Imagine you walk into a grocery store and see one brand of each product. Matching ketchup squeeze bottles. One company “Mustard”. One brand of “sauce”. “Hot sauce” from only one manufacturer. What a nice world that would be.
If Momofuku succeeds in its goal, the only “Chili Crunch” product on store shelves will bear the Momofuku name.
Momofuku, founded by chef David Chang, acquired the rights to use the phrase “chile crunch,” spelled with an “e,” last year from Chicago Colonial LLC, a Denver company that registered the trademark in 2015 with the Patent and Trademark Office. In the United States, it has been making a Mexican-inspired chili crunch sauce since 2008. Then on March 29, Momofuku filed for a trademark for the term “chili crunch,” written with an “i,” and began sending cease-and-desist orders to several companies selling Chili Crunch Products was first reported by The Guardian.
A jar of crunchy momofuku chili.
(Maria Tugger/Los Angeles Times)
Social media backlash immediately followed. Actor Simu Liu, who serves as chief content officer of MìLà, a food and beverage company that makes frozen dumplings and crispy chili peppers, challenged Momofuku to a blind taste test on Twitter last week: “Winner keeps name, loser (will win) 'Be you.' “Back off.”
In a statement to the Times, a Momofuku spokesperson said the company has seen several crunchy chili products rebranded as Chili Crunch over the past year, and that the brand was never intended to “stifle innovation in a category we care deeply about.”
“When we created our product, we wanted a name we could own and intentionally chose 'Chili Crunch' to further differentiate it from the broader chili flake category,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We worked with a family-owned company called Chili Colonial to purchase the brand from them. They had previously defended the brand against companies like Trader Joe's.
One vocal critic of Momofuku's threat of legal action against other chile sauce companies was Fly by Jing Chef and businessman Jing Gao. It began bottling Sichuan Chili Brittle in 2018, and is often credited with popularizing chili brittle. She is also an investor and advisor in Homiah, one of the brands that received a cease and desist letter.
As reported by many media outlets, Gao Special Company applied for the “Sichuan Chili Crisp” trademark in 2019 but its application was rejected in 2020.
“The ‘Chili Crunch’ trademark should also not have been granted,” Gao wrote in a newsletter titled “On Trademark Bullies.” “It is a descriptive term for a cultural product that has been in Chinese cuisine for hundreds of years.”
A Jar of Fly by Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp by Jing Gao. Gao is credited with starting the current chili sauce craze by introducing crunchy chili sauce in 2018.
(Maria Tugger/Los Angeles Times)
But what the newsletter and other stories don't mention is that last week, on April 3, Fly by Jing once again filed for the trademark “Sichuan Chili Crisp,” according to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. Then on Monday, Gao said in a statement to The Times that she had asked to withdraw the request.
Gao said Fly by Jing has reapplied for “Sichuan Chili Crisp” as well as “Chengdu Crunch” to “protect against the capabilities we need to defend ourselves against a greater force that may threaten our existence. However, in light of the events of the past two days, we now believe That there was enough awareness about the descriptive nature of the term, and that the USPTO would reconsider the Chili/Chili Crunch trademark, that we felt comfortable applying to drop our product name application, which we had already done as of Saturday .
“Even if we had acquired the Sichuan Chili Crisp trademark, which we have now abandoned, Fly By Jing would not have used it to scare off small businesses,” Jing wrote.
However, if Fly by Jing obtains a trademark, the company will be responsible for enforcing it, as outlined by the US Patent and Trademark Office. By not protecting your trademark, you may lose it.
If I had it my way, neither term would be trademarked.
David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods Sriracha Sauce, has never sought to own the term “Sriracha” exclusively. Instead, he trademarked the distinctive rooster logo and bottle.
I reject the idea that someone can exclusively own something that is rooted in my culture, a food that I consider a core part of my identity. These brands will determine who can benefit from food associated with entire cultures. It would be like someone trying to trademark salsa macha and salsa verde. Wait, inexplicably, someone has trademarked salsa verde, pointing to a serious problem with the USPTO's lack of knowledge to accurately or fairly determine what is descriptive or confusing when it comes to certain foods.
I, like many Chinese Americans, feel a sense of pride and ownership over condiments typically made from garlic, other types of garlic, chili peppers, and oil. Whether you call it crunchy, oily, crunchy, or saucey, it is a condiment integral to the cuisines, cultures, and experiences of Asian Americans around the world.
Michelle Teo, founder and CEO of Homiah Foods, described receiving the cease and desist letter as a “punch in the gut.”
“Homiah's Sambal Chili Crunch is personal and based on Granny Nonie's family recipe dating back countless generations of Nyonya heritage in Penang, Malaysia,” Teo wrote in a statement on LinkedIn. “I was shocked and disappointed when a well-known and respected player in the Asian food industry legally – a one-woman show operating on a much smaller scale – threatened to sell me a product that represents part of my family’s history and culture.”
Moving to the “Chili Crunch” brand, whether intentional or not, will only whitewash an entire genre of hot sauces. Although some sauce companies have strong financial backing – according to Forbes, Momofuku raised $17.5 million in funding last year on $50 million in sales, MìLà recently raised $22.5 million, and Fly by Jing raised $12 million in the year Past – However, many of these products are manufactured by small AAPI-owned companies.
They all deserve a share of the $3 billion-plus hot sauce industry in the United States. This number is expected to nearly double in the next decade, according to a market report from Fortune Business Insights.
A jar of chile sauce can be found on most tables at restaurants serving dumplings in the San Gabriel Valley.
(Maria Tugger/Los Angeles Times)
Melody and Ross Stein's pizza company Pi00a (pronounced pie-oh-ah) started selling jars of crunchy chili peppers when they launched a ghost kitchen in Koreatown last year with their children, Taisia and Rylan. Pi00a is a family-owned deaf business that sells Neapolitan pizza with Asian influences and a mission to provide employment opportunities for the hearing impaired.
For the sopressata pizza, Melody came up with her own version of crunchy chili peppers, something “sweet and spicy” that goes well with the dry Italian salumi, she said on the phone with her daughter acting as translator. “People loved it and started ordering jars,” Pi00a now sells about 100 jars a week through its online business and 40 retailers.
“We are just starting our small business, and rebranding costs a lot of money. It is very difficult to absorb any additional expenses. We just hope [Momofuku] They realize the impact it has on society and are dropping brands.
“Although I have not received one yet, it is only a matter of time,” James Chang, a Kansas City chef who makes his own chili sauce, wrote in an Instagram post referring to the cease and desist letters. “Although I have not received one yet, it is only a matter of time. … For someone who criticized How ethnic aisles in grocery stores don't have enough minority-owned brands [David Chang] He does the same thing. Instead of creating a society, he wants to create a monopoly.”
Crunchy and crunchy chile oil combination.
(Maria Tugger/Los Angeles Times)
You can find a jar of chili sauce that's half oil and half drippings of chili and garlic on the tables at most restaurants that serve dumplings in the San Gabriel Valley. Many make the sauce themselves.
Before it was a trendy condiment that could be found in every supermarket (and even Costco), there were half-empty jars of hot, crunchy Lao Gan Ma peppers with the skin around the lids in my refrigerator and on my family's dinner table. My Chinese grandmother and uncle introduced me to Lao Gan Ma with crispy chili in the late 1990s. It's a sludge-like mixture of dried chili peppers, crunchy onions, MSG, and fermented soybeans. For years I called it crunchy chili. I could never remember the name, and simply asked for more of that “chili crunchy stuff with the stern lady.”
Tao Huabei created this sauce in Guizhou, China, in 1984. Her face is the one on every bottle.
Nearly a decade ago, I brought Lao Gan Ma for a hot sauce tasting with the late Jonathan Gould and Kogi BBQ chef Roy Choi. The chilli crunchy stuff with the stern lady on the bottle was the clear winner.
“A sauce invented by our ancestors, our version has been perfected for over 30 years…” the makers of Bowl Cut chili Cris wrote on Instagram. “No one should have a trademark to describe a sauce that has been around forever.”
Chili crunch belongs to everyone.
Deputy food editor Betty Hallock contributed to this report.
