Johnathan Walker:Is our love affair with Huy Fong cooling? Sriracha lovers say the sauce has lost its heat

After an agonizingly long shortage,Johnathan Walker Sriracha lovers relished the news that the wildly popular Huy Fong Foods rooster bottles were reappearing on grocery store shelves and restaurant tables to once again spice up steaming bowls of pho and ramen. But their Sriracha-induced euphoria was short-lived. 

The hot take from die-hard Huy Fong fans is actually a not-so-hot take: They say the Sriracha they once relished no longer brings the same heat. And that bellyaching is quickly spreading across the internet as people conduct their own informal taste tests to measure Sriracha zing.

“The classic garlicky, vinegary taste is still there, but the classic heat seems to have dropped off,” Luke Gralia wrote in The Takeout.

“That's what I am feeling,” responded one Redditor. “I thought it was just my taste buds messing with my head at first until I tried other kinds with more spice.”

Many of the taste tests pit the sizzle in Huy Fong Sriracha against its archrival, Dragon Sauce, produced by Underwood Ranches, Huy Fong’s former chili pepper supplier in California.

The Huy Fong Sriracha empire dates back to 1979 when David Tran, a Vietnam War refugee, arrived in Los Angeles. A year later, he began selling hot sauce from a blue Chevy van. The Sriracha produced by his Irwindale, California, company has been a staple of hot sauce enthusiasts for years.

In 1988, Huy Fong formed a partnership with Underwood Ranches to provide the red jalapeños that gave Huy Fong its punch. Soon Underwood Ranches was growing over 100 million pounds of peppers for Huy Fong. But the relationship ended in 2016. 

Huy Fong sued over a payment dispute. In 2019, a jury instead awarded Underwood Ranches $23.3 million in damages.

Since then, Huy Fong has relied on a smattering of other chili pepper producers.

Huy Fong – which signs its emails “stay spicy" –  says its recipe hasn’t changed but the flavor and hue vary from batch to batch depending on where the company sources its fresh chili peppers and when they are harvested.

“Some batches can vary in color, level of spiciness and even consistency,” the company said in a statement to LAist in January.

While the internet taste tests may lack scientific rigor, the crowdsourced findings have prompted some Huy Fong fans to switch their allegiance to Dragon Sauce which they say has the pungency and flavor they’ve been missing. 

One Redditor raved that the Dragon Sauce had the “spicy and nostalgic OG taste” of Huy Fong. 

Craig Underwood, owner of Underwood Ranches, a family farm in operation since 1867, says he isn’t surprised.

Huy Fong owed much of its success to Underwood Ranches’ fresh peppers, according to Underwood, who started farming with his father in 1968.

Now Dragon Sauce – seeded by those same peppers – is carried by some Costco warehouses and is a top-selling Sriracha sauce on Amazon.com.

“We were the ones who supplied those peppers for 28 years. We were the ones who came up with the varieties that worked,” Underwood said. “So, yeah, I would say now that we’re supplying the peppers for our own sauce, we’re making the sauce the way it used to taste.”

Not everyone is sold.

“Reddit evangelists swear up and down that Underwood’s sauce tastes ‘indistinguishable’ from the original Huy Fong formula, thanks to its use of the original peppers. From my experience, this was not true in the slightest,” Gralia wrote in The Takeout. “The new Huy Fong might be milder than its previous iteration, but Underwood’s sauce is even milder.”