What I Learned From Making Hot Sauce at Scale in China

https://medium.com/@jingtheory/what-i-learned-from-making-hot-sauce-at-scale-2cbb8ec709ba

by tortilla • 8 years ago

281 98 8 years ago

ilamont• 8 years ago

Congratulations. Curious if there are any concerns about counterfeits showing up in China - or is this really aimed at the overseas market?

jacquesm2• 8 years ago

or is this really aimed at the overseas market?

It says so right in the article.

Scoundreller3• 8 years ago

Author says: "The good news is, the labels look beautiful and are basically irreplicable — good luck to anyone who tries to knock off my branding."

But that sounds like a challenge.

esturk• 8 years ago

I think the author just underestimates Chinese ingenuity when it comes to counterfeit goods. There's more to just spoofing the label. There's also naming, pricing, etc.

Markoff2• 8 years ago

there are already tons of established brands for this product in China, so I don't think anyone in China would even trust her genuine product, let alone try to counterfeit it for domestic market

barkingcat2• 8 years ago

4. The Human Element of Food Manufacturing

Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories. Those fancy iPhone XR's? Assembled by Hand in China (with mechanical assistance) but still, assembled by Hand by real people.

China has way too high population for automation. If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern.

jcims4• 8 years ago

I often wonder about the short term impact of efforts to drive employment conditions and pay of these jobs to more 'western' standards. What happens when a factory is built on the edge of a small town and the starting salary and working conditions are better than 75% of the jobs in the region?

I'm sure there's a 'rising tide raises all ships' element and the long term effects would have to be beneficial. But in the short term i wonder if there's a labor drain/golden handcuffs effect.

swiley• 8 years ago

It's the same as what happens in the US. Eventually something happens to the factory and everyone turns to drugs and prostitution.

kareemm• 8 years ago

I was struck by this when I went to visit Shanghai in 2002. I was sitting beside a recent MBA grad who was originally from China.

We got to talking. At one point in the conversation he asked me a hypothetical question about how I would design a system to determine traffic conditions. I responded with an answer laying out cameras at intersections and software to make sense of the video.

He responded that in China they’d just put a person at every intersection who would send a text message to a team of humans who would update a webpage. It drove home the point to me that labour was so abundant and cheap there that you could often throw more bodies at the problem instead of writinf software... and probably solve the problem better.

fouc• 8 years ago

It's an open secret that AI startups in Silicon Valley are using human labor initially to mimic the AI component.

There's still a lot of room for automation with human labor.

starky3• 8 years ago

China is interesting from this respect, there are so many people, and it is in the government's best interest to keep the citizens employed and happy and therefore there is a lot of "useless" jobs like the one you mention. The first time I visited I was shocked at the number of people employed to man the tollbooths and the number of people working in every restaurant until I realized why.

rqs• 8 years ago

Well, our city (far smaller than Shanghai) has installed few devices to monitoring traffic jam many years ago, probably because nobody actually wants to take stand beside a road for a whole day as a carrier.

It's very interesting point, but not just because abundant and cheap I think.

I was discuss a potential business model with my boss years ago for fun. It's about a breakfast deliver service. My point was, if we have enough data, then we can optimize the process so we can deliver all the breakfasts in the time window (to make sure people can get their breakfasts once they wake up in the morning, and the food itself is still in the "best by" time when they enjoying it)

My boss ask me back "Why would you think those delivery staffs cannot figure it out by themselves?"

Sometime we just forgot how flexible and intelligence human labors can be, and that level of flexible and intelligence is something current automation still can't bring to the real world.

tvanantwerp• 8 years ago

Funny, because I was in a tier 2 or 3 Chinese city a couple of months ago and there were cameras at every single intersection!

titanix2• 8 years ago

It's actually the way they do it in Japan too, so it's not only a labor cost problem that is at play.

teacpde• 8 years ago

Cheap labor is the same reason why many businesses boom in China but not so much in US/Europe. Take food delivery for example, $10 worth of food costs $1 delivery fee in China while it costs $7 to deliver on ubereats here in the US.

akvadrako• 8 years ago

Well yes, but the food also costs about $2 in China vs $15 in the US.

odiroot• 8 years ago

I have limited experience but I doubt it's even as high as $1.

quotemstr• 8 years ago

I worry about the extent to which too-cheap labor night slow the development of labor-saving technology. It's ultimately this technology that improves per-capita productivity and keeps us ahead of Malthus. In an environment where you can throw bodies at problems, why bother with more-expensive automation?

fosk• 8 years ago

Some people say that The Roman Empire - had it lasted without any Dark Age - could have given us mobile phones 1000 years ago. Some others say that it wouldn’t have happened, because they had too many slaves and cheap (or free) labor disincentivized optimizations and technology investments.

scurvy• 8 years ago

Not just automation, but some industrialization, too. I was shocked to watch them build railroads, essentially by hand. One Dutch guy was working the surveying tools, and a translator stood next to him, shouting out the orders. What appeared to be about 30 people straddling railroad rails, lifted up the rails using wood and strap lifts. Hard to explain, but they basically just used a whole lot of people to lay rails.

I asked our fixer what the story was, and it was similar to what's written here. If you want to use a machine, you have to buy the machine from the US. That's expensive, and people in China are cheap. Then you have to pay someone to run the machine, and that person costs 20x what the cheap labor does. Then when the machine breaks, you can't get anything done (and you have to pay someone even more expensive to fix it). When the cheap labor can no longer work, you just replace...them.

He said that the large companies got paid rebates for each person they hired (or something to that effect). It happens in tech, too. Not much in the way of build automation, but lots of people running around datacenters with DVD's and USB sticks.

In short, it keeps people busy and lessens the chance of uprisings (which is a thing in China).

vfulco23• 8 years ago

Fascinating the first image that pops into my mind is the building of US railroads and what a bad rap American business owners get for using slave labor. I don't know much about the period but wonder if one man's slave laborer is another man's very low wage but grateful laborer.

seanmcdirmid• 8 years ago

If you call to build a factory, there will be millions of people wanting jobs. These jobs are not good jobs and are labour intensive, but the desire for jobs outweighs any other concern.

China actually has labor shortages in certain places at certain times, yes, even for those factories. Also, wages have been going up, meaning labor is getting more expensive as surpluses are tapped out. It isn’t infinite, especially in 2018 compared to 1998.

Add on to that china’s coming demographic cliff, and automation is obviously going to have to make up the difference.

barkingcat2• 8 years ago

This is a very western oriented viewpoint. If it comes to that, the Chinese solution is not automation. It's to allow more marriages and have more children.

Revise the now defunct childbirth policy to lean the other way (ie social program to have more kids) and China can have a fertility spurt that can increase the size of the country by two or three US's in 2 generations. There's the labour to take care of the demographic cliff. They can also be ready work in healthcare to take care of the aging population in about 15-18 years.

Voila.

cgdcraig• 8 years ago

Humans are the most flexible and reconfigurable system for assembly. They can identify and deal with near infinite variations in position and condition of your inputs. If you look at automated assembly like 3/4 of the automation is to make sure the robot has the pieces is in the right place or orientation and the movements that are used are not complicated. Meanwhile for a human you can toss a bag of parts and they'll just fish through the bag or reoriented whatever as needed. Put a piece sideways into a machine that wasn't made to deal with it and it'll just flip out. Also reconfiguring assembly lines on the fly is feasible, change what the line is doing could be as easy as workers grabbing a different tool box. Fixed assembly lines are only good at scale and if the product will change incredibly slowly.

Camillo• 8 years ago

Basically in China human manufacturing rules over all. Many westerners have misconceptions about automation in factories.

Many westerners are unhappy because globalization has caused a loss of manufacturing jobs. People elsewhere in the thread say that the Chinese government encourages using a lot of human labor in order to foster social order. Maybe so, or maybe they don't need to, because labor is so cheap anyway. Certainly the Japanese government does it, since labor is not cheap there.

But Western governments are more efficient. They don't have to make sure people have jobs: they can just tell people that those jobs went away because of automation, not globalization. People won't complain too much, they know they can't fight technology.

And that's where the misconception comes from. Basically in the West labor arbitrage rules over all.

jacquesm2• 8 years ago

Making large batches of food homogeneous is super hard. It is hard enough to do it in small batches, but when you scale up the processes gravity really becomes your enemy.

For the automated filling I would look at using a spout with a shaker attached to it that can measure off a very precise amount of granular material without getting clogged.

Finally, nobody seems to be wearing either latex gloves or masks in any of the photos, that may be to make the photos nicer but it is not how you run a proper food packaging chain that has humans in the loop.

Symbiote2• 8 years ago

Finally, nobody seems to be wearing either latex gloves or masks in any of the photos

They're sticking labels on sealed jars and putting them in a box, what benefit would gloves and masks bring?

Scoundreller3• 8 years ago

On the gloves end, less wear and tear on the skin (callouses), and better grip.

reaperducer2• 8 years ago

nobody seems to be wearing either latex gloves or masks in any of the photos

In a different version of the same story, there are photos of the workers who actually handle the food using gloves:

https://www.thecleaverquarterly.com/stories/sichuan-chili-cr...

jrochkind1• 8 years ago

Gloves are overrated anyway. They're the "security theater" of food prep hygiene.

http://foodsafety.psu.edu/angel/fssbook/unit_2/module_4/docs...

(Although I'd imagine you'd want gloves for protection of the _workers_ when dealing with chilis!).

jcims4• 8 years ago

I wonder if/how you would do any kind of continuous testing with food/aromatic products like this. Have a taste panel on site? Do some basic go/no go tests for what, pH, viscosity, gas chromatograph (lol?).

Hard to put test points on a jar of sauce.

stevenwoo• 8 years ago

The Sriracha company doesn't try too hard to make each batch identical from their FAQ - just the variation in chiles alone make that impossible except within a 55 gallon mix, it sounds like it would not be possible without using a lot of additional ingredients to smooth out the flavor between batches like companies do with orange juice.

https://www.huyfong.com/#pg-54-1

PS. if near Los Angeles, they have factory tours and welcome photography of everything.

swaggyBoatswain• 8 years ago

I was over there 2 years ago.

They don't make identical batches, most of the chiles they get come from 1 time of the year.

They preblend a 55 gallon mix (Its their chile paste you can buy at the grocery store) and use that production stock for the rest of the year. They add some additives / flavors etc to make the actual srircha afterwards. Srircha only carries 3 products, chile paste, chile paste with garlic, and srircha.

Factory tour was worth it, I had to plan a month in advance but it was really cool to see. Especially how many 55 gallon jugs they store in their warehouse.

I don't know what the exact testing method they used for quality control, that part of factory was off limits and they didn't explain it either

loosetypes• 8 years ago

I think I really like that.

I had an interesting conversation the with an oyster farmer about the variability in taste geographically in the northeast.

And to me, honey is just honey. But apparently some folks can discern by taste which flower pollens comprise a batch.

But then you drink a Coca Cola, which tastes exactly the same no matter where or when. It’s like it’s more of a chemistry experiment than a food.

latchkey• 8 years ago

Orange juice is made to look identical, which is sad.

Old HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819560

jcims4• 8 years ago

I guess at some point you just trust the ingredients and process? I’m all for variability, it makes life interesting. But if your responsibility it to make sure that everyone buying Sriracha gets what they paid for, what do you do? 55 gallons is a lot of sauce, but if you empty 300 times that into clear plastic bottles every day, that’s a lot of taste testing.

bdickason• 8 years ago

Great post! I’ve seen the hardware side of manufacturing and also been amazed at how hard packaging / filling is when my ex launched a hair care line... her conditioner was also too viscous to go through the factory nozzles :/

kweks• 8 years ago

Small note for a anyone on a similar path researching reliable China-based fulfillment for crowdfunding campaigns or ecommerce..

We have tested and physically inspected literally every major and minor Hong Kong and China fulfillment provider, and settled upon SPNS ( https://warehouse.expert ).

They are the only provider we found with western-education, that provide actual service (customer support, optimising routes and delivery companies, working directly with your end customer to reduce loss, fighting with couriers to negotiate refunds and insurance etc)

The guy heading up the operation is Victor, and can be contacted via team@spnslogistics.com

(Full disclosure: I am not associated with the company - but having spent years finding a decent solution am happy to share it)

tnolet• 8 years ago

This story is amazing and probably a parable for every hardware based startup.

walrus012• 8 years ago

" Chili supplier and blend: I found a supplier who stone-grinds their dried chilis the traditional way rather than using a machine, which retains the luster, natural oils and bright red color that I needed the sauce to have."

This sounds remarkably similar to the problem faced by people who are into seriously expensive coffee. Basically, a "conical burr" grinder crushes the beans together, whereas a cheap spinning blade type grinder chops them apart into flaky bits. The former is strongly preferred by coffee snobs, and the use of the latter is seen as barely better than buying preground coffee.

My theory is that the stone part is actually not essential, but it's the crushing/grinding mechanism that preserves the oil and luster (could be done equally well with stainless steel), whereas some sort of shredding blade allows too much of the oils to escape.

secabeen• 8 years ago

At the higher end of coffee, there's a big debate about whether conical or flat burrs are better. The absolute top of the line grinders (at $2k) have both options: https://www.kafatek.com/

walrus012• 8 years ago

That looks like a piece of laboratory equipment.

colordrops• 8 years ago

Whatever Jenny Gao is doing, she's on point with marketing. I've been seeing her and her product all over the internet for a month now.

deanCommie• 8 years ago

The writing skill speaks for itself. I followed every single link she included, and was utterly engaged by every word and entry.

I suppose there is also the aspect that she is engaging different types of readers (foodies, techies, entrepreneurs, etc), but honestly I was ready to buy the sauce three paragraphs into my first read.

sytelus• 8 years ago

If you were non-Chinese, how do you go about finding suppliers, factories, label designers etc who can manufacture the prototype you have?

contingencies• 8 years ago

It depends on the product. In general, you can either do it yourself, contract out sub-assemblies and perform final assembly, or give it to a factory with related experience and have them execute. With simple products like this, you are better off taking option #3 .. it saves a lot of overhead with respect to legals, financials, setup, etc.

barry-cotter• 8 years ago

You find some people in your city who used to work in China, talk to them, hear how hard sourcing and quality control was and probably give up. Or you find those people on LinkedIn but this stuff is hard for people who really understand China. Making the right connections is hard, staying on top of communications is hard, quality control is comically hard.

csours• 8 years ago

1. No one will demand excellence from your product except you.

I agree so much with this. Put more cynically, no one cares more about your problems than you.

baybal2• 8 years ago

Her backers have had to discover Laoganmna before dishing out money...

barrkel• 8 years ago

This is a lovely marketing piece. Great story, and hammers home the drive to quality, which of course backs up the brand. And it's a story of triumph over adversity, which makes you root for the little guy (or girl, in this case).

Very smart.

21• 8 years ago

Umami, that umami texture...

user5994461• 8 years ago

Still no clue what that is after reading the article.

vfulco23• 8 years ago

My biggest lesson and cautionary tale after launching a professional services company in Shanghai, think English resume editing, LinkedIn Profiles creation, interview coaching and academic entrance services, is to to pick your partners very carefully. There is an infuriating aspect to contracts here where upon signature, the real negotiations on terms begins, even for the simplest points. Be prepared to spend inordinate time on what would be obvious and elementary in the U.S.

Markoff2• 8 years ago

let's better not tell her to read Poorly made in China if she thinks her product will have same ingredients/formula after few months of production, that book perfectly describe daily Chinese reality/mentality if you are interested, can confirm it as someone who worked there for years. for starters any contract it's useless piece of paper

What I Learned From Making Hot Sauce at Scale in China

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