Today marks the first day to enter products in the 2011 Scovie Awards! The annual Scovie Awards recognize top fiery foods products from around the globe. It is one of the world’s most competitive gourmet food competitions, and you can take a look at the 2010 winners here. There are several interesting changes for 2011.

First of all there are new categories and subcategories. The new categories are Extreme Sauce and Wing Sauce. The extreme sauce category will be for sauces that are amongst the hottest on the market. There will be two subcategories for sauces with and without extract. This marks the first time EVER that the Scovie Awards will accept ultra hot sauce entries. The wing sauce category will be exclusively for wing sauces, and with the current popularity of wings it should be the category with the most entries. Can you imagine the bragging rights that the traditional wing sauce winner will have? The new subcategory embraces the hottest (no pun intended) trend in the fiery foods industry; Bhut Jolokia (ghost pepper). There will be a jolokia subcategory of processed salsa for 2011.

The second interesting change is for the companies that will be entering the Scovies. This year there will be a discount for multiple entries. If a manufacturer enters three products or categories you will get the fourth entries free, and if you enter five products or categories you will get two more entries free.

Finally the biggest news for this year is how the winners will be announced. In the past the winners were notified directly. For 2011 the winners will be announced live on scovieawards.com!

Good luck to all the entrants!