Connect
To Top

Meet Diane Foley of Cayenne Diane in Glendale

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Diane Foley (aka Cayenne Diane).

So, Diane, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My husband and I, being artists, technology geeks, and entrepreneurs at heart, have tried our hand at several business endeavors over the years. Some have succeeded, and some have failed. The ones that failed were always learning experiences and prepared us for our next adventure.

I’ve been a professional graphic designer for over 20 years. After getting married and moving to from Las Vegas to LA in 2003, a previous client tracked me down and insisted that I be her full-time graphic designer. That was how I accidentally started my first business. I incorporated my graphic design company, The Visual Sense, in 2004.

Since then, we have started up a few other businesses. Since my husband and I have creative backgrounds, we pretty much create every aspect of our businesses ourselves, from logo creation, to photography, to website building. We’ve spent many nights and weekends together working on new ideas in our shared home office.

I created CayenneDiane.com in 2012. It began purely as a labor of love and I had no idea it would become as popular as it is today. It all started with a simple question about a pepper from a friend that knew I loved hot peppers. I recall he wanted to know how a serrano pepper compared, in Scovilles, to a jalapeño pepper. Scoville units are the way to rate the heat of a pepper or food, and I figured a simple Google search would give me the info I was looking for. I was wrong.

The online info back then was very lacking, so I decided to remedy the lack of online data and began compiling the “Big List of Hot Peppers”. It took extensive research to build. What made my list different at the time was it provided Scoville info and a photo of each pepper for easy identification. I created the kind of resource I wanted to use. I think those are the best businesses to start. If you feel something should exist that doesn’t, then build it!

CayenneDiane.com has grown ever since, with 100K+ visitors a month. People email me daily with hot pepper questions. I also grow a lot of hot peppers for research as well as for eating and cooking. It’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. I may even consider CayenneDiane.com my second accidental business!

CayenneDiane.com is a successful website, but it is a free resource. My husband and I started brainstorming on what our next steps might be to convert the love of spicy food we have into something that might help pay the bills. That lead us into starting up the Heat Seeker Box, which is a subscription box that delivers artisan spicy foods quarterly. I love discovering new great products and then sharing those finds with my subscribers. There are so many great small companies out there across the US creating spicy foods, I just want all spicy foodies out there to experience them all. We just passed our one-year mark with the Heat Seeker Box and we are bringing exciting new products to the store this year, moving beyond just the subscription box.

Has it been a smooth road?
There are certainly always going to be challenges when taking a self-reliant path, but none of those challenges would ever deter me from working for myself or trying to start up a new business. One big challenge in working for yourself is the feast or famine obstacle. My work load may be light for a couple weeks, and then several clients will contact me at the same time with large projects with tight deadlines. Being self-employed means there’s not really a set schedule, but I use any downtime in my graphic design business to focus on my other projects, like CayenneDiane.com. I feel you must be a disciplined person to work for yourself and really loving what you’re doing.

Building a business also requires you to be opening to continually learning new things. The very first year I started up The Visual Sense, I had no idea what I was doing in terms of taxes and what was required to run my own business. That was a very big learning curve. My accountant ultimately had to fix all my errors that first year. I learned so much from that experience making it that much easier to start up other businesses, which we did in 2008 with a clothing company. That company eventually closed, but I learned a lot about e-commerce from that adventure. That knowledge fed directly into our follow-up projects: CayenneDiane.com in 2012, and the Heat Seeker Box in 2016.

One challenge we encountered with CayenneDiane.com was trying to get the website to work the way we wanted and to be as speedy as possible. A popular website puts demands on the limits of most budget web hosting. When you start getting a lot of traffic to a site, you simply must upgrade the infrastructure, so it can keep up with the traffic and not crash. That involves upgrading to better servers. Also, the speediness of a site reflects on your reputation as well as search engine rankings. Because of this, we’ve invested a good deal of time rebuilding the site several times to perform optimally.

So, let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Cayenne Diane story. Tell us more about the business.
CayenneDiane.com and the Heat Seeker Box are business we are focusing on now. CayenneDiane.com specializes in providing information about hot peppers via my “Big List of Hot Peppers”. It also provides info on upcoming hot sauce and chili pepper expos, articles and spicy recipes.

I love helping people discover their next favorite spicy food and spreading the word about all the great small companies I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. This is where the Heat Seeker Box comes in. With my subscription box, I can share all the great products I discover at different expos. These are exactly the things spicy food lovers out there want to know about, and I provide that source of information—and the products as well.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
The hot sauce and spicy industry in general is exploding right now and there is no lack of great spicy products. We are currently seeing more craft hot sauces showing up in grocery store aisles, which is great. Over the next decade, I’d expect to see even more craft brands on the market.

I would love to see more restaurants offering a wider variety of locally made hot sauces rather than the few standards you find today. If I went to a restaurant in Los Angeles, I would love to have a selection of small batch sauces made in Los Angeles. If I went to a restaurant in Detroit, I’d love to have a choice of sauces made by craft makers in Detroit. I think this could be a big opportunity for restaurants to work with local craft hot sauce creators and understand that the heat seeking public really is on the hunt for great craft sauces that we have never heard of or tried before when we dine out.

Contact Info:

Photo Credit:
PJ Foley & Kevin Quattro

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in