Our Story

60+ years of making HEAT

My family has been using heat in their food for a long time. I have very fond memories of my Grandma, Flora Chasteen working in her garden and creating recipes and cooking the most amazing dishes. She had her own garden that she worked every day. She grew everything from tomatoes, okra, sting peas, cucumbers, and peppers. She would hang the peppers to dry them out and used them in a lot of her recipes. Oh, and she had an amazing Chow Chow.

She taught my mom a lot of those recipes and how to cook. In the 1980s, my mom decided there was not a hot sauce product for wings out there that she liked.

She then developed her own, and it received a lot of recognition from friends and family and won a couple of wing/hot sauce competitions.

She looked into bottling it back in the 80s but it never developed past the idea. Every few years she would get the interest up and would start to work on it and then it would not happen. She made wings a lot as I grew up, and I always loved it and so did our friends.

Fast forward to 2003, I enlisted in the Army Reserves as an Ammunition Specialist during college. I decided to Commission as an officer, and in 2006 I commissioned as an Aviation Officer. I was at Fort Rucker from 2007-2009 where I learned how to fly the OH-58D. In flight school, and every time we flew, we had to bring our flight manual which we called -10 for short.

Making her recipe at every duty station for friends, peers, and different events, I knew it was special.

In 2010, I deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom with 2-17th Air Cavalry. After I got home, I asked her what she was going to do with her hot sauce, and she told me that she was just going to give it away to family and friends. I told her I wanted to bottle it and she sold me the recipe for $1 to help achieve her dream.

Since then, I have been developing recipes, flavors and a unique blend of BBQ sauce and rubs, along with being a husband and raising 5 kids. I’m so looking forward to this venture and finally fulfilling my family's dream!

My Passion

I love to serve others, and cooking is one of my favorite ways to do so. As I would make my mom's original sauce recipe, I found that I could create new ones, and that quickly became a passion of mine. And I love food!

Why dash-10 as a name?

A lot of people have asked us why we call our company dash-10 and what it means. Originally we went with DrumStix Signature Sauces, however we felt that the name did not fit our personality or what we were trying to do with the company.

Wanting to connect it back to my time in the military, dash-10 was born. Army user manuals all start with TM (Training Manual) and end with -10. In flight school, our TM for the OH-58D was 1-1520-248-10 and you had it with you all throughout flight school. Called -10 for short, it is essential to have with you at all times. In the same way, dash-10 hot sauce is essential for the mission of your food.