You Won’t Believe The Story Behind Sriracha Sauce!

As website Thrillist notes, Sriracha has had quite the roller coaster of an existence since its introduction some 30 years ago. In fact, it went from obscurity to stardom and then back to…what, exactly?

What has happened to Sriracha, friends? Not long ago it was the toast of the Internet, the darling hipster hot sauce, an Asian-born, American-made spicy sensation. Then seemingly all at once, it was, as the coffee shop mom pointed out, everywhere. And there's nothing the Internet hates more than an indie going mainstream. The World Wide Web is now chock-full of hot takes on Sriracha being over. A Jezebel headline the other day read “Sriracha Has Made Its Overrated Sauce Available in Tiny, Convenient Packets.” Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern told Today.com that there were “200 other hot sauces” he'd reach for before Sriracha. Former Laguna Beach blonde person Lo Bosworth went to culinary school and now thinks Sriracha has too much sugar, and that you should make your own face wash using Arm & Hammer baking soda and water.

Normally, these sorts of tales are relatively simple. A beloved small purveyor of goods is either purchased by a big (and thus evil) corporation or franchises out, the distribution lines open up, thus putting the product everywhere, thus diluting its unique and scarce appeal (see: Krispy Kreme). Or said bigger corporation sacrifices the original quality of the product, thus making it inferior (see: Hershey’s purchasing Cadbury chocolate in America). Or, in the case of craft beer, just the act of associating with the big corporation is enough to cause a backlash (see: all craft beer sales ever).

But here's the thing: Huy Fong — the maker of the original Sriracha, aka rooster sauce, aka cock sauce — hasn't done any of that. And yet it's now suffering the backlash. So what the hell is going on here?

Let's start at the beginning
In 1980, a Vietnamese immigrant by the name of David Tran started a company called Huy Fong, famously naming it after the boat which took him to America, and putting his zodiac sign (a rooster) on the bottles. According to Donna Lam, Huy Fong's executive operations officer, the Sriracha sauce wasn't actually introduced until 1983, and was named for Si Racha, a coastal town in Thailand famous for its red chile sauce (the best-selling Thai version, Sriraja Panich, is thinner, sweeter, and quite different than the Huy Fong recipe). With no advertising budget or sales force, Tran began selling to Asian markets and restaurants around Chinatown in LA, and slowly expanded his network into other cities with sizable Asian populations. “I used to call Sriracha the ‘secret’ sauce,” says Lam. “You only knew about it by word of mouth.”

Fast-forward 20 years to 2003. Huy Fong's Sriracha has had modest but steady success — it's now being sold in Walmart, and P.F. Chang's is putting it in many of its dishes, but it was still very much in the background.

Then came the foodie revolution.

It's sometimes hard to remember that foodie culture as we know it — the fetishization of chefs and certain ingredients or dishes — wasn’t really a thing until the mid-aughts, helped along by new kinds of food television (Iron Chef, Top Chef, No Reservations), the rise of social media, foodie media (Chowhound, Eater, yours truly, various food subreddits, etc.), and the simultaneous ascent and shift in hipster culture away from its original rebirth as a sort of ironic white-trash movement (PBR, pre-investor Kelso from That '70s Show) and toward a culture of artisanal, obscure, and occasionally challenging food products. And one of these products was hot sauce.

According to a Quartz chart compiled by Euromonitor, between 2000 and 2013, the US hot sauce market grew 150% more than “that of BBQ sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard — combined.” IBISWorld says the market now has billion-dollar revenues. And it doesn't show signs of stopping. “I don't see it slowing down,” says Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst for NPD. She pointed to several factors: “Multicultural changes in America, millennials constantly seeking out different tastes and flavors, even the boomers, as they get older they lose taste buds, so they want more pungent flavors.”

But more than most hot sauces, Sriracha was uniquely positioned to be embraced (or hijacked, or appropriated, depending on your point of view) by the growing hipster foodie culture. Here's a product with an amazing, authentic backstory and no marketing or advertising. Everything came, as Lam said, by “word of mouth.” By 2009, Bon Appetit named it ingredient of the year. The New York Times got off its creaky rocking chair to talk to Tran and to report on watching him Google Sriracha, and pull up pictures of Portland baristas with Huy Fong tattoos. Rockstar chef David Chang lavished it with praise and put bottles out in all his Momofuku restaurants.

Eventually, Sriracha went well beyond a simple hot sauce and became something of a media darling, complete with T-shirts and other branded items. As is inevitable, however, the spicy sauce soon lost some its luster, in part simply because other products attracted everyone's attention. Plus, the company couldn't get ownership of the name, meaning that just because something says Sriracha, that doesn't mean it's made by the original manufacturer, Huy Fong. When some products had less than stellar flavor, people blamed Huy Fong instead of the manufacturer of the product.

We think this is a shame. We're big fans of Sriracha and it's sad to see how things have turned out for the original product. Are you a fan of Sriracha? What are your favorite Sriracha-flavored products? Share your opinions in the comment section below!

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