How the register counts.

The scope

EU27, the UK, and EFTA. That is 32 countries: the 27 EU member states, the United Kingdom, and the four EFTA states, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

An earlier version of this line read “EU27 + UK + Norway + Switzerland.” That is EFTA missing two of its four members, and the first question it invites is why Iceland is not in it. Naming the boundary EFTA answers that question before anyone has to ask it.

The four tiers

Every business we find is classified into one of four tiers before it can appear anywhere on the register.

CORE

Makes at least one hot sauce of its own, and chilli is what the range is built on. This is the only tier the claim counts, provided the row is also still trading and in scope.

ADJACENT

A real chilli business whose range is not built on chilli: a fermentary with one hot sauce among its krauts and kombuchas, a chilli farm, a condiment house with a chilli line. Published and labelled as adjacent, but deliberately left out of the count.

ADJACENT-PENDING

Found, but not yet classified either way. Not published, and not counted. This is not a soft rejection: it means nobody has looked closely enough yet to say CORE or ADJACENT with confidence, and publishing “we think maybe” is exactly the kind of claim a funder’s diligence is built to pull on.

OUT

Not a hot sauce producer. Every OUT row carries a reason: restaurant, retailer, industrial, no own sauce, and a shorter tail of other reasons. OUT rows are never published and never render on any page.

Ceased and dormant

A closed business is not a producer. A row marked ceased is dropped from the register and from the count, whatever tier it was.

A dormant row is different: still a real business, just not trading right now. It stays listed and stays counted, with a “not currently trading” note next to it. Hiding a pause would be the dishonest half of that choice.

Where the rows come from

Rows are harvested, not submitted. The sources are award entrant and winner lists, festival and trade fair exhibitor lists, retailer “shop by brand” indexes, media roundups, and trade directories. That is not a claim of completeness. The register is a claim about what we could find and verify well enough to classify, not about every hot sauce producer in Europe.

Two axes, not one

Membership class and the count are different questions, and confusing them is the one mistake that would misstate the claim.

Membership class comes entirely from the Council’s join rules: producers vote and carry the Craft Mark, associates pay dues for access. It answers what kind of member a business is. The count answers a different question: is this business one of the 544 hot sauce producers. It only asks whether a row is CORE tier, still trading, in scope, and actually makes sauce. Membership class never enters it.

A chilli grower can be a full voting member of the Council, with the vote and the Mark, and still not be one of the 544: they grow chillies and make no sauce. A shop that bottles one house sauce can join as an associate, dues- paying and without a vote, and still be counted, because they make a hot sauce. Neither case is a contradiction. They are two independent questions with two independent answers.

The member number

An EHC member number is assigned once, per country, and never reissued, even after a membership lapses. The number is an identity, not a current status. What tells you whether a membership is current is the status printed beside the number, not the number itself.