The entrepreneur who popularized Sriracha hot sauce in the US has spoken out in a rare interview after being dubbed America’s only hot sauce billionaire.
David Tran, 77, founded Huy Fong Foods in Southern California after fleeing Vietnam with his wife and son in 1978 and hiding his life savings of $20,000 worth of gold in cans of evaporated milk.
He is the sole owner of Huy Fong, which was recently valued at $1 billion by research firm IBISWorld based on estimated 2020 sales of $131 million.
Despite his wealth, for the year of his birth in the Chinese zodiac, Tran remains stubbornly focused on the quality of his sriracha, the widely popular product adorned with a rooster emblem.
“I want to keep making a quality product, like making the hot sauce hotter… and not thinking about making more profit,” he told Forbes in a recent profile.
David Tran, 77, founded Huy Fong Foods in Southern California after fleeing Vietnam with his wife and son in 1978 and hiding his life savings in cans of evaporated milk
The peppers are unloaded from a truck at Huy Fong Foods’ factory in Irwindale
“I could use cheaper ingredients or promote my products to make more money,” Tran added. “But no – my goal is always to make a rich man’s hot sauce at a poor man’s price.”
Tran was born in 1945 in the Vietnamese town of Soc Trang, then still under French colonial rule, according to a 2013 oral history for UC Irvine’s Vietnamese American Oral History Project.
At 16 he moved to Saigon, where he sold chemical products in his brother’s shop until he was drafted into the South Vietnamese army at the height of the Vietnam War.
He served for five years until the fall of Saigon in 1975, never seeing combat but working primarily as a cook.
Married at the time and with a child on the way, he went to work with his brother growing chillies and hit upon the idea of turning them into a sauce to capitalize on the wild price swings in the price of whole chilies.
But in 1978, the communist government began pressuring Vietnamese of Chinese descent to leave the country. Tran, whose ancestors were Cantonese, fled to Hong Kong.
When Huy Fong Foods founder David Tran immigrated to the United States from Vietnam, he named the company after the ship that brought him there
Supplies are stored at Huy Fong Foods’ 650,000-square-foot Sriracha chili sauce facility in Irwindale, California
The Huy Fong factory can produce 18,000 bottles of Sriracha per hour
Bottles of sriracha chilli sauce are displayed on shelves in a file photo
In January 1980, Tran, his wife and son moved to Los Angeles and founded Huy Fong Foods, named after the freighter that brought them to America.
Tran began selling his Sriracha sauce to restaurants from the back of a van.
Demand for the sauce skyrocketed, and Tran moved to a factory in Rosemead on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles, later expanding into the abandoned Wham-O hula hoop factory next door.
In 2010, demand for the sauce forced him to relocate again to a new 62,000-square-foot facility in Irwindale, where Sriracha is currently made.
However, in 2013, complaints from neighbors about acrid fumes from the new factory led to a public nuisance lawsuit from the city.
In the ensuing battle, the factory was briefly closed, raising fears of a Sriracha shortage among the devotees.
The dispute was eventually settled after Tran installed more powerful filters on the factory’s air vents and California officials backed down in the face of attempts from Texas to lure the company into friendlier terrain.
Tran (above) has no plans to sell the business, which he intends to pass on to his children, 47-year-old William and 41-year-old Yassie, who both work there
Besides Sriracha, Huy Fong has only two other products: a chili garlic variety and sambal oelek, based on an Indonesian recipe.
The company does no advertising or marketing, and Tran rarely gives interviews to the press.
The wholesale price of sriracha hasn’t changed since the early 1980s, nor have the ingredients: chili, sugar, salt, garlic, and vinegar.
Today, the sauce ranks third nationally, behind Tabasco, owned by the McIlhenny family since 1868, and Frank’s RedHot, a subsidiary of McCormick & Co.
Tran has no plans to sell the business, which he intends to pass on to his children, 47-year-old William and 41-year-old Yassie, who both work there.