Duncan Idaho said:

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People buy this?

So much better when you make it yourself

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The condiment world is feeling extra-spicy these days, and the added heat has nothing to do with Scoville units.

A rift between the maker of Huy Fong sriracha that classic sauce emblazoned with a rooster and its longtime pepper supplier is adding some high drama to the squeeze-bottle aisle. Huy Fong and Underwood Ranches, a California-based company that grew Huy Fong's peppers for decades, had a bitter falling out in 2016 after 28 years in business together.

The dispute reportedly began over the price the sauce company would pay for the next year's crop, and it soon spiraled into lawsuits and countersuits, according to a recent riveting Fortune story about the breakup. In the end, Huy Fong was ordered to pay $23.3 million for breach of contract and fraud, according to news reports, but with the longtime relationship with Underwood permanently severed, the company was left without the raw ingredients to make its signature product.

The company in 2020 started having problems filling orders, and talk of a sriracha shortage began spreading in earnest in 2022. At the time, Huy Fong publicly blamed weather affecting the production of chile peppers, not the behind-the-scenes battle.

Now, it seems that Huy Fong has managed to get enough supplies from alternate growers that it is returning to grocery shelves around the country. But longtime fans have greeted the new bottles with suspicion. One Redditor wondered if he had actually purchased a counterfeit version, but others said they had noticed a difference from the original. "The real thing isn't what it used to be," one lamented. "The new formula is not the same at all and the other brands are way different and not as good sad sad day for me," was another complaint on X.

Meanwhile, Craig Underwood, the owner of Underwood Ranches who, with his main buyer gone, was sitting on a massive amount of peppers did something that sounds like it came straight from a Hollywood script writer's idea pile: He started a rival brand, producing his own line of hot sauces, including a signature sriracha that bears the logo of a dragon in place of his former partner's rooster and a black cap in place of that other sauce's iconic green one.

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