under the Huy Fong label (the one with the rooster on the bottle). Sriracha, like Tabasco, is made with peppers, vinegar, and salt, but with the addition of garlic and sugar, the latter of which ferments the peppers and creates a thick paste. This is strained, blended with vinegar, and boiled down to reduce the overall mixture into a thicker consistency than Tabasco. Sriracha is McIlhenny’s second best-selling product behind Original Red. 

And then there’s Mexican-style hot sauce, aka salsa picante. This category encompasses such beloved brands as Cholula, Tapatio, El Yucateco, Valentina, and others, and it too primarily consists of pepper, salt, vinegar, and garlic.

Yet while vinegar is a primary contributor to both the flavor and consistency of McIlhenny Tabasco, Mexican hot sauces showcase the peppers’ flavor most of all, using only as much vinegar as necessary in the blend; this lends the sauce a bit more heft. In keeping with that style, McIlhenny’s new Salsa Picante is described in the press release as a “rich and thick” sauce, one that’s milder than Tabasco with a “vibrant” blend of paprika, oregano and cumin.

Beyond these hot sauce styles, there’s a whole wide world of spicy condiments to explore, from Korean gochujang to Indonesian sambal oelek to Szechuan chili crisp to Peruvian aji verde. And if McIlhenny’s latest foray into Mexican-style hot sauce is any indication, Americans have never been more curious about all the different ways that international cuisines bring the heat. 

The new Tabasco Salsa Picante will be sold at Walmart and via Amazon, with a suggested retail price of $3.56.