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This story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork. https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong https://www.reddit.com/s

This story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork. https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled. Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are. I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on. It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.

IshKebab 7mo ago
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it? Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
- jakewins 7mo ago
  They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?
  - functionmouse 7mo ago
    Here I was foolishly thinking AstroTurf meant false grass
    - stdbrouw 7mo ago
      Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.
      - OJFord 7mo ago
        Huh, I didn't realise it was that specific, I thought it just meant/came from 'covering everything with crap'.
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
  - HelloMcFly 7mo ago
    It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.
    - dts-five 7mo ago
      Just go to the profile in question and search their profile with an empty query; that'll show all the hidden comments and posts. Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.
      - kotaKat 7mo ago
        IIRC you just have to use an asterisk or something now, and I think the search is broken on OldReddit…
3rodents 7mo ago
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people. There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
- reitzensteinm 7mo ago
  The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.
  - butterbomb 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - brookst 7mo ago
    Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial. Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
    - archagon 7mo ago
      Same as any other conspiratorial thinking: they hold themselves in too high a regard and want to think they’re privy to some secret knowledge that the rubes have missed.
    - zoeysmithe 7mo ago
      I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
JasonADrury 7mo ago
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy. Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes. One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly. The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
- ayylemao 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - JasonADrury 7mo ago
    Why? It's not like I'm claiming some eight figure marketing contracts here. This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started. I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
- maxerickson 7mo ago
  You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.
  - JasonADrury 7mo ago
    I'm largely indifferent, but the products I promote are good and the customers spending 500k+ pa on the services I sell are not unsophisticated.
laserbeam 7mo ago
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
paulcole 7mo ago
Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”
- satvikpendem 7mo ago
  Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.
  - paulcole 7mo ago
    You think this Sriracha story wants to sell you something.
    - satvikpendem 7mo ago
      Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.
      - paulcole 7mo ago
        People sell things by telling stories. Sometimes those stories are interstitial ads and sometimes they are not.
        satvikpendem 7mo ago
        If you can't tell the difference between an ancient poem and an astroturfing reddit post then I'm not sure how to convince you there is one.
      - nathan_douglas 7mo ago
        It was all about Shamhat's OnlyFans clay tablet.
everdrive 7mo ago
A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.
- wat10000 7mo ago
  How many of the credulous responses are themselves bot-generated to make the original sound more believable?
- brynnbee 7mo ago
  A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview. It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes. This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
  - RankingMember 7mo ago
    > "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid Ha, I don't know your friends but in my experience that's like a textbook phrase people use to try to play off being duped when they're clued in
    - inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
      [dead]
  - 7mo ago
oldandboring 7mo ago
Reading some the comments on this thread reveals one of the main reasons why a campaign like this is necessary if you're Underwood. Huy Fong has achieved "category king" status in this space; most people don't know what Huy Fong is, that red sauce is called "Sriracha". Huy Fong knows quite well that as long as the sauce still comes in that bottle and tastes like chilis, 99% of their customers will still buy it. Making a dent in this segment beyond foodies and hot-sauce enthusiasts requires some guerrilla marketing and and public education.
nancyminusone 7mo ago
That's Reddit for you. I wonder how few topics you could condense the most posts into?
alexggordon 7mo ago
Nothing stopping both from being true. The court judgements[0] aren't faked. It genuinely appears Underwood really was screwed over. That said, it doesn't take much for a CMO to look at the situation and figure out how to market the product from there. Something something lemonade. Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky? [0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b303096.pdf?ts=1627407095 https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
- x0x0 7mo ago
  Additionally, it's not like this necessarily got posted out of the blue. There's another Huy Fong sriracha shortage due to a Mexican crop failure driven by climate change. So anyone wondering why they can't buy it will naturally encounter this story. https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-foods-halts-production-again-after-chili-crop-fails-completely/ https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-f... And as you mentioned, that lawsuit has pretty convincing evidence of a multi-year plan to really screw the supplier in order to get even more fantastically wealthy. Amazing greed combined with profound stupidity about the difficulty of reliably sourcing 2 _thousand_ acres of ripe chilies. There's been a decade of rolling shortages.
snowwrestler 7mo ago
A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work. You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible. There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
Barakahzai 7mo ago
Hello - it's me, the OP from the Reddit post. I saw the discussion here and felt I had to respond, because you've gone after my integrity and honesty - you have basically accused me of being a shill for Underwood, a clumsy astroturfer who makes things up. So, I would like to say a few things in reply. First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight. Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away. Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would. That's basically what I wanted to communicate.
moogleii 7mo ago
[dead]

IshKebab 7mo ago

Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it? Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.

jakewins 7mo ago
They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?
- functionmouse 7mo ago
  Here I was foolishly thinking AstroTurf meant false grass
  - stdbrouw 7mo ago
    Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.
    - OJFord 7mo ago
      Huh, I didn't realise it was that specific, I thought it just meant/came from 'covering everything with crap'.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
- HelloMcFly 7mo ago
  It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.
  - dts-five 7mo ago
    Just go to the profile in question and search their profile with an empty query; that'll show all the hidden comments and posts. Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.
    - kotaKat 7mo ago
      IIRC you just have to use an asterisk or something now, and I think the search is broken on OldReddit…

3rodents 7mo ago

The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people. There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.

reitzensteinm 7mo ago
The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.
- butterbomb 7mo ago
  [dead]
- brookst 7mo ago
  Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial. Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
  - archagon 7mo ago
    Same as any other conspiratorial thinking: they hold themselves in too high a regard and want to think they’re privy to some secret knowledge that the rubes have missed.
  - zoeysmithe 7mo ago
    I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.

JasonADrury 7mo ago

I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy. Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes. One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly. The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.

ayylemao 7mo ago
[flagged]
- JasonADrury 7mo ago
  Why? It's not like I'm claiming some eight figure marketing contracts here. This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started. I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
maxerickson 7mo ago
You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.
- JasonADrury 7mo ago
  I'm largely indifferent, but the products I promote are good and the customers spending 500k+ pa on the services I sell are not unsophisticated.

laserbeam 7mo ago

To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.

paulcole 7mo ago

Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”

satvikpendem 7mo ago
Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.
- paulcole 7mo ago
  You think this Sriracha story wants to sell you something.
  - satvikpendem 7mo ago
    Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.
    - paulcole 7mo ago
      People sell things by telling stories. Sometimes those stories are interstitial ads and sometimes they are not.
      - satvikpendem 7mo ago
        If you can't tell the difference between an ancient poem and an astroturfing reddit post then I'm not sure how to convince you there is one.
    - nathan_douglas 7mo ago
      It was all about Shamhat's OnlyFans clay tablet.

everdrive 7mo ago

A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.

wat10000 7mo ago
How many of the credulous responses are themselves bot-generated to make the original sound more believable?
brynnbee 7mo ago
A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview. It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes. This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
- RankingMember 7mo ago
  > "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid Ha, I don't know your friends but in my experience that's like a textbook phrase people use to try to play off being duped when they're clued in
  - inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
    [dead]
- 7mo ago

oldandboring 7mo ago

Reading some the comments on this thread reveals one of the main reasons why a campaign like this is necessary if you're Underwood. Huy Fong has achieved "category king" status in this space; most people don't know what Huy Fong is, that red sauce is called "Sriracha". Huy Fong knows quite well that as long as the sauce still comes in that bottle and tastes like chilis, 99% of their customers will still buy it. Making a dent in this segment beyond foodies and hot-sauce enthusiasts requires some guerrilla marketing and and public education.

nancyminusone 7mo ago

That's Reddit for you. I wonder how few topics you could condense the most posts into?

alexggordon 7mo ago

Nothing stopping both from being true. The court judgements[0] aren't faked. It genuinely appears Underwood really was screwed over. That said, it doesn't take much for a CMO to look at the situation and figure out how to market the product from there. Something something lemonade. Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky? [0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b303096.pdf?ts=1627407095 https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...

x0x0 7mo ago
Additionally, it's not like this necessarily got posted out of the blue. There's another Huy Fong sriracha shortage due to a Mexican crop failure driven by climate change. So anyone wondering why they can't buy it will naturally encounter this story. https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-foods-halts-production-again-after-chili-crop-fails-completely/ https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-f... And as you mentioned, that lawsuit has pretty convincing evidence of a multi-year plan to really screw the supplier in order to get even more fantastically wealthy. Amazing greed combined with profound stupidity about the difficulty of reliably sourcing 2 _thousand_ acres of ripe chilies. There's been a decade of rolling shortages.

snowwrestler 7mo ago

A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work. You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible. There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.

Barakahzai 7mo ago

Hello - it's me, the OP from the Reddit post. I saw the discussion here and felt I had to respond, because you've gone after my integrity and honesty - you have basically accused me of being a shill for Underwood, a clumsy astroturfer who makes things up. So, I would like to say a few things in reply. First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight. Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away. Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would. That's basically what I wanted to communicate.

moogleii 7mo ago

[dead]