The Partners

The Innovative Company LLC is a partnership between Chris McCarthy (Insane Chicken) www.insanechicken.com , Charlie Schandelmayer (Sauce Crafters) www.saucecrafters.com and David Ashley (Ashley Food Company) www.asheyfoodcompany.com.

Chris McCarthy was brought up in a working class Irish Catholic household where there were only two spices in the cabinet.  They were called Salt and Pepper and the Pepper was never used.

While growing up in Dorchester MA and later in Quincy MA in the 1970s his exposure to spicy or exotic foods consisted of the local Chinese restaurant for a Pu-Pu platter.

During his teenage years while waiting for cable to be installed on his street so he and his friends could finally watch MTV he became caught up in the Video game craze and was known to be one of the best at Galaxian and Asteroids at the arcade. Today, video games played via xbox 360 and watching MTV are still part of his daily entertainment only now they are enjoyed on a very large plasma HD TV.  When Chris finds something he likes – He sticks with it.

Chris graduated from Quincy Vocational technical High School where he majored in Graphic Arts and went into the printing business out of High school.  He quickly found that printing and all the paper cuts and chemicals that it entails were not best suited to him.  He went to work at a Boston printing shop where he found he enjoyed fixing the printers and printer equipment more than operating them.  He had found his calling.  He went to Technical College where he earned his associates degree in Electronics and started his very successful and satisfying career in Information Technology.  He currently works in a Large Financial Corporation where he is a senior manager and part of the IT Office Architecture of the company.

Chris met his current wife at work where they both continue to be employed.  Before Chris met Alison he had a culinary range of 6 items.  Cheese Pizza, Cheese Burger, Grilled Cheese, Mac and Cheese, Hot Dogs, Chicken fingers and everything would come with Fries.  He would occasionally consume a green item but only with much cajoling.   Needless to say, nothing spicier than Yellow Mustard was considered to be eligible for consumption.  Alison introduced Chris to Chili and he loved it – it is now one of his favorite foods. In fact, some of his top 3 favorite foods are items that his mother marvels at him eating.

Chris’s father always had an entrepreneurial spirit and started several endeavors that he and the rest of the family would be involved in.  Chris got the entrepreneurial gene from his Dad and started a company with his wife called www.InsaneChicken.com Inc. They decided to sell sauces and spices on-line where the consumer could get a variety of items from all different vendors.  With their technical and creative backgrounds putting the Website together was the easy part.  Picking to right sauces to sell was more daunting.  Chris contacted David Ashley as a well known Sauce guy with a good reputation to help get InsaneChicken.com started.  The rest as they say is history.  Chris and David have been friends and business partners ever since.  Chris and Alison have spin off or bought other websites that Chris’s father helps run.  To name a few of them: www.FireHotSauces.com which specializes in collector Hot Sauces and www.BBQSauceoftheMonth.com which is more geared toward rubs and BBQ sauces.  Chris, David and Charlie have joined forces to form www.TheInovativeCompany.com

Chris and Alison lived on the South Shore of Massachusetts with their two dogs and two turtles.

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Charlie Schandelmayer grew up in Fort Lauderdale Florida with a passion for the outdoors and outdoor sports. In High School Charlie was on the football, track, and swim team. Outside school he played sandlot football, rugby, motocross racing, water skiing, sailing, scuba diving, camping, and fishing. Today Charlie still enjoys riding his motocross bike and ATV’s with his family, scuba diving, camping, fishing and ocean fishing from his kayak.

Charlie met the girl of his dreams (Kerrie) in 1983, working as a sailing instructor for his late brother John’s sailboat and windsurfing store, called Sailor’s Warehouse. He Married her in 1989 and has 3 children Clifton, Sara, and Stephen. He says that without Kerrie and her families help and support, he never would have been able to keep Sauce Crafters up and running.

Because of Charlie’s Mother Ann, who to this day creates delicious meals, Charlie developed a passion for cooking as a boy. In the early seventies while cooking at the grill during numerous BBQ parties Charlie created a unique BBQ sauce that friends simply could not do without. He didn’t realize that 20 years later this would trigger a major career change from the construction industry to the food industry and result in the birth of Sauce Crafters Inc.

Over the years as the company grew Charlie has been on Radio talk shows and TV around the country talking about the many different sauces he makes for Sauce Crafters as well as other companies from all over the country. Many of Charlie’s products have won awards from numerous organizations such as the National Scovie Awards, and the Fiery Food Challenge. Charlie has become a true sauce meister and continues to develop more and more outstanding products using the finest ingredients he can find.

Charlie manufactures a broad line of tasty Sauce Crafters products ranging from mild and sweet to bold and extreme. Sauces like Colon Cleaner Hot Sauce, Mountain Man Fire Roasted Habanero Sauce, Mountain Man Roasted Corn Garlic and Chipotle Sauce, Swamp Honky Chipotle Barbecue Sauce, Orange Krush Hot Sauce, Widow No Survivors Hot Sauce, Sauce Crafters Saddle Blazin Barbecue Sauce, Hogs Ass Garlic Habanero Sauce, Rectal Rocket Fuel Hot Sauce, Satan’s Blood Chile Extract, Sphincter Shrinker Hot Sauce, Charlie’s Hard Times Honey Mustard Barbecue Sauce, and many more.

Charlie built Sauce Crafters with honesty and a dedication to operating a clean plant that puts out quality products. He added flexibility to the company by offering many different types of services, such as Co- Packing, Private Labeling, Warehousing, Fulfillment, and Sales. One of Charlie’s newest projects is small private label runs for things like Birthdays, Weddings, Corporate Events, Trade Shows, and for any business as a hot lead, or hand out to key customers. Charlie treats his customers like members of the team, and says individually we are all a group of small companies, but together under the Sauce Crafters roof we make a strong presentation. Charlie vows to maintain its solid reputation and integrity for the future, and welcomes other companies to come on board.

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David Ashley is a Grand Alchemist of the hot sauce industry. He also serves as President, Director of Marketing, and head of New Product Development for Ashley Food Company in Sudbury, Massachusetts. David has been creating all natural, mouth watering, and award-winning products since 1991.

Ashley Food Company produces 23 sauces, from sweet with heat to lethal, including “The world’s hottest hot sauce” – 357 EXTREME hot sauce; Mad Dog BBQ sauces, Mad Cat, Teriyaki Hot sauce; industrial extracts, and has recently added 357 EXTREME Wing sauce and 357 EXTREME Mustard to the line-up. These new additions emphasize exceptional, full-bodied flavor along with mind-blowing heat, each distinctive but ideal in many applications: the grill, entrees, marinades, dips, dressings, sides, and more.

David Ashley is the mastermind behind sauces for celebrities such as Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, whose Boneyard brew and Mango-Peach Tango sauces are featured in the Hard Rock Cafes. David has worked with The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and his line of Wok sauces, Led Zeppelin and Foreigner, and is not just the premier purveyor of Rock and roll hot sauces, but a hot sauce star himself. He has also created a special line of hot sauces for America’s armed forces serving overseas and is working on a line of kid-friendly condiments named for son Andrew. David also takes an enthusiastic role in creating the artwork, images and text for the sauces’ labeling and advertisements, and he single-handedly designed the website www.ashleyfood.com, www.ashleyfoods.com and www.ashleyfoodco.com.

How did all this start? Earlier on, as in Arlo Guthrie’s lyrics – ‘round 1976, just round the back, a half mile from the railroad track in a town called Stockbridge Massachusetts, where they got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car’, David walked right in as the General Manager of Alice’s Restaurant, famous namesake of Arlo Guthrie’s song. Managing a staff over 90, it was here that David learned the true value of fresh, high quality ingredients and the fine art of mega multi-tasking.

The first steps of his own venture were launched in his tiny Brighton, Ma. kitchen…”The perfect barbeque sauce tastes great, contains natural ingredients, doesn’t burn when you cook with it, and has a kick!” That’s what David was seeking when he started making Mad Dog Barbeque Sauce in 1985. Within five years, he was supplying so many salivating friends with Mad Dog that his wife took the next step and kicked him out of the kitchen and into commercial production. Ashley Food Company was started with credit cards, David’s stubborn determination and his very discerning taste buds. He not only loves to develop, cook with, and eat superior sauces, he wants to share that pleasure with everyone!

To this day David ensures that every blend has a fresh-from-the-kettle-taste. All Mad Dog creations are made in hand-measured batches and cooked to perfection, with a sauce to please everyone, a great range in heat level, variety, ethnic flair. Only the finest, all natural ingredients continue to be used: fresh squeezed lime juice and cilantro, fresh Habanero and Jalapeno peppers, premium unsulphured sweet molasses. Ashley Foods also uses two kinds of cloves, the very best Caribbean spices and the exotic Bird’s Eye African chili pepper, aslo know as the Peri Peri Pepper with its one of a kind fiery taste. Ashley Food Company touted the health benefits of hot peppers’ Capsaicin long before it was popularly known – benefits such as thermogenic, anti-oxidant, immunity and feel-good endorphin properties.

With David Ashley’s consistent, mad dogged commitment to quality, the descriptive “discerning” might be an understatement. Chefs, Critics, Periodicals, “Chili Heads”, America’s Armed Forces, Rock Stars and hot sauce aficionados around the world seem to agree wholeheartedly. Cook’s Illustrated crowned Mad Dog BBQ Sauce the “Original Best in USA”. Southern Living named Mad Dog the “Best Original BBQ Sauce”, adding that it was the “Best Bottled BBQ Sauce” they had ever tried. Mad Dog Inferno Hot Sauce was honored as the first hot sauce ever to have the official title of the “World ‘s Hottest Sauce”, packing a 89,000 scoville hit that will blow your socks off, since replaced by 357 Mad Dog Collector’s Silver Edition hot sauce as world’s hottest! Mad Cat Hot Sauce garnered 1st Place Habanero Hot Sauce at the Scovie Awards by Fiery Foods & Barbecue Magazine. The product line has won over 50 state and national awards, including many national titles.

David Ashley has appeared on cooking shows such as Food Finds. His sauces have appeared on TV in The Today Show, Friends, King of Queens, Regis & Kathie Lee Show, The Drew Carey Show, Everyone Loves Raymond and in feature films such as Legally Blonde 2. Many articles have featured these sauces, in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Southern Living, Cook’s Illustrated, Playboy Magazine, the Boston Globe and other major newspapers.

Ashley Food Company has been making all natural, superior quality sauces for 19 years – products that range from mild with a kick all the way to the hottest sauce you have ever tasted. The company also provides consulting and does private label work. Constantly perfecting new recipes and products, David Ashley’s next creations will no doubt remain innovative – one of a kind in flavor and personality, like the creator himself.

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