Stop Sleeping: Waking the Rooster

Entirely family-owned and operated out of Rosemead, California, Huy Fong Foods manufacture a handful of chili-based sauces which feature the now famous strutting rooster in gleaming white on their trademark green-capped plastic squeeze bottles. In their 30 years of business, they’ve garnered a heavy cult following almost exclusively through word of mouth marketing. Last Spring, The New York Times featured their most popular product, Sriracha (Sir-Rah-Cha) Hot Chili Sauce, and called it “a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples,” but it’s literally been given every superlative under the sun: spicey-sweet, flavorful, addictive, the nectar of the Gods (and those are just from within VaynerMedia).

Considering how little they’ve invested in marketing, their success is a bit surprising. A visit to their website will give you a little history about the company and products, a few text testimonials and a handful of recipes. But aside from making you feel like you’re on a Geocities blog from 1997, the bare-bones site offers very little. They do list prices for their products, but you cannot purchase anything, directly. Would-be customers need to call Huy Fong or manually mail/fax the provided order form to actually make an order. While these old-school methods are charming in a way, I’m sure Huy Fong has lost a significant amount of sales with that kind of barrier, and there’s really no reason for the absence of online ordering.

I wouldn’t expect a company with such a lackluster website to have any kind of presence on social platforms, but the Sriracha Facebook Page has well over 200,000 Likes. Originally created and run by a fervent fan, it has apparently been operated by Huy Fong since last July. Unfortunately, the once frequently-updated page hasn’t had a new post since the transfer of administrative rights, and there’s no reason to believe things will change anytime soon.

It’s peculiar how a brand built entirely through word of mouth (they say as much on their website FAQ) could be so averse to the same kind of marketing online. Huy Fong was already aware (and apparently very appreciative) of the Sriracha Page before they were even given access to it, so I do believe they understand the reach and effectiveness of social media. But their lack of effort on the Facebook platform and their own website, as well as a total lack of presence on Twitter, leads me to believe that they just don’t care.

More power to them as, regardless of marketing strategy, they’ve been largely successful. However, as a huge Sriracha fan myself, I can’t help but imagine how much more popular they’d be if they would just wake up even a little bit.