“Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive, trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive.”
Jackson Browne
Running on Empty
If you love hot sauces as much as I do, there’s no way you haven’t kept a bottle of Sriracha handy on your dining table and in your cooking.
Undoubtedly, Huy Fong Foods, the company behind Sriracha, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of hot sauces, and has been for many, many years. On average, the company produces 200 bottles of Sriracha per minute.
This essentially makes the founder and owner, David Tran, a billionaire. But he is far from the typical douchey billionaire with an oversized ego. In fact, he has said in numerous interviews that he has never dreamed of making billions of dollars. His dream was to simply “make enough fresh chili sauce so that everyone who wants Huy Fong can have it. Nothing more.”
Despite his massive wealth, he is very much still the same humble and shy person who started selling his homemade hot sauce out of his car. And today, he is still driven by the same purpose: he loves making hot sauce, and he loves sharing it with other people.
Over the years, many investors have offered him lucrative deals to buy out his company. And every time, Tran adamantly refused. As he remarked, “People who come here are never interested in the product, only in the profits.”
Today, Tran still fully owns Huy Fong Foods, and is still out there doing what he loves to do. As he joked, “My company is my girlfriend.”
Tran’s journey with Huy Fong Foods began in his home country Vietnam. He served in the Vietnamese army, but never saw any action. Rather, he mainly worked in the kitchen, and this gave him the opportunity to experiment with his own hot sauce recipes.
When his service ended, he brought his experiments with him. He told his wife that he could make something better than the sauces they were accustomed to having at home. Using freshly-ground chilis from his brother’s farm, Tran made his own rendition of the Thai Sriracha sauce, which he would store in reused Gerber baby food jars.
But soon, his life was about to take a huge turn. The newly-installed Communist Vietnamese government started clamping down on Chinese immigrants. They claimed that China was using immigrants to tear down Vietnam’s economy, making the country vulnerable for an upcoming military attack.
Being ethnic Chinese, Tran and his family feared for their lives. Fleeing persecution, they escaped on a cargo ship, carrying with them a locket and 100 ounces of gold hidden in condensed milk cans. With about 3,000 other refugees, they made their way to Hong Kong, and eventually, to the United States, where they were granted asylum.
As they began their new life in Los Angeles, California, it didn’t take long for Tran to start missing the spicy sauces they had back in Vietnam. And as he soon realized, many in the local Southeast Asian community experienced the same hot sauce withdrawal, too.
And so, Tran began selling his Sriracha sauce. He named his business Huy Fong Foods, after the cargo ship that he had escaped on. With the savings he had, Tran bought a 2,500 square-foot factory in Chinatown where he bottled his sauces. He sold his sauces out of his car, and also hand-delivered them to Asian restaurants and markets.
Even then, he had no intentions to grow a major business, as he sought to merely satisfy the cravings of his local community. “I started this business with my eyes closed,” he said. “There were no expectations at all.”
Word-of-mouth quickly spread. And as the demand for his sauces grew, so did his operations. Eventually, Huey Fong Foods became the behemoth that it is today. Yet, all this time, Tran has approached his business in the same way as he did at square one — with his eyes closed.
He never let himself get lured into the temptation for more profit. Instead, he has always focused on just making great sauces above everything else. And the profits came in nevertheless.
This dogged focus on quality may sound somewhat banal and uninspiring, but it is truly what sets Huy Fong Foods from other companies — and Tran from other entrepreneurs.
You can see this in their process, down to their choice of ingredients. For one thing, most companies tend to use dried chilis, because it’s so much more convenient, especially logistically. You don’t have to worry as much about them going bad, so they’re easier to harvest and process at a large scale. But of course, the taste of the finished product isn’t going to be as great as if fresh chilis were used.
Despite the trouble, Huy Fong Foods has always used fresh chilis to make their sauces, sourcing them from a single nearby farm. This way, they get to grind the chilis on the same day as they are harvested.
And amazingly, even though the company has been operating since the 1980s, they have never raised the wholesale prices of their sauces.
To add to that, Tran has resisted the temptation to MCU-nize his business, or to aggressively churn out as many variations of his products as he can, despite many people telling him to. His philosophy has been instead to keep things simple, and to not add to the noise unless the product is really, really good. Besides Sriracha, Huy Fong only makes two other sauces – a Vietnamese-style chili garlic sauce, and an Indonesian-style sambal oelek.
The company is known to have never spent a dime on advertising, instead pouring their profits into making their sauces as great in quality and as affordable as possible. “I could use less expensive ingredients or promote my products to make more money,” said Tran. “But no — my goal is always to try to make a rich man’s hot sauce at a poor man’s price.”
He added, “I want to continue to make a good quality product, like making the hot sauce spicier…And not think about making more profits.”
You see, many of us begin our endeavors out of love. The feeling and experience of “flow” and unadulterated joy keep us going through the long days and nights. Oftentimes we may experience the process itself as the reward. Because there’s nothing better to feel than the high of being so utterly engaged in our art, that time seems to stand still.
But down the road, we gradually lose touch with this love. Instead of freely experimenting and creating the best art that is expressive of our own individuality, thoughts, and ideas, we get bogged down with the mechanical process of merely keeping up with demands.
We get consumed with making a better living and having more success. And as a result, we become more afraid of taking the risks that got us there in the first place. So we play it safe. We play the tunes by which other people have defined us.
But the thing is, our work doesn’t lie. If we don’t love or believe in what we’re making, it shows in our work. It shows in the lack of care and attention to detail. It shows in the bugs and glitches that are hastily overlooked. And on a more visceral level, the work feels lifeless and stale.
As author Robert Greene remarked in an interview:
“You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’
When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”
Just as David Tran has always done throughout his career, we must continuously stay connected with our love for our art. With that being said, it’s worth looking back — perhaps even at your earliest memories — which aspects of your art did you absolutely fall in love with? What made it so exhilarating, and even otherworldly?
For me, I didn’t get into writing, or even reading, at an early age. But there was always something deeply embedded in me that loved “being lost” in another world. When I was little, this manifested in my love for playing with toys, listening to music, and even literally being lost. My siblings would often get a good lecture from my parents for letting me wander off and explore on my own whenever we went somewhere.
It was only in my teens when I discovered a similar experience in writing. Oftentimes when I write, it still feels ethereal. As I immerse myself into the subject I’m writing about — in this case David Tran — it feels as though I’m experiencing life through a different pair of eyes. And in doing so, I feel connected to a purpose that’s much larger than myself, and my own life feels so small — so much smaller than I’m inclined to imagine.
But of course, I don’t feel like this all the time. It’s very much like how it is in maintaining a relationship with another human being, I guess. Sometimes, I have the need to reconnect with that love, and rediscover what it means to write again.
And the way to do that is fairly simple. You just have to go back to creating your art for its own sake. Read a book that genuinely excites you. Write something just for yourself. Experiment, and be as playful as you can. Go ahead and make a mess.
Carry this playfulness with you as you set out to create and share your art. Step out of the machine of merely churning out more and more. Instead, make it your priority to create something of great quality and value — something you can truly be proud of. And this is truly fulfilling. This beats all the money and attention that you can get.
Take care of your art, and your art will take care of you.
When Tran was asked why he never once raised the wholesale prices of his sauces, he responded, “I’ve achieved more than I’ve ever wanted.”
“I feel most fulfilled knowing that everyone loves my product,” he added. “That feeling is better than earning money. So I tell everyone — and I’m telling you — don’t do things just for the money. No matter what you do, success is not guaranteed.”
In summary, just remember: your art is your girlfriend. Or boyfriend.
Izzat Zailan 