How Did a Very, Very Local Flavor Cross the Ocean and Become a Craze? | Market Inventors

Sriracha, made by Vietnam-born David Tran, opened up a different appetite for heat among Americans.

"One of the greatest sauces known to man."

"Addictive, amazing — a must-have in every kitchen!"

"If you don't like it, then I guess the rest of your life is going to be pretty bland. Buy it, put it on everything, and never go back to a bland life."

Search "Sriracha" on Amazon in the United States and reviews like these are easy to find — and more keep arriving.

Sriracha is an unremarkable-looking bottle of chili sauce: green cap, clear plastic bottle, red sauce, a rooster standing on the label, and the product's name in three languages — Chinese, Vietnamese, and English: Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce. Below that is the maker, Huy Fong Foods.

Most people who have tried it say the sauce — sweet, heavy on garlic — isn't really all that hot, and some describe it as a spicy ketchup.

It conquered America fast, not just as a food but as a fad. An American named Griffin Hammond ended up making a documentary about it. He told QDaily: "You can find Sriracha at the supermarket. If you go to an Asian restaurant, it's always on the table. You can see it on TV. Right now I'm even wearing Sriracha socks."

The craze began around 2013. NASA astronauts took it into space, and people watched it float around the space station on TV; it turned up on the counter at Momofuku Noodle Bar, the restaurant run by the New York chef David Chang; it became one of the sauces served at Subway.

All kinds of Sriracha merchandise appeared: high heels, phone cases, T-shirts, mugs. On YouTube you can watch food bloggers cook every sort of dish and run every sort of experiment with it; someone wrote a rap song about it; Lexus built a Sriracha-themed car as a marketing stunt; McDonald's put out a Big Mac made with it.

In sharp contrast, Huy Fong founder David Tran doesn't much care that his product has gone mainstream. He told QDaily that Huy Fong's Sriracha sales grow every year, "but that's not the point, for me."

Since the day he made his first bottle, Tran has cared about only one thing: production. "How to cut costs, how to improve quality."

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Born in 1945, Tran is a descendant of Teochew Chinese from Guangdong who moved to Vietnam in the 19th century. He served in the South Vietnamese army, but by 1975 he had started making his own chili sauce. At first it was a satay-style sauce; he packed it into glass jars that had held baby food and delivered it with his family by bicycle.

In 1979, after the Vietnamese Communist Party took over South Vietnam, Tran boarded a Taiwanese freighter called the Huey Fong and fled. He reached Hong Kong first, then went on to Boston.

Even in Boston, Tran couldn't stop thinking about chili sauce. He found that Americans made it differently than people did in Vietnam, and he decided the best pepper for making chili sauce in America was the jalapeño. Told he could find jalapeños in California, he set off for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles at the time was full of Vietnamese refugees like him, still eating the food of home — pho — but without the chili sauce they were used to. "Everyone like me needed our chili sauce." So in 1980 Tran made his first bottle of Sriracha, from the same main ingredients used today: jalapeño peppers, vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic.

As in Vietnam, he ladled the sauce into glass bottles by hand and delivered it himself — except that in Los Angeles his delivery vehicle was a blue Chevrolet van.

On the bottle, and on the side of the van, Tran printed the rooster that would become his product's emblem. Back in Vietnam in the 1970s, he had run into a street artist and asked him to draw a rooster. He carried the drawing to the United States, but he never asked the artist's name, so to this day no one knows who designed the logo.

In the years when Huy Fong's Sriracha had a following but was not yet widely known, many Americans couldn't pronounce "Sriracha" and simply called it "rooster sauce." Tran's reason for choosing the rooster was simple: he was born in the Year of the Rooster, he believes "the rooster is a symbol of strength," and he considers himself a tough rooster.

Back then a 28-ounce bottle (about 793.79 grams) sold for just $4. All Tran hoped for was that low-income Asian immigrants would use his sauce with their pho. "I didn't know Americans would eat spicy food."

But it sold better and better. More and more restaurants put it on the table, and it began appearing on the shelves of supermarkets where Asian customers shopped.

Tran credits the taste. Other sauce makers at the time, to cut costs and shorten production time, used dried chilis, adding water and sugar and then soaking them in oil. Huy Fong used fresh chilis. "Maybe that's why our sauce tastes a bit different."

Once orders steadied, Tran stopped making the sauce like a cottage industry. In 1987 he built a 68,000-square-foot factory in the suburb of Rosemead, California, designing and commissioning the machinery himself. The factory made three products: Sriracha, a vegetarian chili sauce, and a chili garlic sauce.

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, in 1996 the plant employed only a few of Tran's relatives and 15 workers, yet Huy Fong's annual sales had already reached $7 million. That same year Tran bought a 170,000-square-foot building to store raw materials.

By 2012 the factory was turning out 3,000 bottles an hour, 24 hours a day, six days a week — at least 70,000 bottles a day. That year Huy Fong sold 20 million bottles, for $60 million in sales.

Data from the market research firm NPD shows that 56% of American home kitchens hold some kind of hot sauce. 9% of households have Sriracha, and among households where the parents are under 35, the figure is 16%.

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Like Tran's own path, the American road to spicy food had its detours.

Soon after the New World was discovered, Europeans carried chili peppers from Mexico into the United States. In the 19th century, after the Mexican–American War, the U.S. took New Mexico, Arizona, and other territory that had belonged to Mexico, and more Americans came to know Mexican food. Chili sauce and chili powder were invented in the same period, letting people in regions where chilis wouldn't grow taste them too.

Later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed many Asians and Africans who had found it hard to immigrate to settle in the United States. According to data from Pew Research, the country gained 59 million immigrants between then and 2015.

A change in the makeup of the population brought a change in what people ate. In recent years the term "ethnic food" has caught on in the U.S. — mainly Asian, Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern cooking — and data from the market research firm IRI shows retail sales of this kind of food in the U.S. rising from $11 billion in 2013 to $12.5 billion in 2018.

These cuisines run hotter than the French and German dishes that used to be popular in America. In Hot Sauce Nation, a book devoted to hot sauce, the author Denver Nicks writes: "Even within (today's) American cuisine, demand for chilis and hot sauce is clearly higher than it was in the pre-1965, European-style American cooking."

But the rise of spicy food isn't only about who lives in the country. For millennials, who want novelty and are readier to take risks, eating hot food fills a need. Hammond said: "Americans like to eat delicious food, and they want to express themselves through what they eat. By eating Sriracha, they can show their friends: 'Look, I'm an interesting person, I've traveled a lot, I know the world.'"

So the hot sauce business kept growing. According to a 2012 report in The Washington Post, hot sauce sales had grown 9.3% a year over the previous decade, making it one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States.

That is the backdrop against which Huy Fong's Sriracha took off.

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Asian food keeps getting more popular in the United States. Japanese restaurants, which spread after World War II, now number 25,000 in the U.S. As the celebrity chef Jet Tila said in an interview for the documentary Sriracha, American chefs almost always reach for Sriracha when they make a spicy tuna roll: "If it weren't for that, I don't think Sriracha would have become this popular."

The food most closely tied to Sriracha — Vietnamese — has also been gaining ground in the U.S., pho above all. A report from Google last year found that awareness of "pho" had risen over the past decade and picked up speed in 2013, with search volume over the past three years up 11% year on year.

The market research firm IBIS World notes in its report that hot sauce makers today "have refined the heat levels they offer, creating extremely spicy sauces for fans and the adventurous, while also creating milder sauces and sauces with unusual flavors."

Sriracha got this popular precisely because it fit the trend — and carved out a niche of its own inside it.

The biggest share of the hot sauce market today belongs to McIlhenny Company's Tabasco sauce, at about 19%, with more than a century of history behind it.

Sriracha drew in more than Asian communities and people who like Asian food, and its taste is nothing like Tabasco's. John Hard, founder of CaJohns, another well-known American hot sauce brand, put it this way: "Sriracha is sweet, garlicky, and thick, and it's made with jalapeños, so it's not that hot. I think it attracted a whole new group — call them hipsters or whatever you like — Sriracha introduced a whole new set of people to the idea that hot sauce doesn't have to be Tabasco, and it doesn't have to be Red Hot either."

That brought Huy Fong enormous success. The company has held double-digit growth ever since it was founded. Tran said: "Over the past 30 years, the economy has had its ups and downs. But for me, I don't feel it — sales grow every day, every month. The market keeps expanding, and expanding."

To keep up with demand, in 2010 Huy Fong started building a new factory in Irwindale, California, covering 650,000 square feet. It was 2.5 times the size of the old one, with nine production lines, each able to fill 18,000 bottles an hour.

Tran has in fact never made a plan of any kind. He takes orders and meets demand, and that thinking has run through 36 years of business. As the customer base grew, Huy Fong began working with a single distributor in each big city or region, and now has about 100 of them. But the company never tracks how its products sell, and Tran doesn't know where they end up. "My friends tell me our products are in Africa, in the (former) Soviet Union, wherever — I'm happy about that. But I have no idea how they got there."

In 2015 Huy Fong also began signing licensing agreements with a number of companies, letting them use its trademark to make Sriracha-flavored products such as beef jerky and popcorn. Huy Fong charges no licensing fee; Tran asks only that his partners use his sauce and keep its original flavor in whatever they make.

Huy Fong has never advertised, barely ran social media accounts before 2013, and kept a bare-bones company website. Tran explains that raw materials limit production and the number of bottles is fixed — "more advertising means more customers come to buy, and they still can't get any" — so he would rather spend the money on making the sauce.

The company has run short of chilis before. In 2007 Sriracha sold so well that Huy Fong used up that year's entire chili supply three months early, and retailers raised prices and hoarded stock. Tran considered buying jalapeños at the supermarket, but he couldn't be sure of their heat or how they had been grown, so all he could do was talk to customers one by one and ask them to wait. He lost none of them in the end, but he plainly doesn't want it to happen again.

Today Huy Fong is a far more open company than it was a few years ago.

After it built the new Irwindale factory in 2013, 1,400 local residents complained that the spicy smell from production gave them headaches and made them cough and demanded that Huy Fong stop. The city of Irwindale sued, calling the odor a public nuisance.

The fight drew not only California media but national U.S. outlets and foreign ones such as the BBC. To clear up the public's bad impression, Huy Fong decided to open the factory, letting reporters and consumers walk through it. In the end the city produced no evidence that the plant was affecting air quality, and Huy Fong said it was willing to donate $250,000 a year to Irwindale, which settled the matter. But in 2015 Huy Fong refused to keep paying; in May 2016 Irwindale sued again, and the case is still in court.

Even so, Huy Fong kept the factory tours going, and it also started giving interviews.

Also in 2013, Griffin Hammond launched a 31-day crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for his documentary Sriracha, aiming for $5,000. He hit the target in eight hours and raised four times the goal — far more backers, and far more enthusiasm, than he expected.

Trailer for the documentary Sriracha

In the film, Hammond recorded every side of Sriracha: the factory, Tran, the fans, the unpaid promotion on social media, the Sriracha-flavored packaged foods, and the sauce's original inventor.

He thinks the documentary also helped pry the company open: "(At first) he didn't want to tell his own story — he thought someone might copy him and do the same thing. But I think, in the course of filming, he realized he had a genuinely interesting story to tell, and that even if someone copied his factory down to the last detail, no one could do it as well as he does."

By the time Hammond was filming, Huy Fong already had plenty of competitors — big companies like McIlhenny, and startups making their own Sriracha. Tran didn't invent the sauce in the first place: it was invented by Thanom Chakkapak, a woman from the Thai town of Si Racha, which is also why Huy Fong cannot trademark the name "Sriracha."

Tran isn't worried. Tour his factory, he says, and you could make exactly the same sauce yourself: "I don't care. The market is huge, and I have no ambition to own it. Let everyone make it."

Three years after the documentary, Hammond told QDaily: "I think it's crossed over into the mainstream — most Americans have probably heard of it. When I was making the film, I'd tell people I was making a movie about Sriracha, and most Americans would say, 'What's that?' Now, if you say the name, they might not know it, but if you say it's the sauce with the green cap, they'll say, 'Oh, that one.'"

And the number of people who know that green-capped chili sauce keeps growing.

Cover image: Flickr; unless otherwise noted, images are courtesy of Griffin Hammond.