My guess as to why it's successful is that it's always been moderately priced and Huy Fong is recognized as the originator of the "Americanized Sriracha" sauces.
If a company tries to sell a cheaper version - then it feels like a cheap knock-off. And as everybody can afford to buy the original, why wouldn't you?
If a company tried to sell a more expensive premium product in flashier packaging - then it would feel inauthentic. What are you paying more for?
Plus whilst they've not paid for advertising, they've performed an excellent job of ensuring I'm aware of their history. I've no idea of the history of say Tabasco or Franks - but I've many times heard the history of this plucky little immigrant founded company (and this thread is just a continuation). Maybe the key is to just have a likable story - and let others tell it.
It reaches a point where it has economy of scale and specific taste profile developed that it is very hard for others to break into the market. Similar to bake beans for those living in UK.
The cost of ingredient is so low in the overall of things, restaurants, owner, vendors or whatever are not willing to switch ingredients and risk losing their customers. Tabasco is similar because majority of their business actually resides in Food Services sector and not consumers. The basic rule of thumb in Food offering, dont FUCK with your recipes.
I remember when I was still in the Food sector I was trying to import and distribute Sriracha for years in the late 00s and very early 10s. Every time the answer has been not enough capacity. Demand outstripping Supply in most of their important / domestic ( US ) market. Importers have to rely on non-official parallel import channels. Somehow I think it went internet viral by mid 10s, which in turns generate further interest. And a whole positive feedback loop was formed. Worth noting is that these things takes a long time to make. I dont know about Sriracha but Tabasco takes up to three years. Once you factor in capacity planning and sourcing of quality chillies ( and assuming yields are good ), that is why supply takes time to catch up.
Unfortunately these type of investment takes a very long time and are not something VC likes to invest in. But for me they are sometimes far more interesting and fascinating than most tech.
Heinz ketchup is on a whole different level; it's not just that it's the default ketchup (which it is), it's that:
1) When ketchup is called for, there isn't a substitute condiment that's kind of similar. Sriracha in general is a subset of hot sauces, but nobody thinks of a general case for ketchup--it's just ketchup. Maybe there are situations where no hot sauce but sriracha will do, but that's much rarer in the US (where Huy Fong dominates the market).
2) There are no Fancy Dijon Ketchups. The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better; Heinz is as good as it gets. It's Andy Warhol's old observation that the President drinks the same Coke that you do, only more so--there are way more niche colas than niche ketchups.
My first exposure to Sriracha was the 2014 lawsuit where a plant in California was causing issues.
Queue meeting my now asian wife whose family uses Sriracha in near about everything and it has basically replaced ketchup.
Matter of fact they use it so much it changed MY spice tolerance such that we now have Sriracha Ketchup instead of Heinz. We even went the extra bit and replaced American Mayo with Kewpie mayo.
American condiments can stand to learn from global condiments...
And like Heinz Ketchup (although apparently it's a regional thing, Hunts is popular in some places and there are other versions), the statement "without a trademark" makes no sense. Like, neither company owns "Sriracha" or "Ketchup", but both definitely have trademarks on the other parts of their packaging and names.
And Heinz has a Sriracha Ketchup.
>. Once you factor in capacity planning and sourcing of quality chillies
I believe Huy Fong (as of 2016) and Tobasco (As of much earlier) run their own pepper farms. Tobasco takes those three years to age in vinegar. Siratcha does not have an aging process I am aware of, it goes straight through the commercial kitchen and into bottles.
The don't change your recipe is certainly true. I remember Arnott's (Australia) has a disastrous backlash[1] when they tried to change the flavour of BBQ and Pizza Shapes.
Sriracha does seem to be northern California's version of ketchup - it is ubiquitous in restaurants. You can even get it at Starbucks, though I've never seen anyone add it to hot drinks.
I've seen it a lot in southern California as well, although various Mexican hot sauces are also popular, as is Tabasco.
The Tabasco story is really interesting and it's essentially the Sriracha of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tabasco is a private, family-owned company. They still grow all the seeds for its pepper crops on the same island they did in the 1800s [1]. Some family members were friends with Teddy Roosevelt [2]. I remember hearing, but cannot find a source right now, that Roosevelt like the sauce so much he had it included in military ration kits.
I'm the same, all of the knock off's don't taste very good. Mostly it seems they have much more vinegar flavor which I don't like and is most of the time the main reason why I think they are inferior.
Have you tried Sriraja Panich Sriracha?[1] It's one of the many sauces that claims to be the original Thai version. I liked the taste pretty well, just as much as the version manufactured here although they are different. It doesn't taste anything like Sriracha but I prefer Bachan's BBQ Sauce to Sriracha. [2]
Yes, to me this is a Coke like product. There are other sriracha sauces, just like there's other cola drinks, but so far there's only one Huy Fong Sriracha.
True though it's in the substantial economic interest of house brand teams to make it good enough, so they will keep trying. TJ in particular is quite good at this.
I don't think the likable story is key. Until recently, most of the many millions people buying the sauce didn't know anything about its origin. It was just the cheap sauce alone in its category that you could find everywhere.
I'd never heard an origin story, either. The reason I'd heard of it, liked it, and buy it myself is because restaurants very conspicuously put it on their tables. If that wasn't coordinated marketing, then I guess it's luck. But was probably marketing. Even without a "sales team," someone had to be going to those restaurants and making deals with them.
And the irony is, the "you could find everywhere" bit is entirely down to the sales force he doesn't have (but his ten distribution partners do, and his Asian competitors didn't have in his target market for most of their existence)
I've got two different blends of Sriracha sauce in my cupboard, both from Thai companies and one of them even copying Tran's bottle style, but it wouldn't have occurred to me until reading this article that a particular Vietnamese-American brand was supposed to be the "authentic" one. He could have got the origin story out there to people who don't watch documentaries about hot sauce if he'd spent money on advertising though...
Yep. They have a product people like and those people like it so much they do the marketing for them. It is the dream of any company to not have to do traditional marketing and advertising.
And what more would I possibly want from their product? It is a good product at a reasonable price. People are going to go with what they like.
All you have to do at this point is not mess that up. Don’t try to increase profit margins by raising prices or changing the formula. And don’t do anything that is going to lower brand recognition.
The biggest risk to Heinz ketchup, for example, is their premium price. Restaurant owners often go with a different ketchup because Heinz costs significantly more. Obviously Kraft-Heinz has determined that they can make more money this way and since they have strong brand recognition it probably won’t harm them.
People try that with ketchup all the time. It barely moves the needle. Sriracha, like Ketchup, is a 'cheap' product at this point. If people are going to spend 4 times as much they want something fancier.
Sauce and condiment companies that establish a franchise tend to be enormously profitable in general (see also pre-KHC Heinz or Lee Kum Kee). The product is very cheap to make, and as you note a bottle of sauce is pretty inexpensive (and contributes almost nothing to the cost structure of a full meal) so customers aren’t all that price-sensitive. These facts are a recipe for fat margins and high ROIC.
Aside, but if you ever find yourself in or near southern Louisiana, the Tabasco headquarters at Avery Island is actually a pretty fun outing. Lots of tasting (pre covid anyway), a self-guided factory tour, and some cool nature.
One thing that helped is it became the standard in pretty much every Pho restaurant I've ever been to. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but if definitely makes any alternative brand seem inauthentic.
The part that strikes me is that they still have the same 10 distributors since the 80's.
The "local Chinese restaurant" is a much more franchised thing than most people are aware of, and those 10 distributors meant it already ended up throughout the country and allowed everyone to try it for free. This is likely the secret to it's success.
The only similar product I can think of is Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Though it did get some advertising, by automatically being available in every Taco Bell it became a minor craze. It's not an easily reproducible concept though.
There are immigrant associations that will take recent Chinese immigrants, train them to cook the US staples, help them find a new "territory", and finance the restaurant. It's really fascinating.
I don’t think the “franchise” is literal in terms of a royalty — it’s just that the vast majority of Chinese restaurants order their supplies from the same few distributors yielding largely similar results. It’s why you pretty much know what you’re getting when you go to a new Chinese restaurant in a way that you don’t at a new Italian restaurant.
according the same thread, they also had a sole jalepeno supplier all the way up until 2017 when "the partners had a falling out. Huy Fong now sources from 3 suppliers."
"No trademark" is misleading. They have trademarks. Without them I expect exact clones would take their sales. The bottle and logo are quite distinctive and trademarked. The thing they didn't trademark is the name Sriracha.
Also the thread mentioned they've protected the squeeze bottle with green cap design which I think only applies to the US. For instance in Europe most Asia stores stock 'goose brand' sriracha which apart from the animal look almost identical[1]. Got burned by that myself a while ago when the whole sriracha craze started online and I mistakenly bought a bottle of the goose brand stuff.
"Sriracha" couldn't be trademarked because it is the name of the sauce. It's like someone trying to trademark "Kansas City style Barbeque Sauce" -- can't be done.
I don't know much about trademark but I know of this company called Apple. Would Apple be blocked from trademarking it's name if it sold actual Apples instead of computers?
yep, those are over here too, and they're all underwhelming. I don't think I've actively purchased any, but somehow I've sampled many of them. Maybe at restaurants that cut corners, maybe at friends houses. All were subpar in my tastes.
Trademark treats this as a crime against the original producer. Pretending to be that producer to fool the consumer into buying your product is a crime against the buyer known as fraud. IANAL and I don't know whether in a legal environment with trademark that form of fraud is recognized as such, but it should be and I think it would be a superior solution to the problem trademark is meant to solve.
It doesn't seem to apply in this particular case, but it's also important to note that having a trademark is different from having a registered trademark.
No comments yet pointing out what I think is the important point: Siracha is the established brand.
If anyone wants to compete with Siracha they would be best served by using marketing. That Siracha gets to skip spending on marketing after having developed a green field market just speaks to their competitive moat. They produce a high quality product at reasonable prices, if anything there isn't room to compete if not on marketing.
They've developed channel power, probably not on the same level as Coke, but something like that.
Once you have your place 'in the system' etc. you have incredible leverage.
The chocolate bars at my convenience store are the same, boring 20 variations for my entire life. They are not 'the best products' - they are just the products that will work through the system. It'd take a decade of consumer awareness to put something on par with 'Coffee Crisp' and then you have to get all of the gears of distribution to go along with it.
So what we end up up with in chocolate - and any number of other goods - is kind of a 'channel equilibrium' where products establish channel dominance (which requires scale), and then inch forward ever so slightly.
To see a 'new' product get to that level ... take a look at 'Swiffer' (cleaner) - basically, that's an institutional effort by P&G to 'disrupt' their own categories a bit and they've spent zillions marketing that. It's a trivial little thing, not much in the way of innovation, but when were talking consumer products at that scale, it never was about 'innovation'.
These companies do buy brands and scale them but even then brands meet their limit. 'Ben and Jerries' they can probably 10-50x in size ... but at that price point they can only go so far with the category. Odwalla ... sadly had to shut down.
This makes me think about the explosion in ice cream startups in the 2010s (the second time it happened after the 1980s). Ice cream is particularly hard to distribute but several companies made the cut and found themselves in nationwide supermarket aisles. I think there's always a consumer appetite to try the next new thing. I don't buy the idea that there's a moat around any of it.
>No comments yet pointing out what I think is the important point: Siracha is the established brand
In 2021 it is. They got to this place without marketing and by entering an already packed condiment market. Tabasco sauce had already been around for a century before they even started.
Yes, first-mover advantage per category, i.e., Pebble. There is also last-mover advantage, i.e., Apple Watch. If you get the FMA, you have to go big ASAP and continue to dominate.
Interestingly, the Huy Fong version of sriracha is no longer available in Finland due to it containing certain sulfites that are not allowed in spice sauces.[1] There are several competing sauces available, though. I remember wondering why it had disappeared from the shelves and only finding this one news article about it.
This reminds me a Chinese chili sauce brand called Lao Gan Ma. [1] The founder is a woman, who started the business as a road side shop selling hand made chili sauce. Now it sales more than half a billion dollars per year.
They do not run advertisement too. The founder also insisted on some distinguished principles such as not taking any debt, not own supplier money, and not getting listed in stock market.
The sauce is often named as a necessity for Chinese studying or working aboard. You can simply mix it with rice or noddles and have a delicious meal.
If you like spicy Chinese food, you should give it a try.
I love Lao Gan Ma, but was devastated to learn that it has a non-trivial amount of trans fats in it (it's right on the nutrition label). Now I need to find an alternative.
Funny enough, I can't stand Lao Gan Ma, there's a subtle taste to it that I find gross. I can't taste that flavor every time I use it, but if if I put it on dumplings it's there. However, I love some of the alternative versions. The best article I've seen on alternatives is below. I love Chile Crunch, I eat it on everything, it's a mash up of Asian and Mexican styles.
The US has a different flavor culture than SE Asia (though Huy Fong did get its start selling to SE Asian immigrants in the US).
I've tried more "authentic" Srirachas and don't like them at all (taste like cheap sweet ketchup to me). I eat Huy Fong almost daily (I have no Asian heritage).
It surprised me just how sweet authentic Thai cuisine is. Usually, American food is sweeter than its origins. In the case of Thai food, Americans may actually have toned down the sweetness a bit.
Thai food is an interesting case. The Thai government has recognized that food is great at breaking down cultural barriers, and they've gone to great lengths to promote it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17770707
I accidentally bought the brand that is more common in Britain (Flying Goose). It wasn't as spicy as I expected so I put a fair dose in my tortilla and now I can't even think about it without feeling nauseous because it was way too salty and garlicky. The British variant apparently has 5x the amount of salt, is less spicy, and tastes strongly of garlic. And yet it uses the exact same visual design of the bottle, pretending to be the same thing.
I much prefer the flavor of the Sriraja Panich brand you find in the Asian markets. But the squeeze-bottle packaging/pour of the Huy Fong stuff is definitely more convenient than the glass ketchup bottle style package Sriraja Panich comes in over here. I've never seen it in a squeeze bottle package like that second article shows.
There was a long piece on the beginnings of Sriracha in LA (I cannot find it because there are many), but what stood out to me specifically was it talking about how "back home" the American Sriracha was the shit.
To put it in clearer terms, this is like selling a "Chicago-style pizza" but putting cheddar cheese instead of mozzarella. This new version can be successful, but it's still not the original Chicago-style pizza.
Sri Racha is a town in Thailand, Sriracha sauce is named after that town and is ostensibly an attempt to replicate the sauce that originated from there - apparently it misses the mark a bit in terms of authenticity, but obviously it is still pretty great.
It's a California fusion food which has spread world-wide. Sibling comment is incorrect; it is at most "inspired by" the original Thai sauce. It's made with the California-native Jalapeño ingredients you might expect in a Mexican restaurant, not South East Asian cuisine.
The style has been around for a long time and other SEAsian countries have their brands.
I used to consume a lot of a different brand when I was a kid and always thought it was funny when this particular brand caught on in western countries. I never thought it was very good.
Tragically, I stopped being able to get this sauce a couple years ago when the EU blocked imports due to one of the ingredients (I'm struggling to find a source atm though).
It was magic! It made Irish cuisine bearable.
The alternatives - Flying Goose, etc. are oversweet, underspiced, and dreadful.
I don't think it's a question of it being blocked due to the additive, it's just that no-one has gone through the hassle of declaring the additive and doing the tests to show that the quantities ingested will be below levels etc. Maybe the demande for that specific sauce isn't strong enough, and importers prefer just to switch to a similar brand with no sulfites
Is it the original from Huy Fong though?
In the Netherlands there are a few different variants of the sauce for sale, but the original is only sold through smaller shops.
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If a company tries to sell a cheaper version - then it feels like a cheap knock-off. And as everybody can afford to buy the original, why wouldn't you?
If a company tried to sell a more expensive premium product in flashier packaging - then it would feel inauthentic. What are you paying more for?
Plus whilst they've not paid for advertising, they've performed an excellent job of ensuring I'm aware of their history. I've no idea of the history of say Tabasco or Franks - but I've many times heard the history of this plucky little immigrant founded company (and this thread is just a continuation). Maybe the key is to just have a likable story - and let others tell it.
It reaches a point where it has economy of scale and specific taste profile developed that it is very hard for others to break into the market. Similar to bake beans for those living in UK.
The cost of ingredient is so low in the overall of things, restaurants, owner, vendors or whatever are not willing to switch ingredients and risk losing their customers. Tabasco is similar because majority of their business actually resides in Food Services sector and not consumers. The basic rule of thumb in Food offering, dont FUCK with your recipes.
I remember when I was still in the Food sector I was trying to import and distribute Sriracha for years in the late 00s and very early 10s. Every time the answer has been not enough capacity. Demand outstripping Supply in most of their important / domestic ( US ) market. Importers have to rely on non-official parallel import channels. Somehow I think it went internet viral by mid 10s, which in turns generate further interest. And a whole positive feedback loop was formed. Worth noting is that these things takes a long time to make. I dont know about Sriracha but Tabasco takes up to three years. Once you factor in capacity planning and sourcing of quality chillies ( and assuming yields are good ), that is why supply takes time to catch up.
Unfortunately these type of investment takes a very long time and are not something VC likes to invest in. But for me they are sometimes far more interesting and fascinating than most tech.
1) When ketchup is called for, there isn't a substitute condiment that's kind of similar. Sriracha in general is a subset of hot sauces, but nobody thinks of a general case for ketchup--it's just ketchup. Maybe there are situations where no hot sauce but sriracha will do, but that's much rarer in the US (where Huy Fong dominates the market).
2) There are no Fancy Dijon Ketchups. The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better; Heinz is as good as it gets. It's Andy Warhol's old observation that the President drinks the same Coke that you do, only more so--there are way more niche colas than niche ketchups.
Queue meeting my now asian wife whose family uses Sriracha in near about everything and it has basically replaced ketchup.
Matter of fact they use it so much it changed MY spice tolerance such that we now have Sriracha Ketchup instead of Heinz. We even went the extra bit and replaced American Mayo with Kewpie mayo.
American condiments can stand to learn from global condiments...
And Heinz has a Sriracha Ketchup.
>. Once you factor in capacity planning and sourcing of quality chillies
I believe Huy Fong (as of 2016) and Tobasco (As of much earlier) run their own pepper farms. Tobasco takes those three years to age in vinegar. Siratcha does not have an aging process I am aware of, it goes straight through the commercial kitchen and into bottles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBLvKe9vors
[1]: https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/arnotts-sha...
I didn’t realize it take up to 3 years to make the sauce. It’s because they need to ferment some of the stuff?
Sriracha does seem to be northern California's version of ketchup - it is ubiquitous in restaurants. You can even get it at Starbucks, though I've never seen anyone add it to hot drinks.
I've seen it a lot in southern California as well, although various Mexican hot sauces are also popular, as is Tabasco.
Dead Comment
The Tabasco story is really interesting and it's essentially the Sriracha of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tabasco is a private, family-owned company. They still grow all the seeds for its pepper crops on the same island they did in the 1800s [1]. Some family members were friends with Teddy Roosevelt [2]. I remember hearing, but cannot find a source right now, that Roosevelt like the sauce so much he had it included in military ration kits.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tabasco-hot-sauce-industry-60-m... [2] https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/John%20Ave...
It remains a differentiated product based on its core feature, taste.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sriraja-Panich-Sriracha-Chili-Sauce/d...
[2] https://bachans.com/
I've got two different blends of Sriracha sauce in my cupboard, both from Thai companies and one of them even copying Tran's bottle style, but it wouldn't have occurred to me until reading this article that a particular Vietnamese-American brand was supposed to be the "authentic" one. He could have got the origin story out there to people who don't watch documentaries about hot sauce if he'd spent money on advertising though...
And what more would I possibly want from their product? It is a good product at a reasonable price. People are going to go with what they like.
All you have to do at this point is not mess that up. Don’t try to increase profit margins by raising prices or changing the formula. And don’t do anything that is going to lower brand recognition.
The biggest risk to Heinz ketchup, for example, is their premium price. Restaurant owners often go with a different ketchup because Heinz costs significantly more. Obviously Kraft-Heinz has determined that they can make more money this way and since they have strong brand recognition it probably won’t harm them.
Deleted Comment
Valentina black label is better for some things, though. It's not marketed as a sriracha sauce, just a Mexican hot sauce.
Aside, but if you ever find yourself in or near southern Louisiana, the Tabasco headquarters at Avery Island is actually a pretty fun outing. Lots of tasting (pre covid anyway), a self-guided factory tour, and some cool nature.
Deleted Comment
My grocery store has a half dozen Sriracha sauces. Some I like less, some I like more. They’re all pretty different in flavor.
The "local Chinese restaurant" is a much more franchised thing than most people are aware of, and those 10 distributors meant it already ended up throughout the country and allowed everyone to try it for free. This is likely the secret to it's success.
The only similar product I can think of is Mountain Dew Baja Blast. Though it did get some advertising, by automatically being available in every Taco Bell it became a minor craze. It's not an easily reproducible concept though.
This is interesting (but also makes sense) -- do you happen to have an article?
There are immigrant associations that will take recent Chinese immigrants, train them to cook the US staples, help them find a new "territory", and finance the restaurant. It's really fascinating.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/cookas-tale
Parts of it are incredibly obvious though, things like interior design, the Chinese Zodiac place mats, fortune cookies and Sriracha.
Dead Comment
[1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61aZqqvP7WL...
> 9/ Interestingly, Tran never trademarked "Sriracha" (he did trademark the green cap and rooster, though).
https://kakaomart.com/products/trader-joes-sriracha-sauce-1-...
If anyone wants to compete with Siracha they would be best served by using marketing. That Siracha gets to skip spending on marketing after having developed a green field market just speaks to their competitive moat. They produce a high quality product at reasonable prices, if anything there isn't room to compete if not on marketing.
Once you have your place 'in the system' etc. you have incredible leverage.
The chocolate bars at my convenience store are the same, boring 20 variations for my entire life. They are not 'the best products' - they are just the products that will work through the system. It'd take a decade of consumer awareness to put something on par with 'Coffee Crisp' and then you have to get all of the gears of distribution to go along with it.
So what we end up up with in chocolate - and any number of other goods - is kind of a 'channel equilibrium' where products establish channel dominance (which requires scale), and then inch forward ever so slightly.
To see a 'new' product get to that level ... take a look at 'Swiffer' (cleaner) - basically, that's an institutional effort by P&G to 'disrupt' their own categories a bit and they've spent zillions marketing that. It's a trivial little thing, not much in the way of innovation, but when were talking consumer products at that scale, it never was about 'innovation'.
These companies do buy brands and scale them but even then brands meet their limit. 'Ben and Jerries' they can probably 10-50x in size ... but at that price point they can only go so far with the category. Odwalla ... sadly had to shut down.
In 2021 it is. They got to this place without marketing and by entering an already packed condiment market. Tabasco sauce had already been around for a century before they even started.
Tabasco and Sriracha are about as similar are ketchup and mustard.
[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11251204 (in Finnish)
They do not run advertisement too. The founder also insisted on some distinguished principles such as not taking any debt, not own supplier money, and not getting listed in stock market.
The sauce is often named as a necessity for Chinese studying or working aboard. You can simply mix it with rice or noddles and have a delicious meal.
If you like spicy Chinese food, you should give it a try.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_Gan_Ma
I don't know if I'd classify it as spicy, though my taste buds may also just be very dead.
https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/the-best-chile-crisp-...
Edit: the Thai version is thinner, tangier and a toucher sweeter, and made from spur chillies, not jalapeños. [1] [2] [3]
[1] https://shesimmers.com/2010/03/homemade-sriracha-how-to-make...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/01/16/681944292/in...
[3] https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/what-is-sriracha-sauce
Not saying the Tran sauce is bad; just different.
The US has a different flavor culture than SE Asia (though Huy Fong did get its start selling to SE Asian immigrants in the US).
I've tried more "authentic" Srirachas and don't like them at all (taste like cheap sweet ketchup to me). I eat Huy Fong almost daily (I have no Asian heritage).
It really is a matter of taste I suppose.
edit: clicked on the link, it seems to be that one, I think?
The style has been around for a long time and other SEAsian countries have their brands.
I used to consume a lot of a different brand when I was a kid and always thought it was funny when this particular brand caught on in western countries. I never thought it was very good.
It was magic! It made Irish cuisine bearable.
The alternatives - Flying Goose, etc. are oversweet, underspiced, and dreadful.
https://newsbeezer.com/swedeneng/sriracha-sauce-can-no-longe...
Some discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/k3udmu/huy_fongs_sr...
Wow, what condescension.
Just dump some sugar and processed cheese on your food and you should feel right at home!
In fairness, Ireland has fantastic cheese, among other things, but spice is hard to come by.
I like this one, packaging looks almost the same: https://static.ah.nl/static/product/AHI_43545239353338303138...
Given that food laws need to be aligned with the EU I also don't believe that the block is an EU wide thing.
But hey, at least you have real cheese. American cheese is not cheese.