Somewhere out there are 200 bottles of hot sauce with a real hundred-dollar bill wrapped around each one. Peel the bill off with a dab of rubbing alcohol and it's yours to spend.
The bottles are a collaboration between ONIMA and Runway, and the sauce inside is IL MIG+. Why did a finance company went looking for the best hot sauce it could find?
What "burn rate" means, and why it became a bottle
Burn rate is the term for how fast a company spends its cash. Every startup watches it. Runway builds the software finance teams use to track it, forecast it, and try not to run out of it.
So when Runway wanted to send clients something they'd remember, they did the literal thing. They took the most-watched number in their whole product and turned it into an object you could hold. Money, wrapped around a bottle, with a slow heat inside. Money to burn. A burn even finance loves. The pun does a lot of work, and it only lands if the sauce is worth wrapping.
IL MIG+
Runway didn't grab a sauce off a shelf; they ran a taste-off, more than 50 hot sauces deep. The Runway team, first heard about IL MIG+ on season 24 of Hot Ones, then did the responsible thing and brought the finalists home to the family Thanksgiving table. The vote came back unanimous. IL MIG+ won.
We'll take a family Thanksgiving over a focus group any day.
What's in the bottle
IL MIG+ starts where most hot sauce stops. We toast rice koji in olive oil the way you'd start a paella, then build on lacto-fermented red habanero, smoked paprika, and aged sherry vinegar. What you taste is the caramelized bottom of a paella pan, savory and deep, with the habanero arriving late and clearing out in time for the next bite.
Fermentation is the tool that sells the whole package. Koji and a long lacto ferment turn raw chile bite into something rounder and more savory, the kind of depth you can't shortcut. That's the part Runway's tasters kept coming back to, and it's why the sauce can carry a stunt built entirely around money without needing the money to be the interesting part.
The ideas that didn't make the cut
We didn't start with a $100 bill. We started with about six months of ideas, some of which we're probably better of for not pursuing.
The original plan was a fully custom sauce made just for the drop. We really wanted to push marketing boundaries with this project, and because of our ambition... it got legally interesting.
We floated working the ashes of burned legal tender into the recipe. In the end, that's not only destruction of currency but kind of gross. Another idea was to print mock bills on flash paper that lit up on contact, really leaning into the concept of burning cash. Both of those come with the kind of federal attention that ends a project fast, so we did neither. No currency was harmed in the making of Burn Rate.
What we landed on was cleaner and better. Take IL MIG+, the sauce that already won, and wrap a genuine $100 bill around the glass with an adhesive that lifts off with a little isopropyl alcohol. Sell it for $13.99. A bottle worth a hundred bucks and change, priced like a bottle of hot sauce. That's burn rate you can hold.
The run
There were 200 bottles. When Runway's founder, Siqi Chen, announced the drop, he kept it simple:
Siqi Chen @bladerso we raised a new round, but haven't told anyone yet
our investors are like, hey put our money to use how come burn isn't going up
i gotchu fam
introducing burn rate by runway
an award winning, blind taste-tested (by me!) hot sauce, wrapped in a genuine $100 bill
for $13.99
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That post kicked off millions of views. The bottles went up, went out, and were gone. Runway put real budget behind it, north of $40,000 by the time it was done, which is an absurd amount to spend on hot sauce and exactly the sort of thing that gets people to look.
The $100 edition was sold by pre-order on an invitation only basis and sold out immediately.
Then the design took first place in the In-House Creative Team category at the Dieline Awards, the main stage for packaging design, and the Dieline ran a full feature on it. Not bad for a bottle wearing a hundred-dollar bill.
Free money??
You missed the Benjamin & that's fine. The reason Burn Rate worked at all is because of what's in the bottle, and that's IL MIG+. (no rubbing alcohol required)
Drizzle it on eggs right before they come off the heat, stir a spoonful into a braise and let it simmer, put it on something boring and see what happens. It beat 50 other bottles and a finance company bet its marketing budget on it. Your eggs are an easier call.