A Sriracha Shortage? It Depends Which Brand You’re Looking For.

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Every month, Jimmy Ly usually orders nearly 150 bottles of sriracha from Huy Fong Foods for one of his Vietnamese restaurants in New York City. The sauce opens the richness of a pho broth or adds a blast of heat to a banh xeo, a Vietnamese crepe. “It’s not too spicy; it’s not too light,” Mr. Ly said. Sriracha can “really hit the sweet spot in terms of spice, sweetness, acidity, just that tang.” But a few months ago, supply began to dry up. Mr. Ly, who owns Madame Vo and Monsieur Vo in the East Village of Manhattan, said that his vendors could not source the sauce and that he couldn’t find it in New York City grocery stores. So he, like some other Huy Fong enthusiasts, bought two large bottles on eBay for $35 each, about five times the usual price, to use at home. But that price was insurmountable for his business. For the second year in a row, Huy Fong, the maker of the most popular variety of sriracha, is facing production issues, the company said in a statement this month, because of “a shortage of raw material” with “no estimations of when supply will increase.”