David Tran, 78-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who founded sriracha company Huy Fong

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.” 

Tran and his family eventually fled Vietnam, bringing 100 ounces of gold stashed in cans of condensed milk to the United States, where he ended up in Los Angeles. There he forged an unlikely, decades-long bond with a California farmer nearly his same age as his main chili pepper provider.

But now, as Fortune’s Indrani Sen reports, Tran’s supply of the sauce that made him famous remains shaky despite reaching stores again after a spotty three-year run. 

Beginning of a hot sauce empire

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1979, Tran was one of the more than 240,000 ethnic Chinese that left Vietnam after its long civil war ended in 1975. He rented an industrial bottling space near Los Angeles’ Chinatown in the 1980s, and named his company after the Taiwanese freighter ship that carried him away from Vietnam, the Huy Fong. 

Tran initially expected sriracha to have limited appeal, explaining in his oral history that he initially thought he “was…