Inspire Tuesday ~ January 14, 2025 – Hot Sauce!

Welcome to my first post of the series – Inspire Tuesday.

I picked Tuesday because it gets very little love. Monday gets attention because it either sucks, or it’s a fresh start. Wednesday is Hump Day, Thursday is Friday Eve, and, well… Friday is Friday. Of course everyone is working for the weekend.

Other than the occasional Taco Tuesday, Tuesday is the milk-toast middle child of the Week family. Hopefully, these post will give everyone a bit of a lift, and elevate Tuesday to a more respectable position. This series will examine the question, “What is good in the world?”

My first inspirational story is the tale of a high school kid that got a B- on a business project. This upset him because he’s typically a straight A student. When he asked his teacher why the low grade, the teacher said his plan seemed a bit unrealistic. So he set out to prove him wrong.

Here’s the twist – this kid was born with Cerebral Palsy. Cerebral palsy is a group of conditions that affect movement and posture. It’s caused by damage that occurs to the developing brain, most often before birth. There are many different types. One of my coworkers has CP, but you’d probably not notice it right off. She is fully mobile. Most of her issue is with pain.

Others aren’t that lucky. Some need a wheel chair or other mobility devices to get them through the day. It’s a lifelong condition that makes every simple task feel like climbing Mount Everest. This is the case of Drew Davis – the hero of today’s story.

After Drew received his B- (which personally would have had me jumping for glee when I was in high school), he set off to prove his teacher wrong. His business plan involved manufacturing, bottling, and selling his own brand of hot sauce. Using his disability (and humor) as a differentiator, he created The Crippling Company and their line of hot sauces and merchandise.

When the company was starting out, they received the proper permits to make and bottle the sauces in their home kitchen. More recently, they moved some of their operations to a commercial kitchen in St. Louis. All the sauce ingredients are locally sourced. Currently,  they offer six flavors from mild to hot with funny names like “Just for the Parking” (Mild) and “Ghost Pepper Palsy” (the hottest). All bottles are emblazoned with their pepper in a wheelchair logo.

As of the last report, he’s sold over 16,000 bottles and distributed to over 30 stores in the local area. You can also find them on Amazon, but personally,  I ordered directly through their website at https://thecripplingcompany.com/.

I just put in an order for their six main flavors – Just for the Parking, Life’s a Beach, Limping, Special Treatment, Crippling Agony, Ghost Pepper Palsy. It was shipped out within a day. I should be receiving it in the next day or two. I’ll keep you all posted.

Oh, and 5% of his sales goes to cerebral palsy research. 

I think that’s pretty darn cool.

So I hope you all found a little inspiration here. Sometimes, we have struggles in life, but for some – life is a struggle, and yet that is what makes them shine.