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Due to our current administration’s tariffs, there’s going to be lots of pain this year, so what things are most important to keep your business moving forward? That might mean you have to de-prioritize something. At B.T.R., we have so much exciting innovation coming, but that might take an extra quarter now because our priority is on retail expansion.

Right now, having a small business or a start-up is glamorous, but at that time, not at all. It was difficult. I was an MBA student. My friends from the MBA program went to work for big corporations. I was the only one in the class that wanted to start a business. So I wrote a thesis on how to start a business in the United States, and I put my thesis into practice.

We were not trying to grow globally in the early days. It has been very organic. It started with a woman in Toronto who had somehow got connected with WPO and wanted to bring it to Canada.

My late husband and I started Secret Aardvark. He was a chef, restaurant owner, serial entrepreneur, and he loved hot sauce. He had been making his own hot sauce since he was a kid growing up in California. When he sold his restaurant, I made him get a job, and he hated it. After two weeks, I told him he needed to market his hot sauce, because he’d been wanting to do that. I think at one point we had eighteen sauces. It was whatever came out of his creative mind.