How the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier
old.reddit.comThis story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork.
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong
Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled.
Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are.
I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on.
It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.
Nothing stopping both from being true. The court judgements[0] aren't faked. It genuinely appears Underwood really was screwed over. That said, it doesn't take much for a CMO to look at the situation and figure out how to market the product from there. Something something lemonade.
Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky?
[0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.
Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
> If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
similar to https://x.com/JenMsft/status/1381640311357628420/photo/1 : corporations need to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend carbonated beverages to each other
No? I have recommended Freestyle sugar free soda as a way to replace heavy CocaCola consumption. Here in Mexico it's a big problem, and I helped me get out of the addiction. ( add Allulose to the soda to add the sweet)
probably because the most obvious "it's exactly as described" is the most boring and uninteresting conclusion, thus you make it more interesting by proposing that it's a big conspiracy
I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
Paul Graham wrote about the entanglement of news and PR companies over 20 years ago: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening with social media and indeed a lot of the news is astroturfed to some extent, though I agree we shouldn't discount the extent to which people are willing to participate in this by reposting popular content for a quick ego/karma boost. And increasingly that reposting is done by bots.
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.
A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.
> "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid
Ha, I don't know your friends but in my experience that's like a textbook phrase people use to try to play off being duped when they're clued in
The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview.
It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes.
This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
They have a whole "That Happened" subreddit just for the rubbish that people post, let alone AIs.
How many of the credulous responses are themselves bot-generated to make the original sound more believable?
That's Reddit for you. I wonder how few topics you could condense the most posts into?
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly.
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
People on HN won't like that you do this but at least you're honest, and showing that this does actually happen, it's just that others are not so loud (at least sometimes, see the link below). This sort of thing is very common on reddit, there are even articles and studies about said astroturfing.
Due to the cyclical nature of posts and the exhausted moderators trying to mod all of them, it's quite effective for "organic" growth. Many companies use these methods to grow, because it's way cheaper than paying for ads and users online are simply too gullible to catch on. And even if they did, you can just delete the thread and make a new one later on.
It's the same strategy used in TikTok where the influencer subtly hints at the product rather than overtly talking about it (perhaps as one slide in a slideshow), and then when a commenter asks what they used, the influencer replies with the name of the product.
For example [0], there have been large scale astroturfing campaigns for things like games, posting large numbers of comments to influence users.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ot0nvg/game_dev_adm...
Personally I don't like that they do that, not that they are pointing out that they do that.
Yes I should've said, people on HN don't like that they do that, or that it happens at all, but the reality is that it does and especially for people on a forum run by a startup accelerator in particular (with tons of Ask HN questions on how to grow their product via marketing), posting on social media is one of the most effective ways to grow, whether people like it or not.
So you're one of the reasons everything is shit. Got it.
In a sense? Yes, and I don't care because other people are posting AI garbage everywhere and genuinely ruining things.
In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.
The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!
GP is from a long line of enshittificators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218815
You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.
I'm largely indifferent, but the products I promote are good and the customers spending 500k+ pa on the services I sell are not unsophisticated.
I mod a couple subs on reddit, and one that is fairly famous. I see this stuff all the time, even if this person is lying. Its a real phenomenon. Usually its messy like "haha, my husband just loves these cookies" and with a link to the site and its obvious its spam, but stuff like this happens too.
I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.
Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.
You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.
I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.
lmao. This reads like the biggest LARP i've seen on this board in quite some time
Why? It's not like I'm claiming some eight figure marketing contracts here.
This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started.
I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
Reading some the comments on this thread reveals one of the main reasons why a campaign like this is necessary if you're Underwood. Huy Fong has achieved "category king" status in this space; most people don't know what Huy Fong is, that red sauce is called "Sriracha". Huy Fong knows quite well that as long as the sauce still comes in that bottle and tastes like chilis, 99% of their customers will still buy it. Making a dent in this segment beyond foodies and hot-sauce enthusiasts requires some guerrilla marketing and and public education.
Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”
Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.
The point of heroic tales such as Gilgamesh was to draw tribute and sacrifices to the temple of Ishtar. The analogy makes perfect sense.
Maybe that's a post facto rationalized reason, as I'm sure it did draw in more tributes, but that's like saying folk tales across the world's sole purpose is to have sacrifices when in reality people just like making up and telling stories. It's like saying the apostles of Christ only spread his message to raise money for the Catholic Church, no doubt that was a side effect but it wasn't the "point" by any means, especially early on where there was no church.
You think this Sriracha story wants to sell you something.
Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?
It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.
Just go to the profile in question and search their profile with an empty query; that'll show all the hidden comments and posts.
Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.
IIRC you just have to use an asterisk or something now, and I think the search is broken on OldReddit…
Here I was foolishly thinking AstroTurf meant false grass
Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.
Huh, I didn't realise it was that specific, I thought it just meant/came from 'covering everything with crap'.
I wish there was a wall of shame blacklist for CEOs who pull unethical shit off. With reviews and ratings from everyone around them. Kind of like yelp, but for CEOs. Then, anyone who wants to start a new venture or giving them any money, can then go look em up there before signing a contract with these trash CEOs. Right now, they only get away with all this because it all happens under the table and not enough people know.
Well there used to be fuckedcompany.com that served a similar purpose. Of course it was litigated into history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
>The site was taken offline for two days in August 2002; Ford Motor Company law firm Howard Phillips & Andersen had threatened litigation against FC's upstream provider HostGator as a means of silencing a discussion of a series of layoffs entitled "Ford, where finding a job is job one." Ford claimed that it infringed a trademark slogan "Ford, where quality is job one," discontinued after widespread use from 1980 to 1997. The site eventually returned minus the news of the Ford layoffs.
Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?
FC wasn't litigated into history, it just had its moment and then passed and pud moved on to do other things.
I suppose court records can function as such a list.
If you also want 'alledged assholery' on that list, the list will just turn into a list of CEOs, due to false reports.
It would be nice to aggregate all that and put it under a "profile". Kind of like facebook, but your entire profile feed is just the long list of court records, assholery and screw overs for other people. I actually saw a version that someone did for Jack (Twitter's ex founder) a few years ago and it was hilarious but cleverly informative. That's honestly where I got this idea from.
Why stop at CEOs?? If you implement this for everybody then I will know who to sell my used car to and who is an unworthy jerk!
Given the vast over representation of sociopathy and malignant narcissism in CEOs it’s going to be most CEOs even if you filter out false claims.
But if you’re gonna hate someone it’s good if you have a real reason to do so instead of bullshit and rumors.
> false reports.
Are you sure they're false?
Are we sure that some reports of every person are false? Of course we are.
It won’t help. At my second job the president hired a VP with a white collar criminal record and told everyone not to bring it up
The POTUS is well known for screwing over contractors and lenders. It clearly didn't damage his reputation enough.
At one of my previous jobs, we were acquired by a company whose CEO had been caught for something involving bank fraud and was under a gag order not to talk about it. As far as I know they're still in business.
I never have thought about it but I guess if the gag order applies to everyone in the case it's kind of convenient.
As a bolshie type myself, very quick to moan at higher-ups, I think we need to be realistic that often we grunts don't have the big picture (especially the politics) and unfortunately that won't stop somebody lowdown move from merely internal letting off steam to anonymous public borderline slander.
There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.
There is such wall. Usually published by Fortune.
Not just CEOs, but we also need it for investors. For example when startups screw over employees on equity, the founders, board members, and their firms, should all be on a public blacklist.
Same goes for prospective investors, too!
If someone is known to be a ghoster, a gaslighter, a bullshitter, or someone who isn't serious and wants to waste the time of founders, it should be known.
That only works for poor people because CEOs will sue immediately. Someone with a lot of money for legal insurance would have to run it.
Well, this kind of data actually exists. The key is to maintain anonymity. Glassdoor does it. You will see a lot of employees actually complain about management and seniors by name on there.
Glassdoor, as big as it is, allows for deleting bad reviews.
I wish there would just be laws against this type of behaviour, but we all know who is in control of which laws are getting passed. So short of that social shaming will have to do. A CEO that treated humans and/or the planet like dirt, should for example be unable to go to a restaurant, a bar, a park, down a road, onto a beach without getting thrown out or ridiculed, heckled or just called out by others. Behave like scum? Get treated like scum. Fuck with the tribe? Get thrown out. It is one of the oldest correctives for shit behavior any society has ever used in the history of humanity. The problem is they have created a world in which they have too many spaces to avoid this type of consequences.
Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.
Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.
I think this Fortune story has a decent timeline of events and explains the perspective of both sides:
> At first, Underwood recalls, he was confused and hurt. “We were trying to figure out what the hell’s going on,” he tells me when I visit his offices in Camarillo, Calif., in December. “Because we were really vulnerable, both in the percentage of our business that he commanded—and I guess our belief that we were going to have a long-term relationship.” But he soon became convinced, Underwood tells me, that Tran’s intentions were bad, and had been for some time. “Basically, he really was out to destroy me,” he says. “He didn’t give a damn about me or our family or all that we’d done together.”
> Over at Huy Fong, feelings were similarly raw. Tran felt betrayed, and blindsided by accusations that he had been underhanded. For most of three decades, he had remained loyal to Underwood as his only pepper producer, and each year he had handed over millions on the promise of a harvest, a gesture that he saw as an act of faith. Now all that trust had collapsed in a petty argument over money.
> Tran has come to believe that Underwood was trying to drive him to bankruptcy, then steal his sauce business. “I helped him because he grew chili for me,” he says. “He made money, he owned land. But it is not enough. He wanted to take over my business.” It felt like being “stabbed in the back,” adds Donna Lam, Tran’s sister-in-law and executive operations officer.
* https://archive.is/https://fortune.com/2024/01/30/sriracha-s...
I remember when Sriracha disappeared from the market for a while (2022?).
The story I heard at the time was heavily positive, talking up the handshakes and relationship angle - suggesting the supplier had a bad harvest (drought) so the manufacturer had decided not to produce sauce rather than produce an inferior product.
Either rumours or more lies - and a good way to help the market forget the earlier flavour and be grateful for a sloppier solution to 'return'?
Yeah, I remember the two parties accusing each other of essentially the same thing -- destroying a 25-year business relationship over short-term greed, for no good reason.
It's good to see the result of the court case, now at least we know who tried to screw who over.
I don't know what tariffs you guys have put on foreign sauces these days but the Flying Goose brand made in Thailand is the only brand that tastes right to me.
I also never heard of Huy Fong until now. Flying Goose is the one that you find to buy in Europe. Also, very tasty!
If we’re talking alternatives, the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha became our staple at home during the shortage. We still use red for a variety of sauces but rarely as a direct condiment.
Flying Goose is good, my favourite is Ox brand. It's very punchy, heavy on the garlic.
Oh there's another Sriracha Sauce?
Off-topic: After visiting a Reddit link via Hacker News on my phone, my Reddit layout is unusable. How do I get out of old Reddit and back to something usable?
Related: why does HN always link to old.reddit?
Because the "new" layout is awful.
Yes, I agree, but the old one is unusable on mobile, and visiting old.reddit.com forces me to keep using it until I logout and login again, which is also awful
The new layout is awful on desktop. Change "old" to "www" and you'll be all set on mobile.
That doesn’t work, but that’s not your fault! I think it’s setting some cookie or something, which makes this annoying to deal with. Anyway, thanks for the reply
I don’t understand the sriracha “thing” in North America. Don’t you guys have 100’s of sambal oleks from SE Asia to choose from?
In short: no.
I’m sure that in the Boston area we’d have had no trouble rustling up half a dozen or more.
We now live in Vermont. The options are pretty much limited to Huy Fong. Reese makes a vastly inferior product that doesn’t belong on the same shelf that can be found in some supermarkets. I know two Asian grocery stores (neither of which specializes on any particular country to my uninformed eye). They’re both small enough that they aren’t stocking hundreds of varieties of any single sauce.
So yeah. Credit to Huy Fong for capturing the mindshare with a quality product and getting available basically nationwide.
In places with Asian grocery stores, or cities with larger Asian isles, yes - we have tons of options. But sriracha is widely loved, many people have never heard of sambal but use sriracha all day.
We can buy it, but its not common. Sriracha is in most restaurants, I keep a bottle in my fridge, it's in every grocery store, etc.
Americans don’t know anything besides name brands. We used to have a healthy diverse culture and small businesses that differed from state to state but our reliance on importing has killed any notion of that. When the rich invade cities the first thing to show up is a Starbucks and the first thing to close is the local diner.
Now I know why the local dive bar stopped using a sriracha bottle for storing hand soap.
David Tran goes down in history for one of the biggest CEO blunders ever made.
Human greed knows no bounds
I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
There are far better hot sauces out there, available at your local Chinese, Pakistani, or Iranian supermarket.
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.
Try it, it's fun!
https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...
Sometimes hot and vinegar is all you want.
There is a place for simple hot sauces, because you don't want to add additional flavours. Sometimes all you want is straight up chilis.
More complex hot sauces might include dried shrimp, fermented soy, lemon grass, dried mushrooms, but those flavours might not be desirable in some dishes. And some dishes require specific hot sauces because they are an integral part of the flavour profile (Mapo tofu, Tom Yum).
I’ve never really been a fan of it as a direct condiment so I’m inclined to agree.
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
Agreed, just tastes like chilli and vinegar to me and I never understood the appeal.
Which ones would you recommend?
It's just slightly spicey ketchup, pretty sweet.
There are definitely better things out there.
They have a spicy ketchup product that I liked, tho it has disappeared from my local stores. At the time I first noticed it at the store it was the hottest one that also matched the thick consistency I expect from ketchup.
> I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandu...
"$post is a boring take" is also such a boring and unecessary take. As is my reply to yours.
There are countless different (hot) sauces. And each one is liked by someone somewhere in the world. Shall we list them all?
Yep this was a very controversial thing when it happened. They tried to squeeze the farmer who supplied all their peppers from their earliest days - why would you do that unless you have no morality? And now the Huy Fong Sriracha tastes different, and Underwood’s own Sriracha is actually what tastes best.
I’m glad to hear there was a happy ending to the epic greediness and underhanded tactics of Huy Fong:
> Later, obviously, there's a lawsuit. Funnily enough, it wasn't actually Underwood who sued Huy Fong. It was Huy Fong who sued Underwood, seeking refunds for payments it had made earlier under their contracts. Underwood turned around and counterclaimed for breach of contract and fraud and a bunch of other shit. Underwood succeeded - there was a unanimous jury verdict in their favor - and got awarded about $13 million in compensatory damages, and another $10 million in punitive damages (these are only awarded where you've done something so outrageous that it's quasi-criminal; it's to deter other people from doing similar things).
On the Reddit thread it was said that underwood hasn’t quite exactly nailed the, I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.
> I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
You're thinking of two different words.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consistency
Sense 1: agreement of parts or features to one another or a whole
Sense 2: degree of firmness, density, or viscosity
Notably, sense 1 has a related adjective, consistent, and sense 2 does not.
he knows. that's why he said viscosity. reread it slowly
It's crazy. They kept expanding more and more already. Apparently they just weren't increasing the rate of increase enough.
Now HF sauce sucks, I wasn't paying attention to this and got a bottle after this whole debacle, and it's horrible.
> why would you do that unless you have no morality?
Since company leadership has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, profit-maxxing for shareholders is the only moral thing to do /s.
(Yes, I see your /s, just adding to your comment)
It's weird that supposedly clever people cannot see beyond "this number goes down/up now" to "this is not immediately beneficial, but it keeps our company healthier in the long run".
This is s privately owned company
Private companies also have shareholders and shares - they just don't trade publicly.
Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
I used to be all-in on Sriracha, used it on everything.
Then, can't remember where, I found out about Gochujang[0] and now it's my go-to fermented chili for everything
AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.
> $12 dollars per bottle is crazy
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
>leave them on a window sill
Ooooh anybody have a rec for the most idiot-proof hot thing to try to grow?
Rainbow tabasco required nothing but water, ime - if you have decent sun or a grow light.
These things: https://seedsbeeblooming.com/shop/ols/products/rainbow-tabas...
Can't vouch for that merchant though
Pepper plants are really easy to grow. Pick seeds that sound like they’ll yield the flavor you’re looking for.
Planted a few Jalapeno seeds in the soil in mom's greenhouse once and harvested buckets of chilies, more than I knew what to do with. Super rewarding.
Counter-argument: we're talking about saving a handful of bucks for something that lasts months. Do it if you find it fun - I tried it and didn't like the work nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).
I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.
>nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
Definitely wear gloves when chopping chillis!
I've tried getting started with this but my first attempt a habanero/mango sauce was _horrible_, must've used a slop recipe or something. Do you have a good base to recommend?
Depends on purchasing power, how much sauce you consume, value added/quality - $12 is often not much, cost of two sandwiches, or 4-pack of beer, half price of one lunch meal, 1/3rd of Netflix subscription, etc... What's crazy is $200 plain cotton white t-shirt, but i.e. $150 merino t-shirt isn't that crazy anymore.
That’s twice the price of a similar sized bottle of fancy ketchup and will last you four times as long.
I bought two bottles a few months back. It doesn’t taste good.
Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else
https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Sauce-Original-Pack/dp/B...
Best hot sauce ever
I loved their dry seasoning [1]. Bought some when I visited the bay area several years back and used to use it on everything from toasts to pasta. Sadly, haven't visited US since to be able to pick up some more :-(
1. https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Seasoning-11-oz/dp/B01LY...
That list of ingredients is awful.
“Red jalapeno, sugar, water, salt acetic acid, garlic, natural flavor, xanthan gum, sodium metabisulfite, and/or sodium bisulfite (sulfiting agent / preservative), potassium sorbate (preservative).”
I’ve had sriracha in the past and it’s disgustingly sweet. Apparently it’s 17% sugar!
How much sauce are you putting on your food though? 17% sugar is bad in a drink where it adds up fast, but for a hot sauce where you're using maybe 2 teaspoons max (likely less), that's like 1-2 grams of sugar. Essentially a rounding error in your daily intake.
Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.
nothing about this ingredients list is awful, what are you talking about?
But it has chemicals in it...
This douchebag engineering manager used to tell everyone his dad was the founder of sriracha. He was a huge liar. Lying works some how
Imagine owning a money printing machine and then breaking it because you want it to print more money more quickly.
When I see a company this big screwing over their partner after 20 years of partnership for some lousy tens of millions of dollars (which is probably peanuts compared to worldwide profits), I immediately think that everything is not as simple as it seems.
In this post, Underwood is obviously a virtuous, hard working victim and the sriracha guys are the villains. I don’t believe that there are good and bad companies and I firmly believe that there is some underlying reason for this situation.
The court awarded $10M in punitive damages in addition to the $13M in compensatory damages. So the options are basically "Huy Fong's lawyers are criminally incompetent" or "Huy Fong absolutely screwed over their supplier".
By way of contrast, I've seen so many corporations led by deranged idiots who used to make good decisions within their realm of competence that I have no trouble believing that Huy Fong decided that they could completely dominate Underwood, and were very wrong.
The more power a person believes they have, the stupider they act.
Quoth wikipedia: "The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Underwood on the grounds of breach of contract and fraud."