Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce website home page last updated May 10, 2004

You could look it up.

Or just look up top where I've reproduced it.

But this hasn't seemed to hurt the company one iota.

When you're good, people find you: no need to advertise.

In fact, Sriracha founder-owner David Tran has never advertised.

Why would he?

Consider:

• Bon Appetit named sriracha "Ingredient of the Year" in 2010.

• "In early 2011 Matthew Inman, the Seattle-based creator of the popular online comic strip 'The Oatmeal,'... 'realized that sriracha could 'save' food, and that it was the unsung Mother Teresa of condiments.' So he drew a comic of a smiling man hugging an overturned bottle of sriracha.... 'Sriracha, you are a delicious blessing flavored with the incandescent glow of a thousand dying suns,' reads the caption. 'I love you.' Fans asked Inman to turn the picture into a poster, then a T-shirt. Last summer he added a wide assortment of sriracha novelties to his online store — popcorn, lip balm, air fresheners, and underpants. With more than 350,000 Twitter followers, Inman provides plenty of free advertising for the company."

• In 2011 the sauce got its own mainstream kitchen bible: "The Sriracha Cookbook" by Randy Clemens.

• "Last May, Cook's Illustrated named it "the best-tasting hot sauce on the market,", ahead of rivals such as Frank's Red Hot, Cholula Hot Sauce, and McIlhenny Co.'s Tabasco."

• A few months ago Subway restaurants in Southern California began experimenting with a new sriracha-flavored sauce.

• Weeks later Lay's announced a sriracha-flavored potato chip.

• Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce has no Facebook page or Twitter account.

Tran told Caleb Hannan in a Bloomberg Businessweek article that "he determined from the start to keep the price low. It's about $4 per 28-ounce bottle. As he likes to say, 'I make sauce good enough for the rich man that the poor man can still afford.'"

Of interest: the bottles of sauce on any given store's shelves "vary in color. Some are orange, others red. It's a quirk owing to the jalapeño hybrids [used]. The chilis are picked at different times during the season as they ripen and change color."

That is so un-Lay's-like, it warms the cockles of my heart.

No variation permitted in industrial foodville, you best be believin'.

.....................................

I got to thinking after reading about how David Tran goes about his business that I could use a dose of his approach, so I'm going to spend more time on bookofjoe and less on who's saying what and where they're saying it.

Eye on the prize and all that.

This message approved by Gray Cat.

Duh.