Sriracha shortage: Meet Craig Underwood, the chili pepper farming millionaire

The call came from David Tran, a Cantonese refugee from Vietnam who had arrived in the Golden State a few years before. He had developed a sauce that he intended for fans of the Southeast Asian flavor profile, called sriracha, but he needed a supplier.

In 1988, a seed supplier told Underwood about Tran’s need for a pepper fix and he decided to write to Tran with a simple question: “Would you like me to grow some peppers?” 

Tran contracted the farmer to grow 50 acres, and the pair began a partnership that was “highly unusual in the processing business,” as Underwood described it in a 2013 documentary about the duo. As long as Tran was selling sauce, he said, “we have to be growing it for them.” 

Within a few years, Underwood had become Tran’s exclusive pepper supplier, expanding his farm by thousands of acres to grow in the process. The duo developed a personal rapport as well as a business arrangement that lasted almost 30 years. Then came a sudden fallout and a lawsuit that cost both men millions, plus a lot of anger and hurt feelings, Fortune’s Indrani Sen reported.  

Underwood’s farm, called Underwood Ranches and located in California’s Ventura County, grew to become one of the country’s leading jalapeño growers. During his partnership with Tran, Underwood rented and purchased land to grow from around 400 acres to some three thousand acres to grow enough peppers for Tran’s rocketing business, Huy Fong Foods, which made $131 million in sales in 2020. 

Tran and Underwood‘s years of success together

Tran and Underwood met each other’s families, watched their respective kids grow up, and even met to talk about the succession of their partnership. In 2013, when the city of Irwindale brought