He fled his native Vietnam with virtually nothing and has built a hot sauce empire — but says dealing with California bureaucrats and excessive regulations isn’t that different from his Communist homeland.
David Tran speaking out on the CBS Morning News.
“David Tran is the founder and CEO of Huy Fong Foods, the maker of the famously tasty Sriracha hot sauce,” writes Zenon Evans for Reason.com. “Grappling for months with regulators and politicians in southern California about the spicy scents that his factory emits, Tran recently compared meddlesome government to that of a Communist country.”
Huy Fong Foods is a hot sauce company based in Rosemead, California that was founded in 1980 on Spring Street in Los Angeles‘s Chinatown. It has grown to become one of the leaders in the Asian hot sauce market, especially Sriracha sauce.
The company is named for a decrepit Panamanian freighter, the “Huey Fong,” that carried Tran and 3,317 other refugees out of Vietnam in December 1978.
Tran’s successful Sriracha sauce was developed by the company’s founder, David Tran, who had grown chili peppers and produced and sold chili sauce in Long Binh, a village just north of Saigon. He fled Vietnam in 1979 as a part of the migration of the Vietnamese boat people following the Vietnam War.
But now he’s wondering if settling in California was a mistake, writes Evans. “It might sound hyperbolic, but he does know a thing or two about living under the nightmarish bureaucracy of a red utopia.”
After all, Tran escaped the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and “its many intrusions” three decades ago to start a new life in The Land of the Free.
“Today, I feel almost the same. Even now, we live in USA, and my feeling, the government, not a big difference,” Tran said from his factory outside of Los Angeles.
It’s not the first time he’s spoken out about the issue. He previously accused the local government of wanting to shut him down. Last month the city council deemed the $80 million business a “public nuisance” for giving off a peppery odor. In 2013, the city sued Tran (despite lobbying to get him to move Huy Fong Foods there in the first place) and California’s health regulators shut down the factory for 30 days.
Tran has received offers from public officials throughout the country that want to court Huy Fong Foods. Texas, which is far more business-friendly than California, has made the biggest push.
Because his peppers are grown locally, Tran is reluctant. He did indicate that he may open another factory elsewhere to meet the growing demand for his popular hot sauce.
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