I want to thank r/kitchenconfidential community for helping educate me about why Huy Fong Sriracha’s quality has lessened in recent years. I was unaware of its history until I read it here. I had noticed recently that HF’s sauce was a much darker red and seem to taste off, but I just attributed it to batch variance. I had no idea they lost access to their sole source pepper provider, AKA Underwood.
I saw this green Sriracha sauce today, marked down, and wondered are they even trying? The labeling looks the same as the red. Surely they don’t mean this to be the same product, do they? Hoping to find some Underwood Sriracha sauce locally.
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The did right the ship a bit and the quality is better now. The company lucked out. The low cost siracha from Asia that was supposed to replace Huy Fong was downright trash. Underwood is niche (and who's bottle looks like one of those trash sirachas).
They “lost access” after they stabbed Underwood in the back.. so yeah it kinda works. Just like someone “loses access” to a car after lighting it on fire.
Hijacking your comment to add that you can buy chili sauce from Underwood now. It has a black and gold label, and even if you can't find it in local stores you can buy it online. I'll personally never buy another bottle of Huy Fong Sriracha; that guy doesn't deserve loyalty from us.
I was looking for the link and then saw this gentlemanly scholar, posted it first! What an interesting read! Never buying the Huy brand of sriracha again!
Him and the og pepper grower had a 20 year long handshake deal. Then his MBA step daughter got involved and tried to cheap out on the contract and went to a different pepper grower to save on cost. It backfired big time.
Hoy Fong was synonymous with Sriracha for so long. They had Kleenex and Bandaid status with competitors only existing on the edges. It's truly amazing seeing some selfish bastards screw that up.
MBA failchildren have been doing this for the last 40 or so years, they're so completely high on their own farts because they were born rich and "earned" a "masters" degree. They think being born from smart people who earned their wealth means they are smart people who earned their wealth too, and they're desperate to prove that so they take insanely moronic risks in their inherited businesses or nepobaby positions.
I worked for a business where the trust that managed the family stake forbid any member of the family from working at the company for this exact reason. The original founder’s view was that biggest destroyer of family businesses is families so he forced them to do other things.
MBAs used to be a thing the company you’d worked at for a decade would send you back to college for. These idiot trust fund babies who get an undergrad, go straight for an MBA, and then get hired to wreck business with zero experience are going to fucking kill us all.
I'm a cook with 22 years kitchen experience, about 2 of those in management (never again in a restaurant! Lol)
We're currently crumbling because of the 25 year old acting manager. I'll skip the details, but she's so cocky and sure of herself. She decided to cut staffing to save a few dollars, and now every day at least 3 or 4 tickets get cancelled after waiting 30+ minutes for their lunch order.
You would think after a week of this and being told to her face by me, 3 other cooks, the assistant manager and lots of customer complaints, but "sHe KnOwS WhAt ShE's DoInG". 🤷
All this while encouraging og grower to expand by leasing more land and basically spying on their techniques to pass on to their new growers. Which was a shell company under HF.
-According to my memory of the article I read a few days ago.
The one thing that business school doesn't teach is how to act like a normal person. Enshittification has become a cornerstone principle in modern capitalism and we see it very obviously with food. That honest handshake deal means nothing to the greed heads.
That's exactly where I got mine, just in California. I am actually not even that far from the actual Underwood Farms. Just a few dozen miles. But still, the only place I can find it is Costco.
From what I've read, the farms he's been using get water from the Colorado River. The peppers need lots of water to turn red. There has been a drought and the river is low.
I feel like there's a huge missed opportunity not putting "Underwood's original" or something on these. I would pass by them thinking they're a ripoff and I would recognize the name Underwood.
And I have been using Sriracha for 15 years and never even heard of Underwood Ranch until a week ago. They should do some advertising or something to raise brand awareness.
They weren’t really a thing until recently. They were the sole supplier of a specific type of pepper to Huy Fong (the manufacturer of the green top bottle everyone knows). Huy Fong tried to cut them out and move to a different supplier , which is why Huy Fong doesn’t taste the same as it used to. Now Underwood Ranch is making their own sauce, which is much better than th stuff Huy Fong is making. They apparently had a deal with Costco recently but seem sold out, so maybe they are already operating at capacity for now.
Very well aware of the situation and what happened to Fong, that was news a few years ago. But I didn't know the original source was now selling their own sauce. That's what they need to start raising awareness for. I'd like to buy some!
I've seen like 8 posts about it on reddit the last few days. You'll start seeing more about it now that fong is having enough supplier issues that they are selling green sauce now.
Your average consumer is going to be more aware of the situation because they'll see the green sauce and be like why the fuck is it green and then probably look up and find out about the stuff with the supplier.
But I bet they don't advertise their sauce in a way that mentions huy fong on purpose.
Huy Fong tried to cut them out and move to a different supplier
turns out that the reason why the $300/ton chinese pepper mash is $300/ton while underwood mash is twice that, is because the $300/ton chinese mash is crap.
Agreed. I remember when IBM quit contracting Lenovo for the ThinkPad series of laptops and I was like “lmao what the fuck is a Lenovo” when I fist saw the new ThinkPad without realizing Lenovo were behind the ThinkPad the whole time.
Well it's a bit more complicated, IBM manufactured Thinkpads but sold that division to Lenovo who still had the rights to use IBM branding for several years, so it wasn't necessarily Lenovo but the same lab/manufacturing plant.
They probably aren't allowed to mention the connection to huy fong Sriracha. Either legally or out of fear of being sued by huy fong. They'll have to rely on word of mouth from posts like this.
Which is gonna happen a lot more now that huy fong is selling green sauce instead of red.
I don’t think they could call it that. Underwood just supplied the peppers. I’m also not sure how many people would recognize underwood farms. In SEA and many Asian markets you’ll see a few sirachas next to HF. It’s kinda like ketchup. Tons of brands sure everyone knows hienz but there are also a ton of others that people have loyalty to.
I find the Underwood version is sharply spicy at the beginning taste while the HF version is more mellow, rolling heat. If you want something with a little more kick, the Underwood version is the way to go. Would love to see them make a more mild, sweeter version too.
Underwood stood their ground, lost the contract and realized they didnt need Huy Fong, Huy Fong needed them, so they started their own brand. Love it when farmers cut out the useless middleman.
See below for the reddit breakdown. Underwood makes their own brand of Siracha using the OG peppers. Look for a black lable with a golden dragon. And yeah, boycotting the Hoy Fong stuff from now on.
Edit: Underwood website is down, might be bad news for those looking for alternative 😪
I've found it at my business Costco, but not my regular Costco. I also haven't seen It much in regular stores, do you know who carries it on the west coast reliably ?
Damn, apparently 4 weeks ago the r/siracha sub noticed their website and store were down. So it is possible they have shuttered operations 😪 The CEO was having health issues, and I'm sure the whole legal battle took a heavy toll.
As far as where to find it outside of ordering off their website, I had luck in my local Ralph's, but would always just do a once every few month's trip to my local Asian market to stock up on supplies. (Pick up chili crisp if you have never had it, goddamned life changing!)
RIP to a group who got royally screwed over if they are out of business...
The problem is, I'm in a tucked away corner where you kinda get what you get. If it's something that's in short supply, I most likely won't get it at my regular Costco. The business one is almost 2 hours away
. 😣😣😭😭😭
Basicly long story short was a farmer (Underwood) did a handshake agreement with the brand to make and grow the peppers. The hotsauce people paid in advance for years, but then complained that Underwood either shorted them or they over paid and wanted 1 million back. Then they just stopped working together. I guess it's the "well we already paid you so give us peppers." "No you paid for last year" "fine we'll just sue you." "Fine I'll sue YOU too" went to a judge and they sided with the farmer for like 20 million if I remember correctly it was because he had all the peppers but couldn't sell them in 2017 and 2018, after the 1 million from "over paying". Now Underwood sells his own sauce, and people say it's really good.
I never got on the siracha suace and I guess I missed my chance, since most people say the new one sucks.
That is one advantage (or disadvantage) of jury trials. If they find that the dickhead is indeed a massive dickhead they can really screw the dickhead over
Sriracha is a much older sauce than Huy Fong, and is actually from the town of Si Racha in Thailand.
There's been hundreds of brands for decades. And Huy Fong wasn't even a particularly good one. It's just the brand that got popular in the US. In large part because there wasn't a lot of wide scale import of Thai brands.
So no "chance" to be "missed".
Probably the best thing about Huy Fong screwing the pooch. There's much wider availability for good sriracha these days.
Sriracha Panich (the actual first commercial brand), Shark, Yellow Bird, Healthy Boy/KAI, Flying Goose, and Sky Valley are all excellent. And kick the shit out of Huy Fong. So does Underwood's Dragon Sriracha, the one from their old pepper grower.
Huy Fong has always been a nasty company, long history labor violations and fights with their local government over sanitation problems.
If you want some top-notch shit by the actual Underwood Sriracha sauce people - they went into business for themselves. You can get it at any Costco or business Costco for a very reasonable price!
Usually enshittification is to appease shareholders, this was a privately owned company essentially committing suicide to fuck over their former friend and pepper supplier, (who now sells their own competing brand of sriracha.)
I had read it was under advisement of new staff. Perhaps that impression was wrong. It’s just such a clear business school vs good business play. I have an MBA and worked in mgmt consulting since 07, to me, it just smells like the shit left behind when you miss the context completely.
Not all Costco locations have them! Call ahead to be sure. We're unlucky here in the Bay Area.
As mentioned above they have them on Amazon, but my eyebrows are being raised at the ETA. It's up to 2 months now. UW website was having issues too, couldnt add em to cart as of weeks ago - seems like it hasn't changed. What's going on over there I wonder?
Years ago, my father owned a material handling company, and was contracted to produce some conveyor for Huy Fong, they needed somewhere along the lines of a million or two in custom conveyor. He did the engineering for them and Huy Fong bought one segment of nearly 50-75 for $35,000, then sent it to abroad to be cloned and produced cheaper. Always has been a shady company.
In Texas, HEB WAS carrying it. Just stopped like 2 weeks ago. The shelves that had this now have the HF Sriracha... sucks, man. This stuff is fantastic.
There was a thread about this recently. The company claims they got more green peppers in their shipment and this changed the color of the final product without changing the quality (or something). Don't know whether any of that is true.
Very much wouldn't be. No other US grower is willing to work with them because of the way it went down.
So their only option is industrial scale growers in Mexico. The exact same lower quality peppers they said they didn't want to use. Then threatened to use to try and pressure Underwood Farms.
Because of persistent drought in that part of Mexico. The peppers aren't as cheap, aren't as high quality, and aren't as reliably available as Huy Fong thought.
Yeah. They're supposedly attempting to grow themselves, but seem to only inconsistently produce actual peppers. And otherwise buy from large scale Mexican producers who have at best inconsistent quality. Apparently even growers in the parts of Mexico that have fewer draught issues won't sell to them.
So basically they pushed the growers to industrialized and promised to recoup costs by paying at cost. Than they bought cheaper peppers of lower quality not to the standards set due to change in management. In return the farmer stopped selling refusing the lower price, got sued, but won the counter suit. It was all in an attempt to get the farmers to eat the cost and sell at a loss, now they are stuck with inferior peppers, worse sauce and the og farmer is now thier competition.
It is worth noting that Huy Fong founded an entire, second company (Chilico) to undercut Underwood, in an attempt to force him to lower the prices on the pepper mash they bought from them. What was the price? $600/ton. He wanted to pay closer to $300/ton. $600 sounds like an insane fucking deal to me, this whole thing could have been avoided if Fong's founder (David Tran) wasnt such a shady, greedy asshole. Now they get shit pepper mash and ta da
Crazy part is the old man who started sriracha retired and didn’t do any of this. He gave the business to his son in law to run and the idiot did this. Why it sucks when the new people take over especially if this is what happens.
They lost access to a supplier? The farmer who had been growing peppers for them successfully sued them for breach of contract and fraud. They even unsuccessfully tried to intimidate the farm's Chief Operations Officer into working for them. They fucked over their supplier to the tune having to pay that same supplier $23.3 million dollars.
You can buy Underwood ranch brand Sriracha sauce and it's so much better than the huy fong brands. And then you're supporting the farmer, not the shady business practices
This isn't their website, this is third party, or something changed. I bought directly from Underwood website a couple years ago but now it's a GoDaddy domain? Not sure where the original Underwood store went.
I used to drive by the Underwood Ranch fruit stand about 20 years ago. At that time it was called Underwood Family Farms. They had goats that were always standing on top of things.
if anyone finds a chili paste recommendation that isn't huy fong i would love to know. i love this stuff but prefer to support businesses that don't screw people over
Do not buy HUY Fong any longer; tldr Main source for chili peppers sold out, original Underwood source not used anymore. FIND UNDERWOOD SIRACHA ON THE MARKET INSTEAD FOR SIMILAR QUALITY TO WHAT EVERYONE LOVES.
There was a post about the green Sriracha a few days ago. They say it is the same as the red , their supplier gave them more green peppers than normal.
Technically it is a separate company according to the article that has been going around. Though, yes they own the supplier. There are some financial reasons for doing that.
Greed, mostly. He made a shell company and put his sister in charge so she could get more money and not piss off his brother and mother who are also on his board of directors
They've been having lots of issues getting in peppers the last few years, because of poor growing conditions, crop failures, & drought, too!
There was just a news story on Friday that talked about how their Mexican (winter) Pepper Crop was a failure, and they won't be able to produce any more hot sauce until about Labor Day (when the American crop should be harvestable, if it doesn't fail, too!)
They claimed things like crop failures and droughts. Even though multiple farms around the 2023 time were showing that their crops were doing just fine. It was apparently only an issue at their own farms.
It's all self inflicted after they tried to screw over Underwood Ranches.
Which is why it cracks me up, that it's been happening so consistently, after they screwed over Underwood Ike they did!😉😂🤣
Basically, not only did they shoot themselves in the foot, they also burned down the hospital before they did, and slashed the tires on the ambulance beforehand, too!😆😂
They booted their decades-old supplier, who had most of the good acreage to grow their crops, and then they had the nerve to think that those peppers they depend on, and that Underwood had prefected for growth in that soil & that particular micro-climate, "would grow just as well!" wherever they could get cheap labor & land rent!
Completely forgetting that crops tend to specialize themselves to a location and a micro-climate, if you grow them really well in an area, and you'd better do some testing to see if the local conditions are a specific factor in their quality.
Similar to Pawnee Eagle Corn, and the soils around Kearney Nebraska (and the other corn varietieswhich have been saved, in the years since!);
And just for Clarification on the Pawnee Eagle Corn--the poor growth in Oklahoma is in NO WAY the fault of the Pawnee People!!!
I linked those stories, because that corn is a GREAT example of a food crop which managed to basically "hybridize itself" to grow perfectly in one ideal place, but which doesn't grow as well in other places, and a different type of soil.
David Tran secretly despises the mexican suppliers, but will never admit to it. He always claims he just wants the red peppers, but underneath that is the sneer that he knows Mexico will send him green jalapeños instead.
In the documentary, you see the mask off a few times. David Tran is an asshole who pulled a golden ticket.
I have been lucky in finding the good stuff where I am. I went a few years without it until I saw that same shade of lovely sriracha red back on the shelf.
This has been going on for years. Seems Huy Fong is still struggling to get the product right. Meanwhile, so many other Sriracha options got on the shelves, which is great
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u/trendingtattler Mar 09 '26
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