Viet Anh Nguyen, Founder and CEO of Rude Mama Hot Sauce, has cultivated a brand as vibrant and authentic as her own remarkable journey. What began as a personal quest for a taste of home has blossomed into a thriving business, bringing unique Vietnamese-inspired hot sauces to Canada.
Rude Mama Hot Sauce brings the heat across Canada with Canada Post
Sure, building a national presence demands exceptional flavour, but it also requires a shipping partner as reliable and dedicated as the entrepreneur herself.
That’s why Rude Mama Hot Sauce relies on Canada Post to deliver not just its hot sauce, but the very essence of Nguyen’s passion, ensuring every customer, feels connected to the brand.
Building a business from the heart
Nguyen’s journey began with a craving for home.
After moving to Canada in 2017, she found herself longing for the distinct flavour of a Vietnamese hot sauce she’d fallen in love with years prior. Here in North American, generic, vinegar-based hot sauces caused her health problems and killed the joy of eating spicy food.
Recognizing a significant gap in the Canadian market, she embarked on a two-year mission to recreate the traditional flavour.
“The recipe took me years to develop,” she said. “I wanted to crack the code so that if I put it in the middle of the table, everybody would be able to enjoy it.”
The result? Rude Mama Hot Sauce and its four distinct and beautifully crafted flavours, each with its own personality. There’s the original, “the rudest of the house” and closest to the traditional recipe; the mango, her “firstborn” and bestseller; the pineapple, a sweet but short-tempered “middle child”; and the passion fruit, “full of potential” and versatile enough for Western dishes.
With products perfected, and no prior business experience, Nguyen dove headfirst into learning how to build a company. She took advantage of every program she could find, covering topics like entrepreneurship and accounting, design and marketing.
She was a sponge for information on creating a business the right way.
She also leaned on her “chosen family” for support, making those in her life part of the brand and its products. Seemingly everyone in her life taste tested product: Her program instructors. Her fellow students. Her coworkers. Her doctor. Her dentist. Her physio therapist.
“It’s true – everyone was part of the team!” she said.
Canada Post came into my life like a wrecking ball! I was just this small business, operating out of my house with boxes everywhere, and when Canada Post came into my life, we got growing.
Wrecking ball of opportunity
The turning point for Rude Mama’s national exposure came when the brand was named the Rising Stars award winner in the 2024 Canada Post Tales of Triumph small business contest.
“Canada Post came into my life like a wrecking ball!” she laughs. “I was just this small business, operating out of my house with boxes everywhere, and when Canada Post came into my life, we got growing.”
The Tales of Triumph contest provided an invaluable platform for Nguyen to tell her story and grow her business.
“I felt like a star! They made me famous,” she laughed. “Being able to tell my story to all of Canada – It was amazing. Tales of Triumph built a solid foundation for my brand. At that time, most of the people who bought from me were from small local farmers markets that I attend and sold directly to them. When my story hit a national level, everything took off.”
The Canada Post video that was part of her prize package, for example, gave her brand something to point to when she was explaining her brand to potential customers or buyers, she said.
Nguyen continued, “You can talk about your brand all day, all the time, but it doesn’t have the impact of a beautiful video. It wasn’t just me talking about my brand. It was the fact someone else was saying this about my brand made the difference.”
The whirlwind of national attention presented a new challenge: scaling to meet demand. While production was handled by a co-packer, the logistics of shipping a heavy, fragile product across a vast country became paramount.
Delivering trust, not just sauce
For a consumer-packaged goods business like Rude Mama, shipping is critical.
“The heavy part of shipping isn’t just physical. There is a heavy mental part, too. I wanted to ship cheap, but some cheap companies, they don’t really care. So, every time I shipped a package out, I’d pray for the sauce not to break,” said Nguyen, who tried to reinforce packages with a dozen fragile stickers wrapped around the package.
“I wanted to make sure my package was treated like a princess,” she said.
She learned quickly that choosing the right shipping partner was about more than just cost. Previous experiences with cheaper carriers resulted in broken products and frustrated customers.
“Every time you ship your product out and it gets broken, it’s a fast way to lose a customer,” she said.
Canada Post proved to be the reliable solution.
“Canada Post is a vital partner in my growth. Their reliability, reach and commitment to small businesses like mine let me connect with customers across Canada. I can go everywhere because they go everywhere.”
She continued, “A good shipping company not only saves you a lot of headaches. Canada Post knows what it’s doing. They have been doing it for as long as you as you can remember.”
Growing with a reliable partner
Rude Mama sells through its website, as well as retail partners like Fortinos grocery stores, the Healthy Planet’s online store (with an eye on its physical stores if all goes well). Additional chains and bulk orders for restaurants are also on the horizon.
It will all be accomplished, Nguyen said, with Canada Post at her side.
“I think about what my business needs today, but I also think about what it will need one year, two years, five years into the future. That means every partner, every relationship, needs to be a good one. It’s a hassle to change and then build another relationship,” she said.
For Viet Anh, Canada Post represents that long-term, trustworthy partnership. Having given her a chance when she was small, she is committed to growing with them.
“For me, when I work with somebody, and they give me their word, I will remember that. As I was growing as a small business, Canada Post gave me a chance. I will remember that. And as I grow, I won’t forget that.”