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.
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).
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 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'?
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.
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.
A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work.
You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.
There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
Hello - it's me, the OP from the Reddit post. I saw the discussion here and felt I had to respond, because you've gone after my integrity and honesty - you have basically accused me of being a shill for Underwood, a clumsy astroturfer who makes things up. So, I would like to say a few things in reply.
First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight.
Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away.
Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would.
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?
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.
In the US, Huy Fong was the only Sriracha that I ever saw (and commonly only on the west coast), until the very early 2000s.
My understanding was/is that Huy Fong could have trademarked the name in the US back then, but they chose not to based on the founder's humiity and/or naivete.
Somewhere around 2003(?), Sriracha (still only Huy Fong) became an Internet sensation and then very quickly there were a dozen brands available, all calling themselves Sriracha (legally OK), and often imitating the Huy Fong trade dress in sort-of subtle ways. Huy Fong pushed back on some of those imitators.
And then Huy Fong stopped being able to produce marketable volumes ("bad harvest" was the explanation at the time), and then it started tasting far less good, but still less bad than the others. Presumably this corresponds to their supplier change, which gives me a new appreciation for terroir.
I have never found another Sriracha that is comparable to Y2K-era Huy Fong. Modern Huy Fong is just OK. I don't think it would have become an Internet sensation if the product was always thus. I've tried at least 25 other brands, searching for that taste. So much disappointment!
As someone not from the U.S., this thread confused me at first and I had to look it up.
What tripped me up is that sriracha is the name of a type of sauce, not a trademarked brand. It’s similar to how many companies can make “ketchup”. In contrast, Tabasco Sauce is a registered brand, so only one company can sell a sauce called Tabasco.
Because of that, several companies produce sriracha. The one most people associate with the name in the U.S. is Huy Fong Foods (the “rooster” bottle, often simply called Sriracha). But it’s just one brand among many, like Underwood Ranches Sriracha (made by the former pepper supplier mentioned in the story).
So when the OP says “the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier”, they are talking specifically about Huy Fong, not the sauce style itself.
29 comments
[ 85.6 ms ] story [ 435 ms ] threadIt looks like this:
https://a.co/d/06NNRslo
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).
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'?
There are far better hot sauces out there, available at your local Chinese, Pakistani, or Iranian supermarket.
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.
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.
You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.
There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight.
Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away.
Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would.
That's basically what I wanted to communicate.
Related: why does HN always link to old.reddit?
> 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...
https://fablesofaesop.com/the-goose-with-the-golden-eggs.htm...
To me "Sriracha" is like "ketchup", it's a common name, not a brand.
Never heard of the names cited on Reddit.
We find this sauce everywhere here in France, Go-Tan being the most popular but there's also some smaller brands or products imported by "Tang Frères"
My understanding was/is that Huy Fong could have trademarked the name in the US back then, but they chose not to based on the founder's humiity and/or naivete.
Somewhere around 2003(?), Sriracha (still only Huy Fong) became an Internet sensation and then very quickly there were a dozen brands available, all calling themselves Sriracha (legally OK), and often imitating the Huy Fong trade dress in sort-of subtle ways. Huy Fong pushed back on some of those imitators.
And then Huy Fong stopped being able to produce marketable volumes ("bad harvest" was the explanation at the time), and then it started tasting far less good, but still less bad than the others. Presumably this corresponds to their supplier change, which gives me a new appreciation for terroir.
I have never found another Sriracha that is comparable to Y2K-era Huy Fong. Modern Huy Fong is just OK. I don't think it would have become an Internet sensation if the product was always thus. I've tried at least 25 other brands, searching for that taste. So much disappointment!
https://github.com/aweijnitz/recipe-el_fuego_viviente
Using Xantan gum is a sign of ultra processing. It's used to change mouth-feel, which is basically lying to the body.
I always recommend people to read / listen to https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Processed-People-Science-Behind... to understand these ingredients and what they do to our bodies.
What tripped me up is that sriracha is the name of a type of sauce, not a trademarked brand. It’s similar to how many companies can make “ketchup”. In contrast, Tabasco Sauce is a registered brand, so only one company can sell a sauce called Tabasco.
Because of that, several companies produce sriracha. The one most people associate with the name in the U.S. is Huy Fong Foods (the “rooster” bottle, often simply called Sriracha). But it’s just one brand among many, like Underwood Ranches Sriracha (made by the former pepper supplier mentioned in the story).
So when the OP says “the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier”, they are talking specifically about Huy Fong, not the sauce style itself.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/that-smelly-sriracha-factory...