Trader Joe's New Hot Sauce Has A Surprising Secret Ingredient

Truffle hot sauce? Who would've thought? Trader Joe's, which seems to always be coming out with unique and exciting products, has apparently introduced a black truffle hot sauce. The ever-intrepid folks at @traderjoeslist on Instagram found out about the sauce a few days ago.

As sauce lovers may know, Trader Joe's wasn't the first to think of truffle hot sauce after all. A couple of guys from California brewed a truffle hot sauce in one of their parents' garages and made sauce history with Truff, which came out at the end of 2017. By 2018, Truff was on Oprah's Favorite Things list. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, Truff was one of the food products people stocked up on during quarantine. Sales have grown by 400 percent since March (via Forbes).

No one else had come up with a truffle hot sauce — at least one that was mass-marketed as well as Truff. As the Truff website puts it, "The flavors that we wanted hadn't been mixed. So we mixed them."

Trader Joe's must have decided they wanted a piece of the truffle hot sauce market pioneered by the guys at Truff. Trader Joe's got our palates ready earlier this year with Tomato Ketchup with Black Summer Truffle, introduced in June.

People love Truff hot sauce, so the Trader Joe's version could be a hit

Trader Joe's hasn't announced anything about the new truffle hot sauce, but it's clearly out there. And people who can't find it yet at their local store are dying to know how it tastes. In particular, they want to know how it stacks up against the spicy Truff. The main reason for all the curiosity is that Trader Joe's hot truffle sauce costs $7.99, according to @traderjoeslist, while Truff's black truffle sauce sells on the company's website for $17.98.

A cheaper version of something like Truff could be a hit, considering that a lot of people have fallen completely in love with Truff. A BuzzFeed writer gushed so much about Truff's black truffle hot sauce she had to clarify that she wasn't paid by the company to write her review. BuzzFeed said the sauce so versatile it can go on just about anything.

Ingredients in the Trader Joe's sauce can be found on the second photo in the @traderjoeslist post. The list includes chili peppers, olive oil, cane sugar, honey, coriander, vinegar, black truffles, garlic, and cumin. The Truff sauce has pretty much the same stuff (via Fartley Farms). This should make for some interesting side-by-side taste tests. If the Trader Joe's version of black truffle hot sauce is half as good as Truff, well, it would be worth the price.