How I Built a Radically Personal Hot Sauce Brand and Found Myself in the Process
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, my middle name given me by my nuclear-physicist father means profound, abstract, and is a homonym for his field of study — string theory. Imagine burying all that, just to feel seen, just to belong.
It’s no wonder my search for identity and heritage later in life brought me back to my hometown of Chengdu in China, where I’ve spent the last ten years finding meaning and my place in the intersection of food with culture, tradition, and modernity.
I delved deep into Chinese food culture and its regional cuisines, so varied and diverse it felt more like a continent. I was stunned by the depth of this 5000 year heritage…
