Ingredients in Sriracha: chiles, sugar, salt, garlic, distilled vinegar, potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite and xanthan gum

Have you walked up and down the condiments aisle this summer, scratching your head and wondering “where did they put the Sriracha?”  And then asked yourself, “what the f**k am I going to put on my Mongolian Beef tonight!?”

Well, you’re not alone!  Sriracha HOT Chili Sauce along with its sister sauces CHILI GARLIC & SAMBAL OELEK have all been out of stock this Summer and Fall all over the world, and the main reason is due to a massive drought in Northern Mexico, and consequentially, a terrible red jalapeno chili crop this Spring.  The main ingredient in Sriracha

Or at least that is the story sauce makers Huy Fong Foods told the press this summer.  The whole story is a lot jucier.

I checked 2 different Safeways, a Lucky’s and my local bodega in San Francisco this fall, and none of them had Sriracha in stock, not even Instacart who will deliver groceries from several grocery chains in your area has it available to order anymore, and that is perhaps the most telling.

There is a lot more to the story, last summer Huy Fong Foods, Inc., the company that makes Sriracha hot sauce, was ordered to pay more than $23 million in damages to a jalapeno pepper farm in California. after Huy Fong failed to convince a state appellate court to dismiss the fraud claims against them.

You can read the details of the lawsuit here, (or watch the video below) but the gist of it is Hug Fong Foods broke off ties to its decades-long jalapeno pepper grower Underwood Ranches LP circa 2019, Underwood have been growing the chili-peppers that make sriracha since 1988, right here in California.

And in the messy break-up, a Ventura Jury unanimously found Fong had breached its contract and committed fraud against the Underwood farmer, by inducing Underwood to buy more land, and grow more peppers, for less money, all the while Huy Fong was courting other pepper growers in Mexico and showing them Underwood’s farming techniques, which they had promised to keep confidential.

Different pepper, different partners, exploding sauces.

So Sriracha broke up with its local California pepper producer (defrauded them) and then became heavily reliant on imported Mexican peppers. Which makes some sense on paper, until there’s a massive drought in northern Mexico.

In a statement by email in June 2022, a company representative for Huy Fong Foods, said that the issue stemmed from “several spiraling events, including unexpected crop failure from the spring chile harvest.” Huy Fong Foods generally goes through 100 million pounds of chiles each year, the representative added.

Sriracha is believed to have been invented by Thai women, but the Huy Fong Foods version is now made in LA county by a Vietnamese immigrant, and then put on a “Mongolian” beef dish bought at a Chinese restaurant, by a little American piglet (me), to immense satisfaction.

If a lack of supply wasn’t bad enough, the real salt in the eye for Huy Fong was when their sriracha bottles started exploding.  Yes, in the winter of 2019, Food Standards Australia New Zealand warned of a build-up of lactic acid could cause bottles to “bloat and continue to ferment”, causing the hot sauce to explode out of the bottles and splatter over people or property when opened.

This caused the members of the EU (along with Aus & NZ) to recall massive orders of the sauce as well, a cascading loss of product and sales for the company right before a worldwide pandemic hit.

Perhaps the sauce was packaged wrong?  Perhaps the new peppers they were processing had more lactic acid buildup potential?  Whatever the problem was the Huy Fong website now has to post a warning to its customers on its homepage:

www.huyfong.com:
“Please note: HFF products may contain excess gas buildup. Therefore, please open cap and seal with caution. When removing the seal, please face the product away from yourself, others, and valuable items. HFF products may contain unforeseen allergen(s). This statement is made for further protection against any incorrect information that our vendors may have provided regarding allergens.”

Fun fact: People in Mexico eat on average 16.9 kg per capita of jalapenos annually. Chihuahua and Sinaloa grow nearly 50% of Mexicos Chili peppers each year

Assembly lines that usually produce 18,000 bottles of Sriracha an hour are down to just one conveyer belt a day at HFF headquarters.  The company did say it expected a new jalapeno supply to pick up this fall, but…still no Sriracha on the shelves yet. and we live in the same state as the factory.

Personally, I hope they pay their debts and find some fresh peppers to keep making their sauces because I love their sauces, even if their neighbors can’t stand the smell of them.  The founder of HFF, David Tran has a wonderful story and is an example of the American Dream. But lately, it’s been closer to a nightmare for Sriracha.