By Jing Gao
It’s been a year and a half since launching my company Fly By Jing and exactly two years since I wrote ‘What I Learned from Making Hot Sauce at Scale’. In many ways it’s felt like the blink of an eye, and in others, like a lifetime.
But first, let me reintroduce myself.
My name is Jing, but it hasn’t always been.
I spent the last 25 years of my life hiding behind ‘Jenny’, a name I chose at age five to make life easier as a kid growing up in Europe. 婧 Jing, given to me by my late grandfather, means virtuous, feminine. 玄 Xuan…
I set out to create the first line of all-natural, deeply flavorful Chinese condiments. Getting there was harder than I anticipated.
Back in July, I launched a pre-order campaign for my Sichuan Chili Crisp, the first 100% all-natural Sichuan chili sauce to hit the market. I wanted to bring the deep and complex flavors of China’s culinary heritage to the world using top quality ingredients, and redefine perceptions of Chinese food in the West. It became one of the highest backed food projects on Kickstarter, with over 1,600 backers helping me exceed my funding goal by 350% in four weeks. I was finally ready to scale up production of the sauces I had been making out of my kitchen.
That might…
This is a guest post first published on my blog by my friend and writer Philana Woo. It is the first of a two part series on my foray into manufacturing in China to produce an all natural Sichuan chili sauce, which I am launching internationally on June 4.
Yesterday Jenny and I took a Didi an hour northeast of Chengdu city center to visit a hot sauce factory for her new business venture, Fly By Jing.
At the highway checkpoint, police asked to see our IDs. When they saw our foreign passports, they asked our driver where we were…
