From creamy dressings to fiery hot sauces, the world's most iconic condiments are regular fixtures on our tables – but they also turned their inventors and investors into multimillionaires. Behind each bottle is the story of a daring innovator who set out to transform the way we eat, never imagining the extraordinary fortunes their flavours would bring.
Click or scroll through our gallery to feast your eyes on the world's most lucrative sauces, counting down to the brand worth the most money today.
All dollar amounts are USD, unless otherwise stated.
Reggae Reggae Sauce burst onto the scene in 2007 when musician-turned-entrepreneur Levi Roots pitched his Jamaican jerk barbecue sauce on British TV show Dragons’ Den. Armed with a catchy theme song and irresistible charisma, Roots asked for £50,000 (the equivalent of £85,000/$112,000 today) in return for a 20% stake. While some of the judging panel dismissed the idea, investors Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh saw potential, offering the full amount in exchange for 40%. Supermarket Sainsbury’s backed the product immediately, stocking it in 600 stores. Sales rocketed from a projected 50,000 bottles a year to 50,000 a week.
Levi Roots’ initial gamble paid off handsomely. The brand grew into a household name, branching into snacks, drinks, cookbooks and even a BBC cooking show. Richard Farleigh sold his stake within a year for 10 times his investment, while Peter Jones has called it his best deal on the show. Today, Roots is worth around £30 million ($38m), with Reggae Reggae Sauce stocked in major retailers and chains including Subway and KFC – cementing his status as one of the biggest success stories to come from Dragons’ Den.
Back when Britain was undergoing massive change and industrialisation, Jeremiah James Colman was transforming his great uncle's humble Norwich milling business into a mustard empire. To create a unique tangy flavour, the Colman recipe blended brown mustard seeds with white ones. When J.J. Colman took over the business in 1851, it employed 200 people. He aggressively expanded the operation, moving to bigger premises, buying up much of Britain’s supply of mustard and even importing seeds from Holland.
By 1869, Colman’s Mustard was granted a royal warrant by Queen Victoria and employed 1,100 people. According to new online records, when he died in 1898, he left an estate valued at £687,024, the equivalent of about £39 million ($51m) today. He was famously credited as saying that he made his money “from the mustard that people throw away on the sides of their plate", but he did not hoard his fortune. Colman used his position and influence to benefit the people of Norwich, as both a Liberal Member of Parliament and an active philanthropist.
Sriracha, known for its green-capped rooster bottle, has become a global staple in kitchens and restaurants. Created in the 1980s by Vietnamese immigrant David Tran, this fiery chilli sauce is based on a homegrown recipe inspired by traditional Thai and Vietnamese flavors. Tran launched his company, Huy Fong Foods (named after the cargo ship he boarded to flee communist Vietnam) in California, slowly building a cult following for the sauce’s bold, garlicky heat.
David Tran arrived in the US after fleeing Vietnam in 1979 and started making his chilli sauce in a small California kitchen. With 100% ownership of the company, he grew Huy Fong Foods into a thriving business that reportedly earns more than $150 million (£113m) annually, and boosted his net worth to a reported $1.2 billion (£875m). Despite never trademarking 'sriracha', Tran’s distinctive bottle design and word-of-mouth popularity have protected the brand, turning a family recipe into one of the world's most beloved hot sauces.
In 1837, chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins turned a neglected, fermented blend into the first commercial Worcestershire sauce. Legend says a nobleman, fond of a fish sauce he’d tried in Asia, asked them to recreate it. Their first batch was awful, so they stored it in a cellar. After 18 months, it had matured into the bold, balanced flavour we know today. By the 1840s, the sauce was exported across the British Empire, earning global popularity and, in 1904, a Royal Warrant.
Both founders came into local prominence, though John Lea (main picture) is perhaps better known retrospectively. He served twice as Mayor of Worcester (1835 and 1849-50) and channelled his wealth into civic philanthropy, including local schools. Today, the original Worcester factory produces around 43 million bottles annually. As part of Heinz since 2005, the brand contributes to a $300 million (£219m) annual sauces portfolio.
Ranch is the bestselling salad dressing in the US, generating around $1 billion (£770m) a year in retail sales but not many people know it was invented by a plumber. It all began in the 1950s when Steve Henson whipped up a creamy herb blend while working in remote Alaskan camps to feed his fellow tradesmen. After relocating to California, he and his wife opened Hidden Valley Ranch, a modest property near Santa Barbara, where guests fell in love with his homemade dressing. Demand snowballed, and the couple began mixing seasoning packets and mailing them out – sparking a ranch revolution that would soon sweep the nation.
According to a report on CBS News, the orders came flooding in and Henson scaled up production from his ranch kitchen to a factory. By the early 1970s, Hidden Valley Ranch had become a national name, and in 1972, US bleach company Clorox acquired the brand for $8 million – over $61 million (£45m) today. Though Henson kept a low profile, the deal made him a wealthy man well before ranch dressing had even hit peak popularity. His original dry mix became a billion-dollar brand under Clorox’s wing, but it was Henson’s early blend of buttermilk, garlic and herbs that paved the way for huge profits.
Her face is known to millions of people around the world, but in her home nation of China, she is called ‘old godmother’. Tao Huabi was born in 1947 in a remote village in Guizhou Province and never learned to read or write. Widowed in the 1970s, she supported her sons by making and selling rice tofu. In 1989, she opened a small noodle shop in Guiyang, where her fiery homemade chilli sauce quickly became the real star. When customers started asking for the sauce alone – and refused noodles without it – Huabi knew she had something special.
By 1996, she launched a sauce factory with 40 workers, and a year later, officially founded the Laoganma Foodstuff Company. With more than 20 varieties, Laoganma is China’s leading chilli sauce brand and now produces around 1.3 million bottles a day. In 2015, Tao made Forbes’ rich list with a reported net worth of $1.05 billion (£766m), though she had quietly stepped down as CEO the year before. In 2021, the company was worth a reported $1.7bn (£1.24bn), and the retired 'godmother' and face of its hero sauce is said to be enjoying retirement, driving her on-brand red Rolls-Royce.
Now owned by Unilever, Hellmann’s Mayonnaise is one of the world’s bestselling condiments, with the brand reportedly worth $3.46 billion (£2.6bn). Its creator, Richard C. Hellmann, was a German immigrant who opened a delicatessen in Manhattan in 1905. He began selling his homemade mayonnaise in jars, labelled with his trademark blue ribbon. By 1913, demand led him to open a factory and by 1922, Hellmann’s was distributed across the US and Canada – transforming a deli recipe into a household staple.
In 1927, Hellmann sold his booming business to Best Foods. According to some reports, Hellmann's sales were bringing in $15 million and $1 million in profits – that's about $277m (£202m) and $18.5m (£13.4m) when adjusted for inflation. He remained on the board but stepped back from daily operations, using his newfound wealth to buy land and enjoy a life of leisure. He spent $60,000, roughly $1.1m (£800k) in today’s money, expanding his estate in Queens, built a Catskills summer lodge, and founded charitable organisations in the US and Germany. By the time of his death in 1971, he was a respected figure in civic life.
Not many people know who the McIlhenny family are or what they do, but chances are you have tasted their sauce. More than 700,000 bottles of Tabasco are produced daily, with the hot sauce now sold in over 195 countries and generating an estimated $200 million (£146m) in annual revenue. The company founder, Edmund McIlhenny, invented the sauce in 1868 by fermenting mashed capsicum peppers with salt and vinegar on Avery Island, Louisiana. Bottled in repurposed cologne bottles and pitched as a cure for bland food, the sauce quickly caught on and became a national – and eventually global – sensation.
After the Civil War left him financially ruined, McIlhenny’s pepper sauce turned his fortunes around. By the 1880s, Tabasco was gaining fans internationally in Europe; it was even stocked by luxury grocers like Fortnum & Mason in London. McIlhenny died in 1890 before the sauce’s peak, but his family turned the company into a private empire. Descendants still run the business today, with family wealth estimated in the hundreds of millions. In 2023, Forbes listed the McIlhenny family among America’s richest food dynasties, and the company is said to be worth $2-3 billion (£1.5-£2.23bn) today.
Frank’s RedHot is one of the top-selling hot sauce brands in the US, with McCormick reporting $1 billion (£730m) in global hot sauce sales in 2023. The original recipe dates back to 1918, when Jacob Frank, a Cincinnati spice and tea trader, teamed up with Adam Estilette, a pepper farmer in Louisiana. They developed a sauce from aged cayenne peppers with vinegar and garlic to create what they hoped would become a rival for Tabasco. The first bottle left Estilette’s pickling plant in 1920 and was a staple in delis and diners but, according to the manufacturer’s website, it was 44 years later that the bright red sauce found its perfect vehicle – the Buffalo wing.
The legend goes that this iconic American fried chicken dish was invented in 1964 in the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, using Frank’s RedHot, and proved so popular that demand for the sauce grew into a huge money spinner. Frank died a wealthy man in 1954, though he never lived to see the global phenomenon his creation would become. In 1977, it was sold to Durkee Famous Foods, and the factory was turning out 74,000 bottles a day. The brand changed hands several times before McCormick acquired it in 2017 for $4.2 billion (£3bn) as part of a larger deal that included French’s mustard.
Possibly the world’s most famous condiment, Heinz Tomato Ketchup sells around 650 million bottles a year – and that doesn’t include single-serve sachets. One of the most iconic food brands of all time, Heinz began in 1869 when Henry J. Heinz and L. Clarence Noble launched a horseradish sauce. But it was the 1876 debut of its smooth, tangy ketchup that secured the brand’s place in culinary history. By 1886, Britain had its first taste. The range soon expanded to soups, sauces and baby food, yet ketchup remained its enduring signature.
At the time of his death in 1919, Henry John Heinz was worth the equivalent of $1.45 billion (£1bn), with a Pittsburgh factory producing millions of bottles of ketchup a year. A master promoter, he used stunts like giving away one million free pickles to grow the brand. Postwar, Heinz became a global powerhouse with sales topping $5 billion (£3.5bn) by the end of the 1990s – that's $9.7bn in today's money. In 2013, it was sold to Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital for $28 billion, then the largest food industry deal and worth around $38.6 billion (£28.8bn) when adjusted for inflation. Two years later, Heinz merged with Kraft to form one of the world’s biggest food companies.