Sriracha Fans Are Getting Desperate as the Hot Sauce Shortage Worsens

You may recall seeing headlines in the last few years about the ongoing shortage of Huy Fong Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce, arguably the most iconic hot sauce in the world. Driven by climate change and unprecedented droughts that led to the failure of vitally needed pepper crops, the California-based hot sauce company has been forced to drastically cut back production, with releases of the famous Sriracha becoming sporadic and unpredictable. And more recently, that has resulted in a fresh spate of headlines about desperate sauce fans hunting for bottles, and the absurd prices they’re being gouged for Sriracha, up to $50-100 per bottle and beyond.

This has been the case for years at this point–Paste food editor Samantha Maxwell wrote about the effects of the spiraling climate crisis on products like Sriracha more than a year ago. What it comes down to is that the droughts affecting pepper production are still ongoing, and haven’t improved as hoped–the primary farming areas for the chili peppers used in Huy Fong Sriracha are located in Mexico, New Mexico and Irvine, California, and none produced an ample crop this year to ease the shortage, which also affects other products such as Huy Fong’s Chili Garlic and Sambal Oelek. In a statement, a representative of Huy Fong made it clear the problem isn’t clearing up any time soon: “Although some production did resume this past fall season, we continue to have a limited supply that continues to affect our production. At this time, we have no estimations of when supply will increase.”

Unsurprisingly, this shortage has since resulted in a robust black market for buyers hoarding the sauce and then trying to sell bottles at vastly inflated prices. One might expect retailers on Amazon to want to avoid this kind of perception of profiteering, but the reality is that they really don’t care: On Amazon as of this morning, one can buy a single 9 oz bottle (the small size) of Sriracha for $40. Or if you really want to get that value, perhaps you’d be more interested in a 4-pack of larger bottles for merely $200? Ebay is of course no better, with prices ranging from $35 to $60 for a single bottle, before even considering the cost of shipping. Sadly, as in the increasingly desperate American whiskey market, where buyers fight and claw for the right to be gouged, there are likely consumers happy to pay these prices, which only rewards the resellers.

Make no mistake, there’s something deeply unsettling about not being able to access a beloved food product, in this case a hot sauce that may very well be an important part of your culture, national cuisine or racial heritage. But as we pointed out last year, the consumer who simply can’t find Sriracha on the grocery store shelf is ultimately being, at most, temporarily inconvenienced. Consider instead the pepper farmer who is watching crop after crop fail thanks to unprecedented drought and changing weather patterns, potentially facing financial devastation in the process. Consider everyone else whose homes may be at threat from flooding, or wildfires, or erosion, because of what is happening to our planet. You may be reading this from a place of relative safety and comfort, but that might not always be the case–what is happening to those people may soon happen to you. And when that happens, being able to find hot sauce will be the last of your worries.

And until then … maybe don’t enable the person trying to charge $100 per bottle of Sriracha?