The first thing you smell at the Huy Fong Foods factory in suburban Los Angeles is the overwhelming aroma of garlic, a key ingredient in the company’s signature product: Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce. The first thing you see, however, doesn’t make nearly as much sense. In the lobby is a blown-up picture of two astronauts—one Russian, the other Asian-American—hovering in zero gravity in the cramped confines of the International Space Station. Why it’s hanging there becomes clear on closer examination: An arrow superimposed on the photo points to a little green plastic cap, the top of a Huy Fong sriracha bottle floating in the background.David Tran had the picture hung a few years ago. Tran is the 68-year-old founder and owner of Huy Fong, and the creator of the sauce that has brought his family-run business some fortune and fame as one of the fastest-growing food companies in America. Last year, the company sold 20 million bottles.
The NASA picture represents a milestone for Huy Fong. There’s a theory that space somehow dulls the taste buds. So to ensure its astronauts enjoyed a flavorful meal, the agency’s food sciences division began sending Huy Fong’s sriracha into orbit a decade ago. In the poster, the little green cap is hard to find, but it was all it took for one of the company’s fans, who e-mailed Huy Fong to say he had spotted it.
Such fan mail is not uncommon at Huy Fong—even though the company has never advertised in the U.S. It also has no Facebook page and no Twitter account, and the home page of its website serves as a kind of memorial to its nonchalant relationship to the wider world: It states plainly that it was last updated on May 10, 2004. Yet despite this aloofness, Huy Fong’s sriracha has earned a passionate following that’s helped make it an icon.
Like ketchup, sriracha is a generic term, its name coming from a port town in Thailand where the sauce supposedly was conceived. When people in America talk about sriracha, what they’re really talking about is Huy Fong’s version. It’s been name-checked on The Simpsons, is featured prominently on the Food Network, and has inspired a cottage industry of knockoffs, small-batch artisanal homages, and merchandise ranging from iPhone cases to air fresheners to lip balm to sriracha-patterned high heels.
Last April, market-research firm IBISWorld identified hot sauce production as the eighth-fastest-growing industry, behind for-profit universities and solar panel manufacturing. IBISWorld noted that in 2012 the industry’s revenue surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time. It also had grown nearly 10 percent a year over the previous decade, recession be damned. That growth coincides with the burgeoning Asian population in the U.S., which expanded 45 percent in the 2000s, according to the most recent U.S. census. “As that subset grows, it not only demands more sriracha but spreads the word, too,” says IBISWorld analyst Agata Kaczanowska. “It leads restaurant owners to put it out there. And if it’s on the table, people are more likely to try it.”
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