David Tran: The $1 Billion+ Sriracha Sauce Founder...
David Tran left Vietnam in 1978 in aim to make it to the US. Today he's a billionaire with one of the hottest sauce brands in the world...
Happy new week,
If you haven’t heard of Sriracha hot sauce already, then you’ve been living under a rock. If you didn’t know, Sriracha hot sauce is an iconic chilli sauce that has become a household name across the world, developing a cult following and brand loyalty unlike any other hot sauce.
The founder of Sriracha hot sauce is David Tran was born in Soc Trang, Vietnam, 1945. In 1975 he went to work with his brother farming chili peppers, and stumbled across the idea of converting chilli peppers into a sauce to take advantage of the wild price increase of whole chilis. He started by producing his flagship hot sauce, Pepper Sa-te and four years later, Tran and 3,317 other refugees left Communist Vietnam for the United States.
Tran arrived in California in the first week of January 1980. By February, he was back to making chili sauces, naming his company after the ship he had boarded to escape his home country - ‘Huy Fong’. Tran started Huy Fong Foods not only to cater to his fellow Vietnamese immigrants, but also to a multicultural group of consumers in America.
"I made this sauce for the Asian community," Tran told the New York Times. "I knew, after the Vietnamese resettled here, that they would want their hot sauce. But I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese."
Sriracha dates back to 1949, when a woman in Thailand made a chili sauce using chili peppers, vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic. She named it after the small seaside town she lived in, Si Racha.
Huy Fong has never had to advertise its products, they’ve built a cult following through word of mouth. Huy Fong converts over 100 million pounds of fresh chiles into hundreds of thousands of bottles of sriracha annually. Tran managed to hit $12 million in sales in 2001, which by 2013 had geown to $80 million. Huy Fong now generates more than $150 million a year and is valued at $1 billion, selling 20 million bottles a year.
The Sriracha cult don’t just buy the hot sauce, Sriracha now offers keychains, tees, hats, and underwear. Sriracha addicts are loud and proud of their devotion to the sauce. It's not just a hot sauce, it's a way of life.
David Tran said the success of Sriracha is down to the fact that what he was building wasn’t money driven. He saw an opportunity to bring something extremely authentic to him and his culture to America. He started with nothing and let nothing stop him. It took almost thirty-five years, but slowly and surely he managed to make Sriracha a dietary staple.