Sriracha: When Reputation Beats Marketing

For some, the simple rooster on a clear bottle with a green cap is a forgettable product on shelves busy with hot sauces, but for many, the bird proudly endorses a spicy concoction worthy of its cult following.  This increasingly popular sauce is Sriracha and its history is not made up of calculated promotions or lofty big business goals.

David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods and creator of Sriracha, came to the US from Vietnam in 1980 and immediately began producing the hot sauce he had developed at home.  It was a simple home chili paste infused with garlic that he bottled in Vietnam in re-purposed Gerber baby food jars acquired from American servicemen.  Once in the US, Mr. Tran hoped his product would catch on in Vietnamese pho shops and maybe the larger Asian community.  He never developed a formal name for his sauce, used his astrological sign for the logo and added an ingredient list written in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, Spanish and French.  Without promotion, his sauce was discovered by chiefs and the vibrant hot sauce community causing sales to soar.  Today, more than 10 million bottles of Sriracha are sold every year by Huy Fong Foods.  The New York Times details the cult following of the sauce and the founder’s reaction:

Mr. Tran did not anticipate the popularity of his take on sriracha. He believed the sauce to be good. He took pride in the augers and other apparatuses he designed for the plant. He liked to tell people that all he did was grind peppers, add garlic and bottle it…He could never have expected what he found, one recent afternoon, as he trolled the Internet in search of what fans of his sauce have wrought.

Mr. Tran scanned pictures of 20-something women in homemade Halloween costumes designed to resemble the Huy Fong bottle. He navigated to one of two sriracha Facebook pages, the larger of which has more than 120,000 fans.

He retrieved a favorite picture, of Travis Mason, a 36-year-old coffee salesman from Portland, Ore., who commissioned a tattoo of the Huy Fong logo on his left calf. “I’m always interested in what they do,” Mr. Tran said, his voice filled with genuine wonderment.

Makes you wonder what products would dominate without marketing and how Sriracha would do with the kind of advertising campaigns we’ve seen from other hot sauces.

NYT: A Chili Sauce to Crow About