Now, onto the interview!

Chris Mirjahangir: Tell me about Jade City Foods and how you got involved with Toho. 

Cliff Wiener: I wanted to start a company to sell coffee. My best friend owns a company called Foxtail coffee company in Orlando Florida and I thought I could get coffee from them and start my own online thing.  Another of my best friends is in the merch business. One day out of the blue someone he knew calls and says “Hey, I am at a Kevin Smith Mooby’s pop up here in Orlando and we sold out of merch, can you get shirts here by tomorrow?”  He says “Yes.” and that started us on the journey. He goes down to the Mooby’s pop up the next day and sees them selling chicken sandwiches called the c**k smoker and asks them “Hey, do you sell the sauce for the C**ksmoker sandwich?” ” Do you want to?” That’s how we ended up working with Kevin Smith which was our first licensing partner. The company that represents Kevin, also represents Toho. So it was only natural that as life long Godzilla fans, we would want to work with Toho.  After a quick introductory meeting, we made a fast deal and got to work on creating hot sauce and coffee for them.

Mirjahangir: How is each flavor created? For example, are they made with each monster in mind like Biollante with the crushed roses in the sauce?

[editor’s note: the Biollante hot sauce, “Mutated Rose”, was released under a 24 hour limited window on Valentine’s Day 2022]

Wiener: Each sauce is a little different how they are created. Sometimes, using Biollante as an example, it’s obvious what the sauce needs to be from a creative stand point. If you’re going to do Biollante, it has to have roses in it. For SpaceGodzilla we knew we wanted a Blue Sauce.

We always think how can you be true to the character? In other cases, we know the monster we want use but the sauce isn’t always obvious. Angiurus is an example where we knew the name of the sauce before what sauce it would be. When you have a name like Killer of the Living, you know it has to be hot. We did have a philosophical discussion with Toho about Anguirus and how that name doesn’t really equate with the side kick buddy character he has evolved to. Ultimately, we all realized it was a great hot sauce name and is part of the character’s history so we just had to use it.

We discuss various things with our team about flavor and direction and we come up with flavors that we have to experiment with to see how they taste. I know many fans are collecting the sauce and not always using it for its intended purpose, but we pride ourselves on the sauces tasting great. We’re not just a company that makes some junk and throws a picture on it.

Mirjahangir: For each sauce, what is the process like from idea to final product? 

Wiener: Every idea starts different but generally, I will come up with a character and sauce name. Then I go to Chris and Aaron at Toho to discuss the character and the sauce name to get feedback. Particularly on the name of the sauce.  On the hot chocolate for example, Toho felt our original name of the Jet Jaguar Hot Cocoa was too much of a deep dive only the most hardcore fans would get (Red Alone Peppermint), so we went in another direction. After discussing the names, if we don’t know the sauce already, (sometimes we do), we start with our chefs on ideas and what we think would be good or right for a character in terms of flavor or color or whatever we think the sauce needs. If you make the sauce too hot the flavor of anything you eat is over powered by the heat. You make it just right and it enhances your eating experience. Once we settle on the sauce, we start creating labels for Toho to approve and get ready to start making sauce.

Mirjahangir: There are other non hot sauce items such as coffee and hot cocoa, are they created with each monster in mind as well?

Wiener: We always have some idea where we want to go or who we want to use. Not everything needs to have Godzilla on it. I think Godzilla fandom is a bit like wrestling fandom. Just because Hogan is the champ doesn’t mean that everyone has to think he’s the best. It’s the same with Godzilla, every monster has their own personality and sometimes it’s obvious to me, this is what they should be used for. The hot chocolate can art originally was going to be tight close ups of the faces and since the can was silver I wanted to use all of the silver faced characters.  However, in the design phase we realized the cans didn’t look good. It looked sort of weird. So, we ended up using the full-figured images you see on the packaging now. One of our goals is to have every single Kaiju on a product. Every time we do a drop now, we always seem to have left out someone’s favorite. Don’t worry we will get to them. Even the Dorats….

Mirjahangir: What other food item areas would you like to expand the line into?

Wiener: We have the capability of making all sorts of things. Dry Rubs are going to be the next item on our agenda.  There are a few big character surprises in that line. In terms of the process, I had a very long discussion with Chris from Toho about why I wanted to use certain characters.  I ended up using the example of Godman fighting Gabara as why this particular character I wanted to use is Godzilla canon and why it was cool to use him as part of a Godzilla product line. Since we know Gabara was in All Monsters Attack….(some of you may know whom I am referring to, but I don’t want to spoil it.)  We can also make pasta sauce, beef jerky, rice crispy treats, and a host of other things. Dry Rub is sometime in late march/ early April and I think we will have a tea line out soon after. We are also going to expand the coffee line to include some flavored coffees and a decaf.

We will also have some cool Gigan related special chase products this year to celebrate his 50th anniversary.  We’re always looking into new products we can make without preservatives and we just want to really make stuff that everyone will be shocked exists. Based on the reactions in Japan to Mogurea being on a food product I think we can surprise some fans.

Mirjahangir: Is there any interest in merchandise in the way of mugs, tea cups or other items?

Wiener: We’re going to make mugs. However, we won’t just make any old mug! We’re going to do some crazy stuff that hasn’t been done yet. We’re going to do something cool for Gigan to start things off. We’re going to do a really fun laser etched wooden box for it as well. I think it will be ready sometime over the summer but we’re not sure yet. It’s still in the very early concept stages. There may be some gift sets with tee shirts also but it’s all a work in progress.

Mirjahangir: With Biollante and SpaceGodzilla sauces being such limited releases, is there a possibility that they could return in the future for fans who have missed them the first time around?

Wiener: We may bring back these flavors but we want to protect the fans who did get something that was meant to be limited. The packaging will change or some other aspect will. The good news is that we do have a handful of SpaceGodzilla sauces that we held back in case bottles got lost or damaged. Since it’s been a couple of months you can expect those last few bottles to be available soon.  We’re always going to do limited drops and keep people on their toes. The way we do the limited editions will change from release to release. Sometimes the release will be 100 bottles, sometimes it’s going to be timed, other times it’s going to be part of a set or a reward.

Mirjahangir:  Are there characters like King Kong (Toho’s version) Frankenstein, or the Gargantuas possibilities as well? 

Wiener: The rights to these characters are tricky. I don’t foresee being able to use any of them in the near future. I tried to get Mechani-Kong for the hot chocolate line. As you can see, we weren’t able to use him.  We’d really like to make stuff based on all these characters but as of now we don’t have any plans to use them. I don’t know if it will be possible in the future but we can always hope!