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What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage? (2024)

Sauce-maker David Tran and farmer Craig Underwood came together from different worlds to create an American icon. After 28 years, it fell apart in one day.

That spicy, slightly sweet, good-on-everything sauce, in the instantly recognizable bottle with its white rooster emblem and bright green nozzle, was the brainchild of David Tran, who had first devised the recipe and sold the stuff in L.A. in 1980 as a Vietnamese refugee starting a new life for his family. Although it wasn’t offered to customers, there was always a bottle of the “rooster sauce” on the table during staff meals, she says: “It was used by the Latino and Asian cooks to basically add chili heat to anything.” Within a few years, she says, foodies had taken to the product, eagerly squirting it on their Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. To reassure the grower that he wouldn’t be financially wiped out if one year’s pepper crop failed, the companies agreed in 2008 to switch to a system of acreage instead of volume, with Huy Fong assuming the risk by prepaying at the beginning of the growing season to cover the costs of seeds, equipment, and labor.

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