Chili Garlic Sauce and Its Humble Beginnings

While moving into a dorm on campus a few short weeks ago, one of my main worries (as I'm positive I'm not alone in this) was food. I sometimes dreaded college, wondering how I was going to keep up my usual habits of cooking my own food without my own kitchen, very limited access to any grocery stores to purchase ingredients, and laughably few dollars with which to buy food, leaving that second item pretty much pointless.

And here I am, a college student who is currently much more active now than I had been over my two month summer vacation, and I'm living off of pretzels, bagels, and granola bars. Knowing these aren't particularly healthy eating habits, I've been stressing even more over food. That aside, my sister and I moved into our dorm, having to take several trips because my brother's car is tiny. During our first trip, we struggled to find parking, and therefore were held up longer than we thought. My brother then was late to work, so we ended up taking that one trip for the day and slept there with whatever we had brought in our rush to get out the door that morning (groggy from little sleep and exhaustion from five days of brutal band camp, and looking forward to two more days after moving in). To my surprise and amusement toward my fairly well-planned, health-conscious sister, when we finally got around to unpacking our belongings very late that night (as band camp didn't get out until about 11pm), I found out we had packed no bedding, hardly any clothes, and, as I was looking and praying to find food in some boxes, I found nothing except a small, half-eaten box of granola bars and a small bottle of Huy Fong Chili Garlic Sauce.

I'm hardly a big fan of spicy foods, but when I first tried this Chili Garlic Sauce sometime last year, I pretty much fell in love. During my senior year in high school, I'd put it on sandwiches, tortillas, and in lasagna. It hurts like hell if I eat too much of it, and I think I literally burned my tongue with it a few times. (I'm not sure if that's a testament to the intensity of the hot sauce, or to how much of a pansy I am..) But regardless, it's delicious. And since it's a big part of my diet these days (though from a health standpoint that's very unfortunate), I decided to do a bit of research on this sauce.

All of the information I've gathered came from one of two sources: the Huy Fong Foods company page, and Wikipedia. I decided the former had too much of a biased proponent stance on the quality of the product (but why shouldn't it? It's smart marketing, after all), so I looked up "Huy Fong Foods" on Wikipedia for a history of the company; one that wasn't trying to persuade me to buy anything.

Huy Fong Foods, though it is one of the largest businesses in the Asian hot sauce market, began rather small-scale in Los Angeles' Chinatown under the direction of David Tran, a Chinese farmer from Vietnam who fled to the US after the Vietnam War. He was born in the year of the Rooster, which is apparently the reason for the rooster on the logo. The Huy Fong Foods company is now in Rosemead, California, where family of the founder now manage the company. The chili garlic sauce itself is calorie-free but very high in sodium (the exact opposite of food that any kind of athlete should be consuming! grr..). But it's delicious. That's my excuse.

                                                                          ...Awesome.

I think the most interesting aspect about this company is that they do not professionally advertise their products. Instead of advertisements, they rely on word of mouth to advertise their sauces. For this reason, on their website they sell a "sampler pack" of Chili Garlic, Sambal Oelek, and Sriracha (their most famous and best selling variety) sauces for relatively cheap price of $7.00. I thought this was an odd way of doing things, but it has obviously worked as an advertising strategy. That leads me to believe that, despite America's eating habits steadily growing less focused on nutritional value and more on greasy fast food, quality really does matter (at least to fans of Huy Fong products, that is).