With Huy Fong’s iconic sriracha, a Vietnamese refugee created a new American consumer category—then lost it to Tabasco

In United States culinary history, only a few recipes have appealed so widely to consumers’ palates that their flavor spawned an entire category of consumer product. Among them: Sunshine Biscuits’ Hydrox cookie (forerunner of the Oreo); Heinz’s sweet, vinegary take on tomato catsup; and the medicinal syrup that became Coca-Cola.

Almost a century after those iconic products hit the shelves, another joined the pantheon in 1980: Huy Fong Foods’ sriracha sauce. Created in Los Angeles, the bright red chili-garlic sauce can now be found in one in three U.S. kitchens, according to the market research firm Circana.

But these days a lot of the srirachas in Americans’ cupboards and fridges aren’t the one you’re probably thinking of: The bright red sauce with a white rooster logo and jaunty green nozzle made by Huy Fong Foods.

That company’s founder and owner, David Tran, created the sauce we know as sriracha in his L.A. kitchen as a recent refugee from Vietnam. Starting with nothing but a recipe and a condensed milk can full of literal gold that he smuggled out of Vietnam, Tran built Huy Fong Foods (the company he named for the freighter that carried him away from Vietnam) over the next four decades into a behemoth that was the No. 3 hot sauce brand in America, behind only Tabasco and Frank’s Red Hot.

Without any paid advertising, Tran’s good-on-everything “rooster sauce” spawned a fandom that includes festivals, cookbooks, and tribute videos. It’s craveable flavor inspired a slew of foods ranging from McDonald’s chicken sandwiches to Doritos’ “Screamin’ Sriracha” flavor.

Then a catastrophic disagreement between Tran and Craig Underwood, the California pepper farmer who had grown the red jalapeños for Huy Fong’s sauce for 28 years, created a crisis for the business. The breakup of Huy Fong Foods and Underwood Ranches, stemming from a disagreement over payment that erupted in November 2016, led to shortages of Huy Fong’s “rooster sauce,” and left millions of fans often unable to get their hands on their favorite condiment. As I reported in a recent Fortune feature, the rift decimated both men’s companies—leaving the farmer with thousands of acres of pepper fields but no customer; and the sauce-maker with a 650,000-square-foot factory but not enough chili peppers to keep it running consistently.

Since that breakup in 2016, those once-ubiquitous bottles of Huy Fong Foods sriracha have disappeared from supermarket shelves in much of the country. News of the Great Sriracha Shortage spread, restaurants and superfans stockpiled every bottle they could get their hands on, and online resellers started charging up to $80 for a bottle. Now, seven years later, Tran’s company can no longer claim dominance over the category that his hot sauce recipe created.

Dozens of other srirachas have flooded the market amid the original’s scarcity, including versions from the likes of Texas Pete and Roland’s and generics from various supermarket chains. And the No. 1 hot sauce brand in America seized the opportunity created by the shortage of Huy Fong’s sauce to dominate the category that Tran created: Tabasco had the bestselling sriracha in the country for the second half of 2023, according to NielsenIQ, pulling ahead even of the original rooster sauce.

The sad saga of the two men who created one of America’s favorite condiments feels like a kind of fable, or cautionary tale, showing how fragile one product’s dominance of a category can be, no matter how beloved it is.

The rise of a ‘polyglot purée’

Tran started making chili sauce in his 30s, after the war that tore apart his country ended in 1975, as a way to make a living off a patch of peppers that he and his brother grew. After moving to the U.S. with his wife and young children in 1979, he developed a sauce loosely based on a Thai fermented dip for eggs and seafood, and named it for the coastal Thai town of Si Racha. He filled the bottles by hand and delivered them to Asian restaurants in his blue Chevy van.

Huy Fong’s sriracha is quite different from the Thai sauce—made from a different variety of chili pepper, thicker, unfermented, and less sweet. Still, being named for a geographic town meant that the name “sriracha” couldn’t be trademarked in the U.S., so nothing has prevented other brands from copying Tran’s sauce and using the product name.

Kara Nielsen, a longtime food trends researcher, sees sriracha’s growth as “a perfect case study in how culinary trends can work,” she tells Fortune. The growth of the sauce’s word-of-mouth popularity tracks with cultural sea changes over the last half century: American tastes became more adventurous and international, and American baby boomers raised their Gen X and millennial children to love travel and restaurant meals. Newcomers to the U.S. and the rise of immigrant communities accustomed to spicy food boosted the popularity of the versatile hot sauce.

Nielsen remembers first encountering Huy Fong’s sriracha sauce when she was a pastry chef in the 1990s at a farm-to-table restaurant in Berkeley, Calif.: There was always a bottle of the rooster sauce on the table during staff meals, favored by the restaurant’s Asian and Latino cooks, she recalls. Then, in the mid-2000s, when Nielsen was working as a trendologist at a San Francisco market research company, she noticed that same green-capped sauce popping up in Vietnamese sandwich shops sought out by foodies in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, she tells Fortune.

In that period, Vietnamese food, including the fragrant, star-anise-scented broth of pho noodle soups and the pork-and-crunchy-vegetables-stuffed sandwiches known as banh mi, became increasingly popular in the U.S. “It was sort of an ‘are you in the know?’” Nielsen now recalls. “‘Do you know about banh mi and where to get the best banh mi?’”

Fine dining restaurants also played a key role. Nielsen credits “third culture” chefs raised in American immigrant communities, such as Roy Choi and David Chang, with expanding the palate of high-end diners. Another factor, the food journalist Matt Gross adds, is the category of hot-sauce connoisseurs that he dubs “heavy metal white guys”: “You know,” he explains, “all these like ‘ass-blaster’ hot sauces and ‘insanity’ sauces… hotter and hotter and hotter and weirder and weirder and very experimental.”

Sriracha’s jalapeño-derived heat is on the milder end of the Scoville Scale, which measures the hotness of peppers, and its simplicity makes it a match for a range of cuisines and culinary trends. As fusion cuisine rose in popularity among hip urbanites, food trucks proliferated in the recession following the 2008 financial crisis, and the sauce spread beyond Vietnamese and Thai food to Korean tacos, spicy tuna handrolls, barbecue, and countless other dishes that could use a garlicky kick. Sriracha mayonnaise suddenly seemed to be drizzled on everything.

The food historian and writer John T. Edge observed in the New York Times in 2009 that “The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal” of the “polyglot purée” beloved by chefs as well as home cooks. “Every chef has got a bottle in their refrigerator, I don’t care what they say,” the Top Chef winner Harold Dieterle told a documentarian in 2013.

That year, the influential food magazine Bon Appetit launched “Sriracha Week” to celebrate the “it” sauce with a slate of articles and recipes, recalls Gross, who came up with the idea while overseeing the magazine’s website. Bon Appetit did the event for two years, Gross tells Fortune, but by 2015 the sauce had become too popular. “It went from being a semi-underground, cult ingredient,” he says, “to exposed enough that we don’t really need to talk about it.”

Meanwhile, home cooks were discovering that sriracha was indeed good on everything, and took the advice on Huy Fong’s bottle to squirt it on pizza, mac and cheese, hot dogs, and anything else they could think of. Huy Fong signed ever bigger deals with the distribution companies that supply grocery stores, and in the 2010s, Huy Fong’s sriracha arrived on shelves at the holy grail of big box retail: Walmart. Soon, its pungent, garlicky flavor was showing up in all manner of mass-produced foods, from potato chips to jerky to salted almonds to Taco Bell “quesaritos.”

For many Americans, the documentarian Griffin Hammond observes, sriracha has become a kind of identity statement: “It lets you kind of signal your culinary appetite,” Hammond, who made the 2013 film Sriracha, tells Fortune. “It says something about me, the kind of foods I’m willing to eat… Americans want to convey their knowledge of the world through food.”

How to lose a category in one day

It’s a testament to how profoundly David Tran changed America’s preferences for chili sauce that in 2014 Tabasco put out its own version of sriracha, in its first squeezable bottle, complete with an olive green nozzle. The McIlhenny Company, founded in 1868 on Louisiana’s Avery Island, produces America’s most popular chili sauce—a thin, vinegary sauce in a small glass bottle that is made from hot peppers descended from the handful of seeds that Edmund McIlhenny planted on his family’s sugar plantation before the Civil War. Still family-owned and run, Tabasco is one of America’s oldest food brands that’s still in business, and it doesn’t branch into new products lightly.

At first consumers weren’t that interested in defecting from their favorite “rooster sauce,” Lee Susen, McIlhenny’s chief sales and marketing officer, tells Fortune. “Most consumers saw sriracha as a brand,” he explains. “They didn’t recognize it as a product type.”

But that began to change when Huy Fong’s familiar bottles disappeared, leaving “shelf voids” at grocery stores and a plethora of other srirachas jostling for the allegiance of chili-sauce-lovers. Those srirachas included many created by supermarket chains, a few imported from Thailand and elsewhere in Asia, stylish upstart brands such as Yellowbird, and small-batch artisanal outfits—all competing for consumers’ attention with Huy Fong’s sriracha missing in action.

In September of 2022, Tabasco launched www.srirachashortage.com, slyly referencing Huy Fong’s shortages. “LOOKING FOR SOMETHING?” the site asks in large white block letters, as a Tabasco sriracha bottle surges upward, looking at first just like a Huy Fong bottle (though with a nozzle that’s olive green rather than bright green). “Stop searching. Start squeezing,” the site suggests, beneath a request to “follow @TABASCO for no shortage of flavor inspiration” and a grid of food influencers’ TikTok videos showcasing their favorite ways to use the sauce.

And by the end of 2023, Tabasco’s sriracha had usurped Huy Fong’s dominance of the condiment category Tran had created—filling a need that, in 1980, American consumers didn’t even know they had.

For his part, Tran says he doesn’t worry much about Tabasco and the other brands now crowding the sriracha shelf. There’s nothing so very magic about Huy Fong’s sriracha, he tells Fortune with a shrug—other than the freshness of its peppers: “There’s no secret ingredient, OK? You can make your own.”

Of course, devotees of his rooster sauce vehemently disagree. To many, only the original, green-topped bottle will do, delivering the comforting flavor that, by now, many of them have grown up with.

“It’s still an icon,” the food writer Matt Gross says. “Everybody is in the shadow of Huy Fong’s sriracha … There’s no escaping what David Tran created.”

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