A shortage of America’s favorite chili sauce has created a black market, with online sellers making hundreds of dollars offloading the hot commodity.
For three years, an ongoing chili pepper shortage has been impacting the production of sriracha hot sauce, with adverse weather conditions over the past year continuing to affect the quality of the chili pepper harvest.
Huy Fong sriracha—the most popular brand in America, according to Instacart sales data—has been particularly hard-hit. In an email to customers last year, the company said that given the poor weather affecting its suppliers, it was now facing a “more severe shortage of chili.”
“Unfortunately, this is out of our control, and without this essential ingredient we are unable to produce any of our products,” Huy Fong said at the time.
The impact of the shortage is manifest on grocery store shelves in recent months, with many consumers taking to social media to complain about the hole the unavailable sauce has left in their lives.
This Sriracha chili sauce shortage is getting ridiculous now. These 4 bottles below used to cost $16 total at $4 each. Now people are reselling them on EBay for $110 for the same 4 bottles. If you see any left in your local Asian supermarket with the green cap bottle, hoard… pic.twitter.com/1RtamIAKl8
— Tommy Mustache ❤️❤️❤️ (@MustacheTommy) June 22, 2023
Putting Sriracha on the list of things I won’t get to enjoy for at least a couple years because of climate change. https://t.co/cNinQ8iJHJ
— Erik :: they/them 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ (@thecardsharp2) June 29, 2023
Ever since the Sriracha shortage, my food hasn’t been hitting the same😖
— 𝔍𝔞𝔦𝔩𝔢𝔫𝔢 (@JaiForJoy) June 29, 2023
Lucrative opportunity
While many outlets—including Target, Walmart, and certain Amazon sellers—have limited or no bottles of Huy Fong sriracha in stock, for those who do have sauce that they’re willing to sell, the shortage has proved a lucrative opportunity.
One Amazon seller is offering a pack of two 17-oz. bottles for $125, making them one of several retailers using the e-commerce platform to offload multipacks of the cult favorite at inflated prices in excess of $100.
Ordinarily, a 17-oz. bottle costs around $5.
On eBay, the cost of Huy Fong sriracha is also surging.
One of the cheaper listings on the online auction platform has sold 70 28-oz. bottles at $35. Another is selling packages of 50 individual 7g sachets of the sauce for just under $24—and has already made 79 sales.
At the other end of the pricing scale, an eBay user auctioning off a 28-oz. bottle of Huy Fong sriracha has so far racked the bidding up to $91, with almost two days of bidding left before the auction closes.
“I am selling them individually, and I have 10 bottles up for sale,” the seller wrote on the listing page. “Expiration date is September 2024.”
Meanwhile, an eBay listing for a box of a dozen 28-oz. bottles of the sauce has reached a bid of $415, with bidding closing on Sunday. The seller claims in its listing to have “more than a dozen boxes available” in addition to the one being auctioned off.
Offline, physical grocery stores have also been hiking their prices. One TikToker recently shared footage from inside an unidentified store where Huy Fong sriracha was being sold for $25.99.
“Can you believe it? It’s just sauce, it’s not supposed to be $26 for a bottle,” she said. “I hope everyone’s hanging in there during the sriracha shortage.”
Huy Fong Foods, the manufacturer of the sauce, did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. However, the company told CBS News that production had recently restarted, but said this was limited as it was still contending with supply constraints.
“Unfortunately, we are still experiencing a shortage of raw material,” the firm said. “At this time, we have no estimations of when supply will increase.”
Huy Fong, founded by David Tran after he fled Vietnam for America in the 1970s, was recently valued at $1 billion by research firm IBISWorld, with sales hitting an estimated $131 million in 2020.
