a sauceFrank's RedHot
also: Frank's · Frank's RedHot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce
A bar orders it by the case and says 'Frank's' the way it says 'a Coke'.
A thin orange cayenne pepper sauce: aged cayenne red peppers, distilled vinegar, water, salt, garlic powder, in that order on the label. McCormick & Company makes it. The Original blend measures 450 Scoville heat units — the capsaicin scale named for Wilbur Scoville — which puts it below Tabasco, Cholula and Tapatío, and barely above Sriracha; the XTRA Hot blend measures 2,000. It is the bottle most Buffalo wing recipes start from.
The story Cited · wp-frank-s-redhot
Jacob Frank founded the Frank Tea and Spice Company in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1896. In 1917 he contracted with the Estilette Pepper Farm in Louisiana and went into partnership with Adam Estilette. They mixed spices, vinegar, garlic and cayenne peppers, aged them, and put the blend on the market in 1920.
Ownership moved: Durkee Famous Foods in 1977, Reckitt Benckiser from 1995, and in August 2017 McCormick & Company closed a $4.2 billion deal that took in both French's mustard and Frank's RedHot. Production sits in Springfield, Missouri.
The wing connection is older than the ownership and thinner than the marketing. Wikipedia's Buffalo wing article says Frank's "was probably not the hot sauce that was used in the original 1964 Anchor Bar recipe." Inference — the bottle's grip on the wing was won after the fact, by being cheap, thin, and everywhere.
The brand's television campaign gave it a second life: an elderly woman named Ethel, planted in front of a dignitary, says of her recipes "I put that s*** on everything", bleeped, with a splat over her mouth.
How it is done Tradition
Shake. Pour into melted butter for wings, roughly one part to one for mild, more sauce for hot. Straight on eggs, pizza, fried chicken, and into chili. The vinegar is the working part as much as the pepper: it cuts fat and it keeps the sauce thin enough to coat rather than cling.
Today Harvested · fdc-franks-redhot-original
Sold nationally in supermarkets and in food-service jugs. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for the 5 fl oz Original bottle reads 190 mg sodium in a 1 teaspoon serving — 570 mg in a tablespoon — with no sugar and no fat. The maker publishes the 450 SHU figure for Original; it publishes no Scoville number for its Buffalo Wings Sauce or its Nashville Hot.
The particulars
| base | vinegar-pepper |
|---|---|
| heat | mild |
| styles | buffalo |
| region | The United States, Western New York |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · McCormick & Company, Inc. · Springfield, MO |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | #1 on the label |
| vinegar | #2 on the label |
| butter or oil | — |
| tomato | — |
| sugar | — |
| soy sauce | — |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 570 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 0 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | 450 SHU |
| the label, in order | aged cayenne red peppers, distilled vinegar, water, salt, garlic powder |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. Label serving is 1 tsp (5 mL) = 0.333 tbsp; label sodium is 190 mg, so 190 × 3 = 570 mg per tablespoon. Ingredient order is the label's. The maker's own product page prints the same statement with 'Distilled Vinegar' spelled out. The panel figures come from FoodData Central; the Scoville figure is the maker's, off its own product page (s:web-franks-redhot-original-page), and 450 SHU is published for the Original blend and is the rare case where a wing-sauce maker states a number; heat_claim is null because the bottle prints no heat word — 'Original' names the variety, not a heat level. Every bottle we have read is on the sauce page.
Recipes you can use
Old cookbooks are printed whole, spelling and all. Where a recipe is still somebody's copyright, you get the ingredient list and a link to the rest.
Pepper vinegar
- half a dozen red peppers
- three dozen black peppercorns
- two tablespoonfuls of sugar
- a quart of vinegar
Copied verbatim, old spellings kept. A home version of the same idea — red pepper steeped in vinegar and bottled — published fourteen years before Frank's reached the market. Harland sends it to the oyster plate, not the wing.
Not to be confused with
- Buffalo sauce — This is the bottle. Buffalo sauce is the bottle plus melted butter, mixed in the kitchen or in a factory.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Frank's RedHot · link
- Buffalo wing · link
- Scoville scale · link
- Frank's RedHot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce — branded food label (FDC ID 2565317) · link
- Frank's RedHot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce · link
- Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping — Marion Harland, 1906 · link
- Cayenne pepper · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.