How the Sriracha guys screwed over their supplier
163 points
5 hours ago
| 6 comments
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neya
3 hours ago
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I wish there was a wall of shame blacklist for CEOs who pull unethical shit off. With reviews and ratings from everyone around them. Kind of like yelp, but for CEOs. Then, anyone who wants to start a new venture or giving them any money, can then go look em up there before signing a contract with these trash CEOs. Right now, they only get away with all this because it all happens under the table and not enough people know.
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mellosouls
1 minute ago
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As a bolshie type myself, very quick to moan at higher-ups, I think we need to be realistic that often we grunts don't have the big picture (especially the politics) and unfortunately that won't stop somebody lowdown move from merely internal letting off steam to anonymous public borderline slander.

There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.

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oakmad
1 hour ago
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Well there used to be fuckedcompany.com that served a similar purpose. Of course it was litigated into history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
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Barbing
1 hour ago
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>The site was taken offline for two days in August 2002; Ford Motor Company law firm Howard Phillips & Andersen had threatened litigation against FC's upstream provider HostGator as a means of silencing a discussion of a series of layoffs entitled "Ford, where finding a job is job one." Ford claimed that it infringed a trademark slogan "Ford, where quality is job one," discontinued after widespread use from 1980 to 1997. The site eventually returned minus the news of the Ford layoffs.

Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?

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kvdveer
3 hours ago
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I suppose court records can function as such a list.

If you also want 'alledged assholery' on that list, the list will just turn into a list of CEOs, due to false reports.

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neya
2 hours ago
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It would be nice to aggregate all that and put it under a "profile". Kind of like facebook, but your entire profile feed is just the long list of court records, assholery and screw overs for other people. I actually saw a version that someone did for Jack (Twitter's ex founder) a few years ago and it was hilarious but cleverly informative. That's honestly where I got this idea from.
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fake-name
2 hours ago
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> false reports.

Are you sure they're false?

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hinkley
1 hour ago
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Given the vast over representation of sociopathy and malignant narcissism in CEOs it’s going to be most CEOs even if you filter out false claims.

But if you’re gonna hate someone it’s good if you have a real reason to do so instead of bullshit and rumors.

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socalgal2
1 hour ago
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It won’t help. At my second job the president hired a VP with a white collar criminal record and told everyone not to bring it up
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ReptileMan
2 hours ago
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There is such wall. Usually published by Fortune.
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SilverElfin
2 hours ago
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Not just CEOs, but we also need it for investors. For example when startups screw over employees on equity, the founders, board members, and their firms, should all be on a public blacklist.
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vasco
2 hours ago
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That only works for poor people because CEOs will sue immediately. Someone with a lot of money for legal insurance would have to run it.
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neya
2 hours ago
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Well, this kind of data actually exists. The key is to maintain anonymity. Glassdoor does it. You will see a lot of employees actually complain about management and seniors by name on there.
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vasco
2 hours ago
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Glassdoor, as big as it is, allows for deleting bad reviews.
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atoav
58 minutes ago
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I wish there would just be laws against this type of behaviour, but we all know who is in control of which laws are getting passed. So short of that social shaming will have to do. A CEO that treated humans and/or the planet like dirt, should for example be unable to go to a restaurant, a bar, a park, down a road, onto a beach without getting thrown out or ridiculed, heckled or just called out by others. Behave like scum? Get treated like scum. Fuck with the tribe? Get thrown out. It is one of the oldest correctives for shit behavior any society has ever used in the history of humanity. The problem is they have created a world in which they have too many spaces to avoid this type of consequences.

Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.

Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.

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JacobAldridge
38 minutes ago
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I remember when Sriracha disappeared from the market for a while (2022?).

The story I heard at the time was heavily positive, talking up the handshakes and relationship angle - suggesting the supplier had a bad harvest (drought) so the manufacturer had decided not to produce sauce rather than produce an inferior product.

Either rumours or more lies - and a good way to help the market forget the earlier flavour and be grateful for a sloppier solution to 'return'?

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the_biot
6 minutes ago
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Yeah, I remember the two parties accusing each other of essentially the same thing -- destroying a 25-year business relationship over short-term greed, for no good reason.

It's good to see the result of the court case, now at least we know who tried to screw who over.

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walthamstow
54 minutes ago
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I don't know what tariffs you guys have put on foreign sauces these days but the Flying Goose brand made in Thailand is the only brand that tastes right to me.
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pprotas
3 hours ago
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Human greed knows no bounds
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SilverElfin
2 hours ago
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Yep this was a very controversial thing when it happened. They tried to squeeze the farmer who supplied all their peppers from their earliest days - why would you do that unless you have no morality? And now the Huy Fong Sriracha tastes different, and Underwood’s own Sriracha is actually what tastes best.

I’m glad to hear there was a happy ending to the epic greediness and underhanded tactics of Huy Fong:

> Later, obviously, there's a lawsuit. Funnily enough, it wasn't actually Underwood who sued Huy Fong. It was Huy Fong who sued Underwood, seeking refunds for payments it had made earlier under their contracts. Underwood turned around and counterclaimed for breach of contract and fraud and a bunch of other shit. Underwood succeeded - there was a unanimous jury verdict in their favor - and got awarded about $13 million in compensatory damages, and another $10 million in punitive damages (these are only awarded where you've done something so outrageous that it's quasi-criminal; it's to deter other people from doing similar things).

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duskdozer
12 minutes ago
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It's crazy. They kept expanding more and more already. Apparently they just weren't increasing the rate of increase enough.

Now HF sauce sucks, I wasn't paying attention to this and got a bottle after this whole debacle, and it's horrible.

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hinkley
1 hour ago
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On the Reddit thread it was said that underwood hasn’t quite exactly nailed the, I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.

I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.

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overfeed
27 minutes ago
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> why would you do that unless you have no morality?

Since company leadership has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, profit-maxxing for shareholders is the only moral thing to do /s.

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Mistletoe
3 hours ago
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Now I know to buy the Underwood brand sriracha.

It looks like this:

https://a.co/d/06NNRslo

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eeixlk
2 hours ago
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Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
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NitpickLawyer
2 hours ago
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> $12 dollars per bottle is crazy

Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.

It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.

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pnt12
36 minutes ago
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Counter-argument: we're talking about saving a handful of bucks for something that lasts months. Do it if you find it fun - I tried it and didn't like the work nor spice under my fingernails, at all.

My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).

I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.

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Barbing
57 minutes ago
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>leave them on a window sill

Ooooh anybody have a rec for the most idiot-proof hot thing to try to grow?

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duttish
2 hours ago
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I've tried getting started with this but my first attempt a habanero/mango sauce was _horrible_, must've used a slop recipe or something. Do you have a good base to recommend?
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cyberrock
1 hour ago
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AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.
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hinkley
1 hour ago
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That’s twice the price of a similar sized bottle of fancy ketchup and will last you four times as long.
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blell
1 hour ago
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That list of ingredients is awful.

“Red jalapeno, sugar, water, salt acetic acid, garlic, natural flavor, xanthan gum, sodium metabisulfite, and/or sodium bisulfite (sulfiting agent / preservative), potassium sorbate (preservative).”

I’ve had sriracha in the past and it’s disgustingly sweet. Apparently it’s 17% sugar!

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kdheiwns
1 hour ago
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How much sauce are you putting on your food though? 17% sugar is bad in a drink where it adds up fast, but for a hot sauce where you're using maybe 2 teaspoons max (likely less), that's like 1-2 grams of sugar. Essentially a rounding error in your daily intake.

Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.

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chaostheory
1 hour ago
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I bought two bottles a few months back. It doesn’t taste good.

Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else

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brcmthrowaway
1 hour ago
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