Today’s interview is with Steve Coleman of Snack Season. He’s been able to combine his love of wrestling with his very very cool ability to make sauces and he talked to me all about it.
Reading of the Records: This is probably a loaded first question but I wanted to know how you first got into make sauces
Steve Coleman: I actually first started making sauces when I was a kid growing up. I loved to try and combine different sauces that I already had and then add in different seasonings to try and make like the ultimate sauce. I remember when I was probably 12 my parents got me a hot sauce making kit for Christmas and I thought it was the coolest thing. I never really did anything more than just combine sauces until around 2020. That’s when I first started to experiment with making my own. The “Cactus Jack’d” was actually a bbq sauce that I would make for ribs and chicken before Snack Season was even an idea. Eventually me and my friend Brain Cell were trying to think of things we could do for our old YouTube show during the pandemic and my idea was to do hot sauce challenges. I started buying as many sauces as I could that would make for interesting content and filmed us eating them and reviewing the sauces. Some of my friends at work heard I was doing this and so they asked me to bring sauces into the office to try it there amongst ourselves. I did and eventually the idea came to me and my friend Tim that we should make our own as something extra to sell at his table during VHS Fest which is a weekend at the Mahoning drive in theater that has vendors and horror movies. He was a vendor and we thought some horror themed sauces would go well with his tapes and horror tees. That’s where Snack Season was born.
RR: You’ve been able to take Snack Season and create wrestling-themed sauces. GCW fans can see you at the Showboat events selling these sauces. How long have you been a wrestling fan and was there a particular moment that made you fall in love?
SC: I’ve been a wrestling fan my entire life, I can remember being in preschool and going to the video store and getting Summerslam 92 and Hulk Hogan’s Rock n Wrestling on VHS. I also remember going to see WWF live at the old Spectrum in Philadelphia and getting to see the Undertaker and being so scared, my mom had bought me a foam urn and told me that if I held it up it would protect me from him. I brought the urn and the program from the event to show and tell the next day. I fell out of it for a while as I got older but when I was in middle school I had gotten sick and when I was in the hospital my aunt brought me WM 18 and No Way Out 2003 to watch. I fell right back in love when I was watching Hulk Hogan vs The Rock and seeing Chris Jericho as champion. After that I was hooked again and watched religiously every week. Eventually in 2006 I started training to be a wrestler while I was still in HS and it’s been in my blood ever since!
RR: Wow! What was training like?
SC: It was super hard. Since I was only 16 I wasn’t legally allowed to wrestle on shows in PA so my trainer Onslaught took his time with me. He wanted me to focus on cardio and strength before he would even think about letting me touch the ring. For months all I did was help with ring crew, lift and do various cardio routines. At one point I was the only student so I had to learn how to take the ring apart by and set it up with only the promoter to help me to carry everything.
RR: GCW fans can catch you at the Showboat events and you’ve even been able to collaborate with wrestlers on some sauces. What has it like being able to combine your love for wrestling and making sauces?
SC: It’s been absolutely incredible! While our first sauces were horror themed, once we knew that we wanted to keep making sauces I decided that for my contributions I wanted to do it around wrestling. Cactus Jack’d was originally going to be Macho Man Mustard before I decided that giving some love to Mick Foley and my favorite type of wrestling, deathmatch, was what I wanted to do. When I went to TOS 6 last year and saw people like Effy I was determined to try and partner with some of those guys to try and give them something cool and different to sell at their merch tables. Little did I know that it was going to become what it did. Every single person I approached that weekend said yes and then Brett Lauderdale gave me his email and said to reach out to him. From that moment I knew it was going to be a crazy ride. My original GCW lineup was Bam Sullivan, Jimmy Lloyd, RSP, Effy and GCW itself. Each one was so different with how we built the sauces and it really showed me that there was a lot of variety in my ability to craft sauce. The biggest moment for me though was having a phone call with Effy where he helped me to set up my business model for Snack Season that I still use today.
RR: And now you recently announced a partnership with NFW to start Hot Tags. How did this come to be and what are you most looking forward to with it?
SC: That actually was something that I had been working on for over a year! When me and Brain Cell were doing our hot sauces gauntlets one thing that we did was bring some guests on to do hot ones style interviews. It was something I really enjoyed and wanted to try and expand on. Once I started Snack Season, I attempted to bring the concept back with my friend Tim doing them on Twitch with his friends and eventually reached out to Jeff Cannonball about coming down to my house and filming one of the challenges to release on YouTube. Unfortunately, the audio wasn’t great so it never got released but the idea stuck in my mind and I began trying to get iwtv’s attention to pitch them the concept. One night last month I was speaking with Cody from NFW and mentioned to him that I had never been able to get in touch with iwtv and explained the show concept to it and he loved it. We set up a meeting at TOS 7 in a room at the Showboat and discussed the idea, he showed me the logo concept and we agreed on a deal to have NFW be the home of Hot Tags. This way the show will be on iwtv for everyone to enjoy while being more content for what Cody is building with his amazing promotion! I think what I’m most excited for is just getting to show independent wrestlers having fun and in a different environment than just in the ring. I have so many cool ideas for what the show is going to be, it’s not going to just be a straight up Hot Ones interview, that I think people are going to love and it will show a different side of these amazing people than the fans are used to seeing.
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