Press
Boilerplate, facts, assets and the angles we think are actually interesting. If you need something that is not here, email press@chickencat.co and you will get a reply the same day.
Angles
The Tennessee Food Freedom Act exempts home-produced food from state licensing and inspection — and unlike almost every other state’s cottage food law, it does not carve out acidified foods. That means bottled hot sauce can legally be made in a home kitchen here and nowhere near everywhere else. It also means we cannot ship a bottle across the state line. Merch has no such limit, which is why a sauce company has 24 t-shirts.
Every batch is validated by a process authority at the University of Tennessee, which sets the maximum equilibrium pH and fill temperature. We measure with a calibrated meter, keep records for three years, and put the numbers on a public page. Nobody else in hot sauce does this. It is not marketing — the records are required, we just stopped hiding them.
No flames, no skulls, no “insanity.” The mark is a chicken-cat chimera drawn as a nineteenth-century zoological specimen, with a Latin binomial and a plate number. The heat ladder ascends by getting darker and more muted rather than redder — sage, then amber, then oxblood — which is the opposite of what the category does.
Nashville hot is a cayenne-and-lard paste applied before frying. Ours is a vinegar sauce that goes on after. We are not competing with it and we are not bottling it — a distinction most brands here blur.
Boilerplate
Chicken Cat is a small-batch hot sauce company in Nashville, Tennessee.
Chicken Cat makes three fermented hot sauces in Nashville, Tennessee. Each batch is fermented for six to eight weeks, validated by a process authority, and sold with its pH log published openly. Founded 2026.
Chicken Cat is a small-batch hot sauce company founded in Nashville, Tennessee in 2026. Its three sauces — Mouser, Catbird Seat and Hackle — are fermented for six to eight weeks before bottling, with no gums, dyes, preservatives or capsaicin extract. The company produces under the Tennessee Food Freedom Act, publishes the pH and batch records for every lot, and sells a parallel line of 24 apparel designs that ship nationwide while the sauce remains Tennessee-only.
Logo, product photography and share images are on this site and free to use with credit to Chicken Cat.
Photography of the sauce itself does not exist yet — Batch 001 has not been bottled. If you need it for a piece, tell us your deadline and we will work to it.
Contact
Samples for review are available to press in Tennessee. Outside the state we can send apparel and answer any question you have, but not sauce — the law is the law.
press@chickencat.co
