My spicy-food-loving 11-year-old son Jasper grew up dousing everything from eggs to ramen with his favorite hot sauce, Huy Fong Foods’ sriracha. But in recent years we haven’t been able to find it at our supermarket in Brooklyn. He wanted to know why—so the two of us went to California to figure it out.
The result is this Fortune story in our upcoming magazine, which published online this week. It’s a heartbreaker of a business yarn, about a farmer and a saucemaker, men from different worlds who built an iconic product in their 28 years working together—and about the suspicion and broken trust that destroyed their partnership in one day.
The collaboration of David Tran, a refugee from Vietnam with a great recipe for hot sauce, and Craig Underwood, a fourth-generation California pepper farmer, was the key to making that spicy, slightly sweet, good-on-everything sauce, in the instantly recognizable bottle with its white rooster emblem and bright green nozzle. Their exclusive deal—Underwood’s farm grew all the peppers for Huy Fong’s sriracha, and Tran was Underwood’s only pepper buyer—became the stuff of business legend, and Huy Fong Foods became the No. 3 hot sauce brand in America, with fans like Jasper all around the world.
But their disastrous 2016 breakup left both companies tattered and millions of sriracha lovers scrambling to get their fix—and it created “shelf voids” in supermarkets that were filled with a slew of copycat srirachas. Now Huy Fong has lost its dominance of the product category Tran created.
The saga reads like a kind of fable, or cautionary tale, of a rift that decimated the hot sauce empire the two men had built—and that both were too proud, angry, or hurt to mend. |
