It took decades for David Tran to become a hot sauce multimillionaire, with his signature sriracha becoming one of the top three hot sauce brands in America.
He got started making chili sauce back in his homeland, right after serving in the South Vietnamese army and manning his older brother’s chili field to provide for his family. He would sell glass jars of the sauce door to door, Tran said during
He got started making chili sauce back in his homeland, right after serving in the South Vietnamese army and manning his older brother’s chili field to provide for his family. He would sell glass jars of the sauce door to door, Tran said during a 2013 interview for a Vietnamese American oral history project at the University of California, Irvine. He would do “nothing but take care of the chili and bring it to the market,” he recalled. It was a secretive operation, he said, because “at the time the communist[s] came and they closed almost every business because it belonged to the government.”