I Love Chamoy: 3 Things You Didn't Know About The Shark Tank Product

The sharks on "Shark Tank" are out for investment blood in Season 15 — and one of the products they're considering could provide a sweet payoff for an investor. Chamoy is a beloved Mexican sauce with a sweet, tangy, and spicy flavor that can be used to season fruit, vegetables, drinks, treats, and just about anything edible that requires a little pizzazz. Chamoy is often described as a candy sauce, and while it's a traditional Mexican snack and a crucial part of the culture, the hefty amounts of sugar required to make the sauce don't exactly complement certain dietary restrictions and lifestyles.

I Love Chamoy is a sugar-free alternative to the standard sauce that currently comes in three flavors: original, chili mango, and pickle. The product contains zero calories, zero grams of sugar, no artificial colors, and 50% less sodium than the other options available on the market. Created with no carbohydrates, I Love Chamoy is perfect for people with low-sugar diets — which is exactly who the sauce is designed for.

"Shark Tank" might be the reinforcement of the American Dream, but thanks to I Love Chamoy, it's about to experience some serious Mexican flavor. 

I Love Chamoy creator Annie Leal was born and raised in Mexico. She says the idea for her product was inspired by her father, who has a sweet tooth — and diabetes. She told Good Morning America that he tried every kind of sugar-free American candy, but when it came to finding sugar-free Mexican candy, there were no options available. Leal decided to try to make a version of chamoy that her father could enjoy.

She told Thrillist that the day after she had the idea, "I had my dad drive me to Target to pick up notebooks and markers, like it was the first day of school. I had no idea where to start, but I just began drafting up names and a logo."

I Love Chamoy started as a way for Leal to help her father, but as the company grew, the rest of Leal's family also became involved. Her mom serves as the company's VP of operations, her sister handles the finances, and her father has become the face of the company and is featured in much of the company's social media marketing.

If at first you don't succeed, try 43 more times. Annie Leal, I Love Chamoy's founder, never had any intention of entering into the consumer goods market. Her background is in social media and marketing, but when she came up with the idea for a sugar free alternative to the traditional chamoy sauces available on the market, she decided to reach out to a food engineer for help developing the sauce's recipe. Leal told Thrillist, "I truly cannot cook to save my life, which is the funny part."

Leal might not have the cooking background, but she forged ahead and after 44 attempts, hit upon a formula that successfully mimics the taste of standard chamoy. Leal's proprietary recipe incorporates cayenne pepper and ancho chiles — both native to Mexico — for spice and swaps out sugar in favor of monkfruit, which provides a similar, natural flavor.

In the beginning, Leal's expectations for her product were modest: she ordered 750 bottles and planned to sell them over a six-month period. But a viral video on TikTok accelerated her timeline, and the 750 bottles sold out in one week.

Annie Leal began selling I Love Chamoy through her TikTok shop at the end of 2021 and by the summer of 2022, she and her company were already attracting investments and media attention. In August, the company was selected by HEB as the best Texas made company and received a $25,000 cash prize. That fall, Leal was interviewed by Thrillist and filmed a video for Good Morning America. I Love Chamoy has also been covered by outlets like Telemundo, La Opinión, Now This, Remezcla, and Mitú.  "It turns out a lot of people have stories similar to my dad's, so we've been kind of running 100 miles per hour," Leal told Thrillist.

Leal also attributes the brand's success to its social media followers. It was thanks to customer feedback that she decided to eliminate artificial Red 40 color from the product's ingredients list (it was later replaced with hibiscus powder). The brand's Instagram and TikTok accounts also feature the creative ways people employ I Love Chamoy, helping to inspire consumers to incorporate it into their meals and snacks, and spreading the word about this delicious Mexican sauce.

"It's really important to keep the flavor authentic and celebrate our culture and just do it in a way that more people can enjoy," Leal told Good Morning America.

One-woman sauce-slinger Annie Leal enters the "Shark Tank" with a full mariachi band playing an appropriately chilling rendition of the ABC series' theme song. She offers the five celebrity investors 5% of I Love Chamoy for the low, low price of $300,000. In addition to the condiment, Leal shares that she's already soft-launched a new product, which appears to be a chamoy gummy candy. The sharks are unanimously impressed by the taste of I Love Chamoy, as well as its year-to-date sales of $1.3 million. 

Unfortunately, figures alone can't justify this investment for most. Guest-investor Jason Blum (founder of the production company Blumhouse) can't mentally bridge the gap between movie-making and sauce-selling, so he goes out. Meanwhile, Lori Greiner also declines to invest for similar reasons. Mark Cuban says chamoy isn't his cup of tea, and thus, he wouldn't be able to advocate on behalf of the brand. And though Barbara Corcoran loves almost everything about the company, Leal's retail aspirations run counter to the online direct-to-consumer strategy that Corcoran sees the most potential in.

All chamoy leads to Mr. Wonderful, with Kevin O'Leary offering $300,000 in exchange for a whopping 15%. Though he's already gone out, Cuban still believes in I Love Chamoy enough to encourage Leal not to cave to O'Leary's "brutal" proposal, even if it means exiting the tank empty-handed. While Leal and O'Leary negotiate between her 8% counter and his take-it-or-leave-it offer of 12.5%, Cuban insists that at her size, those few percentage points really matter. Leal refuses O'Leary's "blood-sucking" offer and leaves the tank. Instead of the mariachi, her exit is underscored by emphatic applause from the four other investors.