HOT MESS

Huy Fong sriracha rose from nowhere to become an iconic American food brand. Here's how a feud between partners knocked it off its throne.

- Indrani Sen

It was November 2016, and the fourth-generation California farmer had just completed a perfect pepper harvest another high point for a business, Underwood Ranches, that had grown exponentially over three decades on the strength of a single crop. As the sole supplier of the juicy red jalapeños for sriracha, Huy Fong Foods' iconic fiery-red chili-garlic sauce, Underwood's empire of peppers had spread from a 400-acre family farm in the 1980s to 3,000 acres across two counties outside Los Angeles.

Sriracha's rise had by then become the stuff of business legend. That spicy, slightly sweet, good-on-everything sauce, in the instantly recognizable bottle with its white rooster emblem and bright green nozzle, was the brainchild of David Tran, who had first devised the recipe and sold the stuff in L.A. in 1980 as a Vietnamese refugee starting a new life for his family.

Tran's business motto is "make product, and not profit," but Huy Fong had become the No. 3 hot sauce brand in America-all as a private company, without selling even the smallest share to the country's Big Food titans. At the time, Tran's green-tipped bottles could be found in one in 10 American kitchens and on the International Space Station.

Sriracha's success grew from the firm ground of Underwood and Tran's business partnership: Underwood supplied all Huy Fong's chilies, and Tran was Underwood Ranches' only pepper buyer. By 2012, Tran had built a gleaming 650,000-square-foot factory less than two hours from Underwood's Ventura County headquarters. On a tour of the site, he told Underwood that together they would fill it with chilies.