Humble beginnings......

Mild to Wild Pepper & Herb Company® started off rather modestly, as an idea by two Indianapolis firefighters. Jim Campbell (me) had been selling dried chile peppers that I'd grown in my backyard to fellow firefighters for several years as a hobby.  Each successive year I was planting more and more to keep up with demand.

While on vacation in Santa Fe, NM with another firefighter- Kyle Leslie, we stopped by the flea market and picked up several different kinds of fresh chile powders. Trying them out on a steak dinner later that evening, the idea for a formal business venture was formed.

That same year, with borrowed land and help from Adrian Orchards in Indianapolis, a handful of Orange Habanero seeds were sown. At the same time I ordered a sampler set of hot sauces and started making phone calls to the numbers on the labels trying to find anyone who was interested. 

One of those first contacts was a restaurateur named Blair Lazar (of Death Sauce™ fame) who was also just starting out in the industry and gave me the technical specifications for how he needed the chiles processed.. The makers of Pure Hell Hot Sauce™ also provided invaluable help and were one of my first customers.

The business has 'grown' ever since. I secured an agreement with GNS Spice, Inc to be able to grow the Red Savina® Habanero, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the hottest Chile pepper on the planet, up until 2007. One of only a handful of growers who in 1997 were licensed to grow the Red Savina™, our peppers were used in several famous world hot sauce premiers. The initial offerings of both Hellenback™ from Two Chefs, Inc and, Sudden Death™ from Gardner Resources were made with Mild to Wild Pepper & Herb Companies' chilies.

Since then Mild to Wild® has gone on to specialize in trying to provide the 'little guy' with a competitive, flexible provider of many types of processed peppers and hot sauces. This is because I myself am essentially 'a little guy', still being a one man band.

Mild to Wild® took a big step forward when I decided to make a presence on the web in about 1993, just after Al invented it. These first tentative steps were guided by FireGirl (Mary Going) and quickly paid off. When she got out of the web development business, I was lucky enough to find to two fellow struggling sauces makers just a couple of blocks away who were also top notch web pros. Swapping habaneros for HTML they got me well on the way to a professional web presence.

I have since expanded the business many times becoming the 'go to' guy for bulk chiles in their purest form. The list of ever expanding clients who have purchased chiles from me can be found at my "Wall of Flame" and it is ever expanding.

I maintain my full time employment as a professional firefighter on the NW side of Indianapolis. As such, there are sometimes delays in shipping orders and answering requests. Part of the price you pay in supporting the 'little guy' I guess. Still, Mild to Wild® offers a full range of products from sauces for private labeling and retail sales, to bulk chile peppers for the largest of industrial accounts and everything in between!