The Costco Hot Sauce Pack You Aren't Missing Out On

Once upon a grocery store, long in the past, there was a person who wanted nothing but a hot sauce to douse their food with spicy succulence. However, in the hot sauce section, they were greeted with only a few meager options. They could pick from the standards — Tabasco, Frank's Red Hot, and Tapatio. This person left the store, renouncing the hot sauce world as being a wasteland.

Were that same under-spiced soul to enter a grocery store today, they'd be bombarded with hot sauce options. There's Tabasco of every type, and Frank's Red Hot now has a variety of flavors. There are still standbys, like the Louisiana hot sauce, or El Pato Jalapeno, which is nearly as good as the green tabasco for a fraction of the price. There are newcomers, like the surprisingly good Gringo Bandito, which is backed by Dexter Holland of The Offspring fame.

With such a deep bench of choices, it's easy to make the wrong decision and head into the wastes of hot sauces, where vinegary store brands can waste your time, damage your palate with their mismatched flavor profiles, or hit you with painful heat that lacks actual taste. In this vein, some hot sauce sommeliers have taken notice of a 12-bottle hot sauce sampler pack at Costco. They tried it, they don't care for it, and they want you to save your money.

Costco makes its money selling items in bulk. When shopping at the warehouse giant, you can buy enough toilet paper for your armageddon bunker, sufficient oatmeal for a small army, and more hand lotion than any six people need. Often, shoppers figure out how to avoid wasting what they purchase. However, if you're going to get a dozen full-size hot sauces, you'd better make sure they're worth it. 

One Redditor thought a hot sauce buffet in a box sounded like a bargain and got both more and less than they wanted. The Reddit user bought the dozen sauce sampler pack from Costco, and, ironically enough, these hot sauces left them cold.

The sauce sampler pack is produced by Global Gourmet and contains the aforementioned dozen bottles of various sauces, each with its own color and label. Sadly, these "all taste the same," wrote the Reddit user. The thread was quickly filled with a sea of verbal nods. "They all have a cheap Tabasco taste," said one. "No one who loves hot sauce would buy this," said another. "These are extremely low quality vinegar based watered down condiments," offered a third, who declared themselves a "hot sauce nerd," which gives them the most social media cred, maybe.

Redditor report that those looking to spice up their life are better off ignoring the Global Gourmet, unless weak and unexceptional is how you like your sauce.