A Small Part of a Small Business Can Be a Big Idea

Lisa Tran’s parents (right) escaped a Communist regime and built a small restaurant in America. Now she wants to reinvent it by building a business based solely on their sauces. Her mom thinks she’s crazy—and maybe she is. But some of the greatest brands were built in much the same way.

- By Frances Dodds

I still remember the first time somebody tasted one of our sauces and said, ‘Ugh, not for me,’ ” Lisa Tran says. It was 2017, and Tran had just made one of the biggest, most emotionally wrought decisions of her life. She’d created a line of Vietnamese sauces based on beloved family recipes, despite her parents’ disapproval, and set out to become an entrepreneur. That meant handing out a lot of samples in a lot of supermarkets, where she felt raw and vulnerable. So when this one customer just wrinkled her nose and walked away—leaving a half-eaten cup on the counter—it was a breakdown moment for Tran.

“I went to the bathroom and cried,” she says. “People can be so blunt, and I couldn’t help taking it personally, because our family—well, the sauces we make are so personal.”

The business will always feel personal for entrepreneurs, but for Tran’s family, it is the culmination of many life-or-death choices and a tension over what exactly their American dream looks like. Tran is 40 and was born in a refugee camp. Her parents, Mai Nguyen and Vinh Tran escaped Vietnam in the 1970s and have operated out of necessity ever since. They opened a Vietnamese restaurant when Tran was in high school but never wanted their daughter to join that business; they wanted her to be a doctor and have financial security.