In two and a half weeks, pioneering Belizean entrepreneur Marie Sharp will travel to New York where she will be inducted into the Hot Sauce Hall of Fame. The distinction is reserved for those who, quote, "have been working within the fiery foods industry for a minimum of 3 years." Three years? Cho!...Try 35! That's how long Marie Sharp has been making hot sauce - first Melinda's, and now that her namesake line. In August of last year Courtney Weatherburne visited her plant in Hope Creek where she found that behind all those hot sauces is a very cool lady:..

Courtney Weatherburne Reporting...

Almost every Belizean at home and abroad is very familiar with this logo.

In fact products carrying this brand can be found on every kitchen counter and on most restaurant tables. And Marie Sharp is the woman behind all these product lines.

As well as this 400 acre Dangriga farm where her farmers plant a portion of their supply of Habanero peppers along with a variety of other fruits used in her sauces and jams. So how did she get into the business in the first place?

Well, it all began with a just few Habanero pepper plants.

Marie Sharp - Owner, Marie Sharp

"My husband inherited the farm; and because of the farm we started coming down here and planting; I started to plant all the fruits that I can lay my hand on that grow in Belize. And one of my sisters said to me why don't you plant some habanero peppers for Dr. Gordio; who was a medical officer in Belize City and he use to make a pepper sauce. He use to make a little pepper sauce, in a little bottle called "The Habanero". So I said no problem, I went ahead and planted pepper; but I didn't consult the good doctor. So I ended up in Belize with my first pickup full of peppers and he goes, "Aye, hace yo so poquito." Then I said oh my god; so what I am going to do with all this habanero pepper that I planted? So I had to take out my little home blender and start crushing pepper, adding salt; putting it into pails and barrels."

And with that excess, Sharp began to give out samples to her friends –who all approved and encouraged her to sell her sauces. So she did, and she operated from her home for 3 years until her husband built a factory on this farm in 1985. Since then the company has experienced dramatic growth.

Marie Sharp - Owner, Marie Sharp

"We have Japan, Shanghai, Korea, Germany, India, Kuwait, Lebanon. We have; we're practically all over you know because we're talking right now to somebody for Dubai and South Africa."

Jorge Manzanero - Quality Control Manager, Marie Sharp

"One of the biggest customers is Japanese and we had to cater to them because they had a very high standard that we have to meet."

And those standards are met in this new factory. Here is where all the pepper sauces, jams and jellies are produced.

This is the storage area where the raw materials are kept. These 24 tanks can hold over 200,000 pounds of habanero peppers and other ingredients. After the sauces have been cooked to perfection they are stored in these tanks.

From there they are ready to be bottled, labeled and boxed for local distribution or export. It seems like quite a small space and a straightforward process for the operations of $8 million dollar company

But it's in that same humble space, that the commitment to consistency, precision, and ingenuity have made a local label a brand with international renown.

Those are the driving forces behind Sharps' new pepper sauce: The Smoked Habanero. It was launched in February and officially debuted at the Agriculture and Trade Show in May.

But for this new sauce, she got a little inspiration from the Alaskans.

Marie Sharp - Owner, Marie Sharp

"The idea came about because my husband and I love to watch programmes from Canada. The people who live in the bush in Canada; and we like to sit down and watch those programmes. And we see how they smoke fish, they smoke meat, they smoke everything; so we just sat there and my husband said, "How if we smoke some habanero peppers?" I didn't pay him any mind you know. He went ahead and he made our guys, in house, build a smokehouse; and they built a nice smoker and we started to smoke the habanero peppers. After he had the peppers smoked now he comes and say now you have to make the sauce."

"What we did first, I made up one. I made up one sample in the lab; and then we put it out there and we put a questionnaire. And we asked everybody that came to give us some ideas of what they thought of it. We did this during the tourist season; because during the tourist season we have buses and cars. The amount of people that come here you wouldn't believe it. So they come and they taste, outside they taste all the products and so on. One fight everybody has is they want to buy the one bottle. I said I only made one bottle."

And her new line of pepper sauce quickly gained popularity from that one bottle. The Smoked Habanero Pepper Sauce – which is the first of its kind is now 1 out of about 11 hot

Stacked meticulously across this shelf are the over 30 different product lines of Marie Sharp –from the pepper sauces to the juices – each line representing the success of her company and Belizean pride….

Marie Sharp - Owner, Marie Sharp

"I feel very proud. I'm very proud; I'm proud of my Belizean people because without them. At the beginning I had a hard time with them because Belizeans don't like nothing that is made in Belize; but once I won them over, I have no more problem with them. I can almost say I have 95% percent of the Belize population eating something from Marie Sharp."

The Hot Sauce Hall of Fame Class of 2016 includes Blair Lazar who makes the Guinness World Record certified hottest pepper sauce on earth called the Death Sauce; David Tran, who started the popular Chinese Sriracha Sauce in 1980 and Jacob Frank, the Founder of Franks Red Hot, which was used as the secret ingredient for the first ever Buffalo Wings, and of course our very own Marie Sharp who is described as the maker of quote, "the quintessential Central American hot sauce awesome flavor and great heat!", end quote.