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.
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ..."
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
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.
>The site was taken offline for two days in August 2002; Ford Motor Company law firm Howard Phillips & Andersen had threatened litigation against FC's upstream provider HostGator as a means of silencing a discussion of a series of layoffs entitled "Ford, where finding a job is job one." Ford claimed that it infringed a trademark slogan "Ford, where quality is job one," discontinued after widespread use from 1980 to 1997. The site eventually returned minus the news of the Ford layoffs.
Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?
It would be nice to aggregate all that and put it under a "profile". Kind of like facebook, but your entire profile feed is just the long list of court records, assholery and screw overs for other people. I actually saw a version that someone did for Jack (Twitter's ex founder) a few years ago and it was hilarious but cleverly informative. That's honestly where I got this idea from.
At one of my previous jobs, we were acquired by a company whose CEO had been caught for something involving bank fraud and was under a gag order not to talk about it. As far as I know they're still in business.
As a bolshie type myself, very quick to moan at higher-ups, I think we need to be realistic that often we grunts don't have the big picture (especially the politics) and unfortunately that won't stop somebody lowdown move from merely internal letting off steam to anonymous public borderline slander.
There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.
Not just CEOs, but we also need it for investors. For example when startups screw over employees on equity, the founders, board members, and their firms, should all be on a public blacklist.
Well, this kind of data actually exists. The key is to maintain anonymity. Glassdoor does it. You will see a lot of employees actually complain about management and seniors by name on there.
I wish there would just be laws against this type of behaviour, but we all know who is in control of which laws are getting passed. So short of that social shaming will have to do. A CEO that treated humans and/or the planet like dirt, should for example be unable to go to a restaurant, a bar, a park, down a road, onto a beach without getting thrown out or ridiculed, heckled or just called out by others. Behave like scum? Get treated like scum. Fuck with the tribe? Get thrown out. It is one of the oldest correctives for shit behavior any society has ever used in the history of humanity. The problem is they have created a world in which they have too many spaces to avoid this type of consequences.
Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.
Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.
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'?
Yeah, I remember the two parties accusing each other of essentially the same thing -- destroying a 25-year business relationship over short-term greed, for no good reason.
It's good to see the result of the court case, now at least we know who tried to screw who over.
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 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.
If we’re talking alternatives, the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha became our staple at home during the shortage. We still use red for a variety of sauces but rarely as a direct condiment.
I’ve never really been a fan of it as a direct condiment so I’m inclined to agree.
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.
> I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
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).
On the Reddit thread it was said that underwood hasn’t quite exactly nailed the, I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.
Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
Counter-argument: we're talking about saving a handful of bucks for something that lasts months. Do it if you find it fun - I tried it and didn't like the work nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).
I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.
I've tried getting started with this but my first attempt a habanero/mango sauce was _horrible_, must've used a slop recipe or something. Do you have a good base to recommend?
AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.
Depends on purchasing power, how much sauce you consume, value added/quality - $12 is often not much, cost of two sandwiches, or 4-pack of beer, half price of one lunch meal, 1/3rd of Netflix subscription, etc... What's crazy is $200 plain cotton white t-shirt, but i.e. $150 merino t-shirt isn't that crazy anymore.
I bought two bottles a few months back. It doesn’t taste good.
Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else
How much sauce are you putting on your food though? 17% sugar is bad in a drink where it adds up fast, but for a hot sauce where you're using maybe 2 teaspoons max (likely less), that's like 1-2 grams of sugar. Essentially a rounding error in your daily intake.
Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.
I loved their dry seasoning [1]. Bought some when I visited the bay area several years back and used to use it on everything from toasts to pasta. Sadly, haven't visited US since to be able to pick up some more :-(
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.
By way of contrast, I've seen so many corporations led by deranged idiots who used to make good decisions within their realm of competence that I have no trouble believing that Huy Fong decided that they could completely dominate Underwood, and were very wrong.
The more power a person believes they have, the stupider they act.
Quoth wikipedia: "The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Underwood on the grounds of breach of contract and fraud."
The court awarded $10M in punitive damages in addition to the $13M in compensatory damages. So the options are basically "Huy Fong's lawyers are criminally incompetent" or "Huy Fong absolutely screwed over their supplier".
This story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork.
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.
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.
It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ..."
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?
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.
Well there used to be fuckedcompany.com that served a similar purpose. Of course it was litigated into history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
>The site was taken offline for two days in August 2002; Ford Motor Company law firm Howard Phillips & Andersen had threatened litigation against FC's upstream provider HostGator as a means of silencing a discussion of a series of layoffs entitled "Ford, where finding a job is job one." Ford claimed that it infringed a trademark slogan "Ford, where quality is job one," discontinued after widespread use from 1980 to 1997. The site eventually returned minus the news of the Ford layoffs.
Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?
I suppose court records can function as such a list.
If you also want 'alledged assholery' on that list, the list will just turn into a list of CEOs, due to false reports.
It would be nice to aggregate all that and put it under a "profile". Kind of like facebook, but your entire profile feed is just the long list of court records, assholery and screw overs for other people. I actually saw a version that someone did for Jack (Twitter's ex founder) a few years ago and it was hilarious but cleverly informative. That's honestly where I got this idea from.
Why stop at CEOs?? If you implement this for everybody then I will know who to sell my used car to and who is an unworthy jerk!
Given the vast over representation of sociopathy and malignant narcissism in CEOs it’s going to be most CEOs even if you filter out false claims.
But if you’re gonna hate someone it’s good if you have a real reason to do so instead of bullshit and rumors.
> false reports.
Are you sure they're false?
Are we sure that some reports of every person are false? Of course we are.
It won’t help. At my second job the president hired a VP with a white collar criminal record and told everyone not to bring it up
At one of my previous jobs, we were acquired by a company whose CEO had been caught for something involving bank fraud and was under a gag order not to talk about it. As far as I know they're still in business.
The POTUS is well known for screwing over contractors and lenders. It clearly didn't damage his reputation enough.
As a bolshie type myself, very quick to moan at higher-ups, I think we need to be realistic that often we grunts don't have the big picture (especially the politics) and unfortunately that won't stop somebody lowdown move from merely internal letting off steam to anonymous public borderline slander.
There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.
There is such wall. Usually published by Fortune.
Not just CEOs, but we also need it for investors. For example when startups screw over employees on equity, the founders, board members, and their firms, should all be on a public blacklist.
That only works for poor people because CEOs will sue immediately. Someone with a lot of money for legal insurance would have to run it.
Well, this kind of data actually exists. The key is to maintain anonymity. Glassdoor does it. You will see a lot of employees actually complain about management and seniors by name on there.
Glassdoor, as big as it is, allows for deleting bad reviews.
I wish there would just be laws against this type of behaviour, but we all know who is in control of which laws are getting passed. So short of that social shaming will have to do. A CEO that treated humans and/or the planet like dirt, should for example be unable to go to a restaurant, a bar, a park, down a road, onto a beach without getting thrown out or ridiculed, heckled or just called out by others. Behave like scum? Get treated like scum. Fuck with the tribe? Get thrown out. It is one of the oldest correctives for shit behavior any society has ever used in the history of humanity. The problem is they have created a world in which they have too many spaces to avoid this type of consequences.
Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.
Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.
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'?
Yeah, I remember the two parties accusing each other of essentially the same thing -- destroying a 25-year business relationship over short-term greed, for no good reason.
It's good to see the result of the court case, now at least we know who tried to screw who over.
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?
Related: why does HN always link to old.reddit?
Because the "new" layout is awful.
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 also never heard of Huy Fong until now. Flying Goose is the one that you find to buy in Europe. Also, very tasty!
If we’re talking alternatives, the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha became our staple at home during the shortage. We still use red for a variety of sauces but rarely as a direct condiment.
Flying Goose is good, my favourite is Ox brand. It's very punchy, heavy on the garlic.
Oh there's another Sriracha Sauce?
I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
There are far better hot sauces out there, available at your local Chinese, Pakistani, or Iranian supermarket.
Agreed, just tastes like chilli and vinegar to me and I never understood the appeal.
I’ve never really been a fan of it as a direct condiment so I’m inclined to agree.
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.
Try it, it's fun!
https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...
There are countless different (hot) sauces. And each one is liked by someone somewhere in the world. Shall we list them all?
It's just slightly spicey ketchup, pretty sweet.
There are definitely better things out there.
Which ones would you recommend?
> I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandu...
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).
On the Reddit thread it was said that underwood hasn’t quite exactly nailed the, I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.
> I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
You're thinking of two different words.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consistency
Sense 1: agreement of parts or features to one another or a whole
Sense 2: degree of firmness, density, or viscosity
Notably, sense 1 has a related adjective, consistent, and sense 2 does not.
It's crazy. They kept expanding more and more already. Apparently they just weren't increasing the rate of increase enough.
Now HF sauce sucks, I wasn't paying attention to this and got a bottle after this whole debacle, and it's horrible.
> why would you do that unless you have no morality?
Since company leadership has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, profit-maxxing for shareholders is the only moral thing to do /s.
This is s privately owned company
Human greed knows no bounds
Now I know to buy the Underwood brand sriracha.
It looks like this:
https://a.co/d/06NNRslo
Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
> $12 dollars per bottle is crazy
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
Planted a few Jalapeno seeds in the soil in mom's greenhouse once and harvested buckets of chilies, more than I knew what to do with. Super rewarding.
>leave them on a window sill
Ooooh anybody have a rec for the most idiot-proof hot thing to try to grow?
Rainbow tabasco required nothing but water, ime - if you have decent sun or a grow light.
These things: https://seedsbeeblooming.com/shop/ols/products/rainbow-tabas...
Can't vouch for that merchant though
Pepper plants are really easy to grow. Pick seeds that sound like they’ll yield the flavor you’re looking for.
Counter-argument: we're talking about saving a handful of bucks for something that lasts months. Do it if you find it fun - I tried it and didn't like the work nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).
I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.
>nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
Definitely wear gloves when chopping chillis!
I've tried getting started with this but my first attempt a habanero/mango sauce was _horrible_, must've used a slop recipe or something. Do you have a good base to recommend?
I used to be all-in on Sriracha, used it on everything.
Then, can't remember where, I found out about Gochujang[0] and now it's my go-to fermented chili for everything
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gochujang
AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.
Depends on purchasing power, how much sauce you consume, value added/quality - $12 is often not much, cost of two sandwiches, or 4-pack of beer, half price of one lunch meal, 1/3rd of Netflix subscription, etc... What's crazy is $200 plain cotton white t-shirt, but i.e. $150 merino t-shirt isn't that crazy anymore.
That’s twice the price of a similar sized bottle of fancy ketchup and will last you four times as long.
I bought two bottles a few months back. It doesn’t taste good.
Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else
That list of ingredients is awful.
“Red jalapeno, sugar, water, salt acetic acid, garlic, natural flavor, xanthan gum, sodium metabisulfite, and/or sodium bisulfite (sulfiting agent / preservative), potassium sorbate (preservative).”
I’ve had sriracha in the past and it’s disgustingly sweet. Apparently it’s 17% sugar!
How much sauce are you putting on your food though? 17% sugar is bad in a drink where it adds up fast, but for a hot sauce where you're using maybe 2 teaspoons max (likely less), that's like 1-2 grams of sugar. Essentially a rounding error in your daily intake.
Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.
nothing about this ingredients list is awful, what are you talking about?
https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Sauce-Original-Pack/dp/B...
Best hot sauce ever
I loved their dry seasoning [1]. Bought some when I visited the bay area several years back and used to use it on everything from toasts to pasta. Sadly, haven't visited US since to be able to pick up some more :-(
1. https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Seasoning-11-oz/dp/B01LY...
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.
By way of contrast, I've seen so many corporations led by deranged idiots who used to make good decisions within their realm of competence that I have no trouble believing that Huy Fong decided that they could completely dominate Underwood, and were very wrong.
The more power a person believes they have, the stupider they act.
Quoth wikipedia: "The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Underwood on the grounds of breach of contract and fraud."
The court awarded $10M in punitive damages in addition to the $13M in compensatory damages. So the options are basically "Huy Fong's lawyers are criminally incompetent" or "Huy Fong absolutely screwed over their supplier".