Hot Take
David Chang and the spicy question of who owns chili crisp
“We actually have a lot of women here in Guizhou who can make their own delicious chili sauce…But of course, Old Godmother’s hot sauce is delicious and has its own characteristics.”
-Weibo commenter
“For too long, Chinese and Asian pantry staples have been relegated to the ‘ethnic aisle’ of grocery stores. When I started Fly By Jing, I wanted to break out of that box and push authentic, high-quality flavors into every aisle.”
-Jing Gao
The Portuguese and Dutch brought chilis to China from the Americas in the 1500s. Yet hot peppers didn’t take over Chinese cuisine as quickly as you’d imagine. Initially, they were used as ornamental plants and medicine. This changed later, out of necessity.
Guizhou, an impoverished mountainous region of south-central China, was the first to use chilis in cooking sometime in the late 1700s. This was in part because they had inconsistent access to salt. They needed another way to season and preserve their food. Chilis filled the gap, and new condiments were born. The intense flavor and versatility of spicy sauces like chili crisp quickly spread to neighboring Sichuan province, the rest of China, and beyond.
Today, dozens of hip brands sling sizzling chili crisps in every flavor and shade of red. However, for a long time there was only one brand that was widely available. Lao Gan Ma, meaning old godmother, is instantly recognizable for the unimpressed-looking lady depicted on the red label.
This lady is Tao Huabi, the founder of Lao Gan Ma. She was born in Guizhou, the youngest of eight girls, and wasn’t taught how to read or write. She married a geologist at twenty and had two sons. After her husband died, she opened a restaurant in Guiyang to support her family. She sold noodles with her special spicy sauce. Local students in the area referred to her as godmother because she gave them extra food and generous discounts.
Soon, she noticed her chili crisp sauce had become popular with local construction workers. She sent these workers home with free sauce. This spread word-of-mouth buzz about her chili crisp further. Soon, avid customers were coming in to buy the sauce without any noodles. In 1994, she converted her restaurant into a store to sell her famous chili sauce. She started her own factory two years later at age 49.
Her success brought imitators. She struggled with knockoff brands selling similar chili crisps in identical packaging. Her beloved sauce suddenly had to contend with competition that wouldn’t play by the rules. Tao Huabi applied for a trademark but the Chinese government denied her request. So she hired third party companies to target her rivals. In 2001, the high court of Beijing ruled that similar chili crisps couldn’t use the name “Lao Gan Ma” or imitate its packaging. She received 400,000 RMB ($60,000) in compensation. Her trademark was approved in 2003. Her persistence paid off. By 2015, Lao Gan Ma had annual sales of over $540 million. Today, Tao Huabi’s net worth is estimated to be $1.05 billion.
Chili crisp is very easy to make: pour hot oil over dried chili peppers. After the chilis steep in the oil, they become fragrant and turn the oil fiery red. The appeal of chili crisp isn’t just its spice. The flavor of toasted chilis is amazing—equally nutty, savory, and sweet. Mixing in other ingredients like fermented soy beans, dried shrimp, shallot, garlic, and Sichuan peppercorns imparts additional layers of flavor.
Chili crisp pairs well with everything from greens to fish, eggs to dumplings. If you’re at all into spicy food, it’s addictive. You’ll soon put it on everything.
Chili crisp is also, if you’ll pardon my pun, so hot right now.
Its popularity was, until recently, a unifying force.
Its ubiquity across restaurant tables, recipe books, and plates of tofu, green beans, and pork gave chili crisp a sort of culinary soft power. It’s a shared reference point between regions of China as well as Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and beyond. For Asian immigrants in the United States, making your own chili crisp or finding an old favorite in a store can be a joyful connection to family history and identity. Hot sauces are folk heroes of regional cuisine. Even if people disagree about their favorites, these arguments tend to be playful and loving.
Things only got heated when the lawyers got involved.
On March 18th, 2024, Malaysian food brand Homiah received a cease and desist letter. The letter claimed that Homiah’s Sambal Chili Crunch product infringed on Momofuku’s trademark rights. This was upsetting and confusing for Homiah. Beyond the validity of trademarking a centuries-old hot sauce, there was the issue of spelling.
Homiah spelled chili crunch with an “i” and Momofuku’s trademark was for chile crunch with an “e”, as in the country who went to war to ensure that Bolivians can never go to the beach. Momofuku demanded that Homiah stop using the name within 90 days and claimed ownership over both spellings.
Behind the lawsuit was Momofuku Goods, the grocery arm of celebrity chef David Chang’s enormous empire. Momofuku Goods had acquired the trademark for chile crunch in a previous lawsuit. Denver-based Chile Colonial LLC had created a Mexican version called chile crunch and sued Momofuku for using the name. In a curious feat of legal jujitsu, Momofuku bought the trademark from them for six figures as a settlement. A year later, they threatened legal action against other sauce brands. They claimed that however you spelled it, the term chili crunch belonged exclusively to Momofuku.
The backlash was fierce, and people didn’t mince their words. Critics saw it as a bad faith effort to claim communal culinary heritage for personal gain, akin to trademarking the word ketchup or hot sauce. It seemed to slam the door in the face of other Asian American food entrepreneurs. Homiah’s founder, Michelle Tew, said she was “gutted.” Jing Gao, founder of Fly By Jing spoke out on LinkedIn:
The "chile crunch" trademark should never have been granted. Just like "chili crisp", it is a generic and descriptive term for a culturally specific condiment, one that has existed in Chinese culinary culture for hundreds of years.
I am disheartened to hear that Momofuku is using a trademark with a validity that is tenuous at best to go after numerous brands including small minority women founded businesses. This kind of action, if successful, sets a dangerous precedent for the squashing of fair competition, not to mention how ridiculous it is to try and take ownership of a generic cultural term.
Brands like FLY BY JING, Homiah and others exist in a traditionally marginalized space. It was not long ago that investors and retailers told us that our business was too "niche", there was no opportunity or space for brands like ours, selling products like chili crisp. The more entrants and competitors in the space, only serves to validate the market opportunity. This isn't a zero sum game, and there is enough space for everyone. The bigger we can grow the pie for all, the better it is for everyone.
David Chang fired back quickly, claiming this was all a misunderstanding caused by good intentions and legal technicalities. He said they’d chosen“chile crunch” to respect Chinese food culture and brands like Lao Gan Ma. He also blamed the US patent system.
The unfortunate reality is that owning a patent requires sending cease and desist letters to infringers. Trademark lawyer Daniel Shulman explained it to Eater this way:
“if you don’t enforce your rights against others who use your mark or confusing variations of your mark, you can lose your trademark rights altogether because the trademark no longer functions as a distinctive brand identifier. You simply have to do it; it’s part of good trademark practice.”
This wrinkle can profitable or problematic, depending on who you ask. It exists for a good reason.
Left undefended, a patent will eventually be infringed upon to the point of “genericide.” This means a trademarked term is used so commonly it loses legal validity. This has happened with the terms aspirin, zipper, escalator, cellophane, trampoline, and laundromat. It’s also why ultimate frisbee is technically called ultimate. Frisbee is a trademark owned by Wham-O. Today, Kleenex, Band-Aids, Tupperware, and Ping Pong are all perilously close to genericide.
Chang’s argument was about legal obligation, not malicious intent. In today’s public discourse, intent increasingly matters less than impact. For many, his words ring hollow.
Bad faith trademark practices are as old as trademarks, but they've become more visible in the 21st century due to the outrage economy that powers the internet.
In 2010, Facebook sucessfully trademarked “face.” In 2013, Disney attempted to trademark “Dia De Los Muertos” to market Coco, inciting outrage from the Latinx community. In 2016, The Fine Brothers even tried to trademark “react” to monopolize reaction videos but retreated and apologized after backlash.
While no one seriously expects Disney to give a shit about equity, they expected David Chang to. His actions felt like a betrayal, shutting the door on aspiring Asian food entrepreneurs. It all felt tone-deaf, callous, and insulting to the AAPI community.
The controversy captured the intersection of race, capitalism, and food culture in a way tailor made for podcasts and think pieces. While satisfying, merely burning down the flammable straw man that is a celebrity chef making public blunders in the name of profit glosses over much of what this is actually about. Just as the great Sriracha shortage(s) serve as a delicious microcosm about supply chains, extreme weather, and legal disputes, so too does Chang’s controversy contain multitudes.
We now live in the golden age of multicultural hot sauce appreciation. Gochujang, Zhoug, Sambal Oelek, and Harissa are common in Trader Joe’s and recipe blogs. People whose hot sauce universe once ended at Tabasco now buy and discuss them online.
However, the chili crisp debate reminds us that progress isn’t just about more putting more types of hot sauce on the shelves. Where and how they’re sold matters too. As more regional hot sauces go mainstream, many wonder why they’re confined to the “ethnic food aisle,” a place that David Chang famously called “the last bastion of racism that you can see in full daylight in retail America.”
Appreciating new hot sauces is never just about their ingredients or flavor. Alongside our surface-level love of new food cultures, we need more direct conversations about cultural appropriation and equity, as the shakeups at Bon Appétit brought to light in 2020.
As a Korean American, Chang dodges much of the baggage of chefs like Rick Bayless, whose whiteness always complicates his status as Mexican food ambassador. It’s revealing then that both Chang and Bayless have faced criticism for profiting from cultures not their own. Chang’s chili crunch controversy marks a perilous and noteworthy moment for Asian cuisine in the U.S.
So how then did the popularity of a condiment and chef get so spectacularly eclipsed by the esoteric minutiae of US patent law? To understand this we have to look at how commercialization distorts both what it sells and who sells it.
The spicy crux of the debate was always a linguistic one. Whether it’s called chili crisp or chile crunch doesn’t matter if you’re asking for more at a Chinese restaurant or whipping up a batch for your friend. But when you start marketing a condiment, the name becomes everything. What you call it, how you define and defend its value becomes paramount. Marketing becomes warfare, with trademarks drawing battle lines.
Who you define as the villain of this story is also more complicated than it initially seems. At this point, David Chang is more a brand than a man. Like Bobby Flay, Wolfgang Puck, or Emeril Lagasse, he long ago left the realm of individual working chef and sublimated his name into a corporation. After starting Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004, he now owns multiple restaurants and a line of prepared foods, employing hundreds of people.
While Chang the man has his morals, Momofuku, like all brands, must prioritize growth and profit. This impacts Chang personally, too. If he doesn’t open new restaurants, his sous chefs don’t advance. If his noodles don’t sell, he can’t hire more staff. If his podcast fails, editors lose jobs.
Why was it so hard for Chang the brand and Chang the man to just do the right thing in the first place?
In the summer of 2020, it seemed every company would integrate racial justice into their business practices. Four years later, this feels as dated as Tiger King, a pandemic trend that didn’t age well. Chili crunch-gate, if we can promise to never call it that again, was a necessary reminder that the intersection of business and equity is complex and lacks easy answers.
This shakeup highlights the limitations and downsides of using commercialization to advance multiculturalism. It exposes the professional bullying inherent in our patent law system and the delicious benefits of broadening our communal pantry.
So what did David Chang decide to do in the end? His response was surprising.
On his podcast, Chang issued an apology as well as an announcement. Momofuku will no longer be policing its trademark for either spelling of chili crunch. Caught between the Asian American community’s wrath and the risk of genericide, he chose to do nothing. It’s rare for someone as famous and famously stubborn as Chang to admit a mistake. It’s even rarer for a company to relinquish a lucrative trademark. Yet, that’s exactly what happened.
As Joe Biden of all people recently demonstrated, sometimes true wisdom lies in knowing when to back down instead of double down.
We live in spicy times.