Butterfly Bakery: Patron Saint of Vermont Chili Peppers
“Experimentation is what I do,” Claire Georges of Butterfly Bakery exudes. “I love playing around with recipes and different foods and seeing what happens. I can taste flavors in my head, a form of synesthesia. You mention a flavor, and I can predict its taste before I even see or chop it. I can sense how flavors will combine in surprising ways.”
While at Oberlin College, Claire lived in a vegan and sugar-free co-op where she was in charge of desserts. She reminisced, “That experience gave me a crash course in making sweets taste good for people on restricted diets.” In 2003, she opened Butterfly Bakery in downtown Montpelier and featured vegan baked goods made with whole grains and maple syrup.
In 2011, Butterfly Bakery had a booth at the Capitol City Farmers Market. At the end of each market, the vendors would swap goods. Several farmers happily bartered chili peppers in exchange for freshly baked granola, gingersnaps, and raspberry almond cookies. Claire took those peppers and experimented with micro batches of hot sauce. When they sold out, Claire realized she was on to something. Two years later, a farmer friend, Jim, gifted Claire some hot peppers—800 pounds, to be exact. “I rushed to make sauce with them because I didn’t know how to save peppers back then; I ramped up production—the hot sauce business took off. And Jim now has a lifetime supply of free hot sauce!”
Chili peppers grow really well in Vermont. Last year, Butterfly Bakery purchased 55,000 pounds and plans for 120,000 pounds this year. That’s six tons, making her the number one purchaser of Vermont-grown chili peppers in the world.
Butterfly Bakery’s 100 percent Vermont-grown hot sauce lineup includes flavors that pack a punch: smoked onion, Heady Topper, maple rum chipotle, smoked jalapeño, Vermont habanero, cilantro onion, and peppercorn porter. Her primary farm suppliers include Dog River, True Love, Honey Field, Dutchess, Golden Russet, Quill Hill, Lester Farm Market, and Familia Farm. Onions and garlic come from Full Moon Farm, Pete’s Greens grows the garlic scapes, and West Farm provides tomatillos and dill.
Claire’s other ventures include whole-seed mustards blended with Vermont craft beers or ciders and Vermont-grown herbs and maple syrup. “And just about anything else I can think up,” she laughs. Top sellers are Citizen Cider smoked onion, maple sriracha, Heady Topper, and Gustard, a spicy pickle mustard created for the alt-rock band Guster. “It’s fun to partner with good people doing cool things, like Guster and The Alchemist. We never know what’s going to become the next big thing so we’re constantly experimenting.” Needing to expand, Butterfly Bakery moved from Montpelier to Barre in October 2020. “Having this 16,000-square-foot commercial production space allows us to do a lot of co-packing for other people, which is our primary business,” Claire explains. “We make and package the product here, and they sell it under their own labels.”
Claire is not only entrepreneurial but also philanthropic. She developed Genersaucity, a line of smaller batch hot sauces. “We donate a portion of the proceeds to various Vermont nonprofits. All proceeds of our Gustard product are donated to support Zeno Mountain Farm, a magical nonprofit that hosts camps and retreats for people with disabilities. We’re about to debut our Ghost Verde Pickle sauce, and a portion of the profit will go to support the efforts of José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen. And we donate 5 percent of all our website sales to the Vermont Food Bank.”
“I’m a fixer,” Claire concludes. “I like to solve problems. I can’t solve the pandemic, or other social issues, but I can use my business platform to support other nonprofits doing good work. I personally would lose my way as a business owner if I weren’t doing things to help others.”
