First, there was one.
Before many of us came to the understanding that sriracha is a chile-and-garlic-based hot sauce originally from Thailand and that sriracha is a sorta general term used among many brands making it, we had Huy Fong Food's famous "rooster sauce."
Shapely plastic bottles in polyglot script and Yuletide color schemes shortly crammed in among the refrigerator side doors and sticky tables of this nation, our tastebuds set aflame, as were our hearts over the immigrant success story of David Tran, raised in Vietnam with a Chinese bloodline before escaping communist persecution of the Hoa in 1978.
The sriracha Tran had been making from chiles grown on his brother's farm near Saigon inspired the birth of Huy Fong in Los Angeles in 1980, paving the way for an empire that would bring in an estimated $150 million annually.
Drama threatened to dash the entire dream starting in 2016, when Huy Fong pressed Camarillo's Underwood Family Farms, at one time the primary supplier of chiles to the brand, for $1 million it claimed it had overpaid. A 30-year relationship was subsequently destroyed through lawsuits, financial losses, attempted "stealing" of employees, and alleged contract breaches, which eventually saw Huy Fong hit with a hefty $23.3 million in legal awards to Underwood.