By Lauren Gold, Pasadena Star-News
The hottest movie of 2013 will be released online this week for just $5 a view.
Bottles of Huy Fong brand Sriracha chili sauce are seen for sale at a grocery store in Los Angeles, California, October 30, 2013. ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
“Sriracha,” a 33-minute film dedicated to the famous hot chili sauce by YouTube producer and filmmaker Griffin Hammond, hits the Internet on Wednesday. This year has seen a Srirachapocolypse, with the inaugural Sriracha festival and even Sriracha vodka, but now for the first time, the story of the famous “rooster sauce” has been captured in a documentary film.
Hammond said the documentary turned out to be much more than he originally hoped.
“There is so much I learned over the summer. The story got bigger than I thought it would be,” Hammond said. “In some ways, I imagined this would be kind of this wacky, silly documentary about the fans and the kind of cult phenomenon of Sriracha, but then I found there are these really human stories there.”
The most compelling of those stories is that of Sriracha creator and Huy Fong Foods founder and CEO David Tran, whose brand of chili sauce with the telltale green cap is the most well-known in the U.S.
Tran founded his company after immigrating to America as a refugee from Vietnam. The boat that took him out of Vietnam was the Huey Fong Panamanian freighter, which inspired the company name, the film reveals. The movie includes old Reuters footage of the boat off the coast of Hong Kong.
“When I start the business, we need to create a company name,” Tran says in the film. “What name for me? So I said, ‘OK. Huy Fong, so I can remember it.’”
Perhaps the reason for the lack of a Sriracha movie before Hammond was the relative mystery surrounding the company. Huy Fong was largely closed to publicity or press interviews. With a legal dispute between the city of Irwindale and Huy Fong over an alleged stench coming from the factory and bothering neighbors, Tran has opened his doors.
Even Tran admitted that he was reluctant to allow Hammond in his old Rosemead factory or the new 650,000 square foot state-of-the-art factory he just built in Irwindale. Ultimately, Tran said he was pleased with the outcome.
“I like the documentary,” Tran said via email. “Griffin visited our company and went into deeper detail about our operations. I was not going to let Griffin do it in the beginning, but now the Sriracha fans and friends can see our operations. I heard someone say that it is more difficult to visit Huy Fong than the Pentagon.”
Read the full article by Lauren Gold, Pasadena Star-News.
