Origin of Top Products: 16 Things You Didn’t Know About Sriracha

We have a section on our site is called “Origins Of Top Businesses”.

It features interesting facts about the early years of well-known businesses. 

These facts are given to you for fun and inspiration. 

Fun because how many top businesses started out is really surprising. 

Inspiring because it will help you as a business owner see that if they can do it, so can you.

Today I want to do things a little differently.

On my lung break, I watched a documentary called “Sriracha Movie“.

With the facts fresh on my mind, I want to present to you what I am calling “16 Things You Didn’t Know About Sriracha“:

1. It was created by a Chinese man from Vietnam named David Tran.
2. His family was forced to leave Vietnam when the government cracked down on ethnic Chinese in south Vietnam.
3. Tran and thousands of other refugees crowded onto the freighter Huey Fong that was heading for Hong Kong. After a month-long standoff with the British authorities, the ship disembarked its passengers on January 19, 1979.  Tran was later granted asylum in the United States.
4. He created his sauce in an attempt to reproduce the type of sauce that is popular in Vietnam.
5. He makes the sauce from vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic.
6. He original filled the first jars by hand with a spoon.
7. He started Huy Fong Foods in 1980 and named the company after the refugee ship that brought him out of Vietnam.
8. This original sauce is called Sriraja Panich was created in Thailand in an area called Si Racha in the 1930s.
9. It was created from the recipe of a housewife named Thanom Chakkapak.
10. The Sriracha sauce that Tan made, which is popular here in the U.S., is sometimes known as “rooster sauce,” because of the rooster featured on its label.
11. The business has never advertised.
12. They don’t have a Facebook page.
13. They don’t use Twitter.
14. You can’t order their product online!
15. For 25 years, a farmer named Craig Underwood has been the only supplier of the peppers that Huy Fong Foods uses. (He also doesn’t sell them to anyone else.)
16. YOU’VE BEEN PRONOUNCING IT WRONG! Take away the first “R” sound. It’s “See-Ra-Cha“. You can listen to how it sounds in this clip from the movie…