Painstakingly (and painfully) harvested by bare hand once annually from a small plot of land in Sichuan, the tribute pepper is so named because for 300 years, the village of QingXi - by many accounts the peppercorn's preeminent grower - made a point of expressing a portion of each harvest to China's imperial courts. Gao's highly personal take on Sichuan chili crisp - Fly by Jing's flagship product - involves 18 ingredients, some of which can only be found in China's Sichuan Province.įor obvious reasons, we couldn't exactly pry every little detail out of the proprietress, but she did say that the most essential ingredient is the peppercorn of the tribute pepper, or gongjiao, which Fly by Jing employs widely across its inventory. We spoke with the entrepreneur about launching a successful startup amidst a pandemic, how Fly by Jing went from a small operation to being sold at Whole Foods and Target stores nationwide, and what's next for the rising brand. Guests loved her chili crisp so much that she decided to bottle it and build a Kickstarter page. One thing lead to another, and Gao ended up quitting her tech job and opening a restaurant in Shanghai. "My hypothesis is that people were ready for a new paradigm." "I was realizing that so little real Chinese food made its way out of China and wanted to shine light on that, and represent it on a global stage," she told Insider. "There was an active prejudice against Chinese food as being dirty, cheap, and unhealthy."įirst and foremost, Gao wanted to grasp and address those perceptions for herself, and in the process, a company was born. "I wanted to shift the way people saw Chinese culture and food in the US," says Fly By Jing founder Jing Gao, who in 2018 launched one of Amazon's top-selling "hot sauces" (although that term doesn't quite do it justice), a personal take on Sichuan chili crisp.
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