Key Points
- David Tran, the man behind the hot sauce bottle in your pantry, has now become a billionaire.
- Sriracha has become a fanatical household staple for decades since its inception - born from a Vietnamese refugee.
- The iconic condiment's company is named after the ship he travelled on to flee Vietnam. This is Mr Tran's story.
Hot, rich and saucy.
One product has elevated David Tran as arguably the world's 'spiciest' billionaire.
Sriracha is widely-known around the globe as a cult condiment that's been a mainstay in households for decades, but very few know about the Vietnamese refugee who brought the sauce to their dinner tables.
Mr Tran, 77, is the sole owner of Huy Fong, his business that he named after the ship on which he travelled to flee Vietnam.
He's described Sriracha as a "rich man's sauce with a poor man's price", and now he's become one himself.
So how did he do it?
From refugee to riches
From a Chinese background, Mr Tran was born in Vietnam, where he was eventually drafted into the Vietnam War in 1970 as a cook for five years.
His family's vision to turn chilli into sauce was cut short when the Communist Vietnamese government cracked down against ethnic Chinese people in 1978.
He later fled the country in December 1978 with more than 3,000 refugees in a freighter called the Huey Fong.
The vessel that transported him to start his new life would become the namesake of the company he founded, Huy Fong, paired with his Chinese astrological sign, the rooster.
After spending six months in a Hong Kong refugee camp, he was granted asylum in the United States in Boston, Massachusetts before settling in Los Angeles.
Sriracha hot sauce bottles have become a household pantry item around the world. Source: AAP / AP / Nick Ut
“By February, I was making sauce.”
Before Sriracha became a household staple, Mr Tran and his family jumped on bicycles and delivered their first sauce bottles packaged in recycled baby food jars to small shops and restaurants.
"I made this sauce for the Asian community," he said.
"I knew, after the Vietnamese resettled here, that they would want their hot sauce for their pho ... But I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese."
David Tran uses fresh chillies stacked in his LA-based factory - and very little - else to create his world-favourite sauce, Sriracha. Source: Getty / Gina Ferazzi
What's in the sauce?
Chilli peppers, a bunch of garlic, some sugar and salt along with distilled vinegar. Whacked into a plastic bottle, topped off with a green squeeze lid and set at a relatively affordable price.
But despite roaring demand and an appetite to make more profit, Mr Tran told publication Vice Munchies that he had never once raised the wholesale price of Sriracha.
His premise was always to "make a rich man's sauce at a poor man's price".
The origins of the sauce can be traced back some decades earlier, in 1949, to a woman who lived in a town in Thailand called Si Racha. She named the sauce after her hometown.
Thai Sriracha is known to be sweeter, thinner and milder.
"I know it's not a Thai Sriracha," Mr Tran responded. "It's my Sriracha."
How popular is it?
Huy Fong Foods is now valued at US$1 billion ($1.5 billion), based on estimated sales of US$131 million ($199 million) in 2020, according to IBISWorld.
There are 18,000 Sriracha bottles being made every hour. The sauce is tattooed . You can carry some in a .
People embody the ; there are scores of Facebook fan pages — .
While production initially began from a small building in LA's Chinatown, Mr Tran's company eventually became a giant in its own right, with no advertising and relying solely on word of mouth to become the third-most-popular hot sauce in the US.
