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dried Vast quantities of dried peppers

Nigel

Nigel

Hi all,

I wasn`t sure where to put this, so appologies if this isn`t the place.

Anyway, a good friend of mine is a dealer in spices from all over the world. He imports dried, flaked peppers from India in multiple tons and supplies a lot of sauce makers in the USA. Is there anyone large enough to supply 40-80 tons of pepper flake in the USA? How about smaller amounts of superhots?


Nigel
 
there is no way that anyone in the usa can supply 80 TONS of flake cheaper than it coming from india!!!!!!!! to make 160000 pounds of flkae you would need 1600000 pounds of fresh pods :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: good luck !
 
For someone to grow that many peppers here Stateside, they'd need some serious acreage!
 
I am a flake and powder slob, almost everything I see from India is dried beyond recognition. I work with hundreds of people from India and when they see and use my powder they find it hard to believe it came from a real pepper due to color, smell and taste.

I would say it can be done here easily to be honest. I pass fields on the Eastern Shore in Va that could handle this without issue but they do tomatoes and chickens. :)
 
JoynersHotPeppers said:
I am a flake and powder slob, almost everything I see from India is dried beyond recognition. I work with hundreds of people from India and when they see and use my powder they find it hard to believe it came from a real pepper due to color, smell and taste.

I would say it can be done here easily to be honest. I pass fields on the Eastern Shore in Va that could handle this without issue but they do tomatoes and chickens. :)
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it can be done easily?? do it i cant to watch this!



one acre you can do 1680 plants.

you would need 533333 plants to get that much weight. thats with each palnt giving you 3 pounds.


edited because a comment may have came off as me being a jerk. and that was not my intentions
 
Challenge accepted.

533,333 plants grown sardine style on 1 acre :)

LOL! :) :) :) :)

In all seriousness though, here in california, there are lots of giant farms that could do it.
If they chose to switch what they grow.
 
Nigel, are you looking for a US grower for a business contract or just asking if it can be done?

desertchris, it's 1680 plants/acre = 317 acres.....all planted in chiles!!!


and if $ per # of dried product gets into the conversation, sorry to say but there is no way thousands of pounds of chiles can be grown and processed in the US for the price of what it is from India.
 
salsalady said:
Nigel, are you looking for a US grower for a business contract or just asking if it can be done?

desertchris, it's 1680 plants/acre = 317 acres.....all planted in chiles!!!
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Nope.....plant them like sardines.... :)
I'm kidding though. My gal would get rid of me if I attempted anything like that...hahaha
 
do like they stack 'em in cities... go VERTICAL! Create the Chile High-rise. :lol:
 
salsalady said:
do like they stack 'em in cities... go VERTICAL! Create the Chile High-rise. :lol:
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I almost said that...lol
Bunkbed style pepper growing!!

That empty acre in the back is just begging for it...
But there is no water supply back there...darn....guess i'll have pass....
 
Sicman, are you referring to the costs of doing business, wages for employees, licensing, record keeping, "provenance" of the chile, etc. and all the other costs of doing business and growing produce in the US?


I'm not saying it's right, but it is a fact that all manner of goods can be imported cheaper than being grown/produced domestically.
 
Instead of all the wild blackberry bushes growing like wild fires around here in the Northwest. We could replace em with chili plants. Hell, the blackberry bushes even seem to swallow up trees around here.
 
megahot said:
Instead of all the wild blackberry bushes growing like wild fires around here in the Northwest. We could replace em with chili plants. Hell, the blackberry bushes even seem to swallow up trees around here.
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Replace all the marionberries with chiles? I won't object to that.
 
Just wondering IF it could be done here. I do realise the logistics it would take.

My friend buys chili flake at a certain Scoville rating and his labs test everything. I`m not sure of the SHU per oz, but he buys the hottest that is available It certainly isn`t from Bhuts or Nagas, as if it were he could import 4-5 times less mass. He has a lot of nightmares getting this kind of product through the FDA inspections, it is also sterilised at the US port prior to being let in to the country - steam or irradiation or gas of some description. In addition it has to pass chemical tests for pesticides, herbicides and just any cides, which he has to pay for via his own labs. If it was done here, at least a lot of that could be controlled easier. Shipping 80 tons from India isn`t cheap, either.

Price to the Indian supplier is $3.17 per pound. Then it gets packed, shipped, tested, sterilised, tested some more and shipped all over the USA.
 
salsalady said:
Nigel, are you looking for a US grower for a business contract or just asking if it can be done?

desertchris, it's 1680 plants/acre = 317 acres.....all planted in chiles!!!


and if $ per # of dried product gets into the conversation, sorry to say but there is no way thousands of pounds of chiles can be grown and processed in the US for the price of what it is from India.
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I agree with you, but I took a different approach to the math.

First of all, I have never attempted to scale it up to this level so I am truly talking out of my rear, here.

I was thinking in terms of something easy, fast, small and prolific, like some of the cayenne varieties. My cayenne plants wouldn't know what to do with 26ft^2 per plant. (43,560ft^2 / 1680 ~ 26ft^2/plant)

Even with row planting, I would think you could easily get 10,000 cayenne plants in an acre 4.3ft^2/plant. So after harvest and drying you are looking at 1000-2000 lbs of dried flake per acre, (I still think that number is on the conservative side)

$3.17/lb to the grower? So somewhere between $3000 and $6000 per acre to the farmer. Just in those terms, it sounds pretty good, IF the farmer has a harvest machine that can effective harvest chilis. 100 acres = $300,000 - $600,000 per harvest. I am fairly sure a farmer could turn a profit on that.

I think the real problem comes from the capital involved. A farmer is going to have to retool his farm completely, on a 100 acre farm retooling might cost a million dollars. I don't know if the gear exists, though I am sure it does, there are plenty of chili farms in the world. Then there is the drying/grinding facility, inspections, etc. It would be really important to replace the human labor step practiced in India/Mexico with automation, the machinery might cost half a million dollars, but it would be a lot cheaper than have to pay 100 workers in the US. If the investments could be made, a farmer could possibly turn that into a profitable venture after a few years.
 
$3.17 a pound to the grower. what about ferts and instectides? now you are making -72 cents a pound :rofl:

they do have machines that make the holes but human labor still has to put plants in. then they have combines that takes the entire plant seperating stock from pepper. they cost about $500,000. tabasco has some cool videos of there planting and harvest.

we havent even thought about the cost of drying and flaking and packaging? now we are down -$2.25 a pound :rofl:
 
$4000 per acre for insecticide and fertilizer? I think that is a bit on the high side.

The cantaloupe growers around here use a nifty device that allows 3 people to plant out starts (1 person driving, 2 people dropping in starts) that does an acre in a few hours. But with something like cayenne, you could just direct seed an entire field, cutting out all of those labor costs.

Turns out I was way off thinking that I could compare soybean to peppers. Soybean farmers gross something like $60,000 - 70,000 per acre, if I am looking at this right.


http://fbfm.ace.uiuc...in/c&s_clow.pdf

Sic- I totally agree with the costs for drying and flaking, I wouldn't even venture a guess on that! I don't even know how the heck you would dry 800,000lbs of peppers! The idea of it makes my tiny brain want to explode. :banghead:


* edit - Why the hell do they put bushel prices in cents? 1379.25/bushel I just assumed was in dollars not cents! So that means soybean farmers gross $6000-7000 per acre, not far off my guess for chilis. Of course soy farmers just let the beans dry right on the plants, so there is no added cost there.
 
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