Business
Momofuku responds to chili crunch backlash: 'We wanted a name we could own'
Imagine walking into a grocery store and seeing a single brand of each item. Identical squeeze bottles of “Ketchup.” One company’s “Mustard.” One brand of “Salsa.” Just one maker’s “Hot Sauce.” What a bland world it would be.
If Momofuku has its way, the only “Chili Crunch” on store shelves will bear the name Momofuku.
Momofuku, founded by chef David Chang, acquired the rights to use “chile crunch,” spelled with an “e,” last year from Chile Colonial LLC, a Denver company that registered the trademark in 2015 with the United States Patent and Trademark Office after making a Mexican-inspired chile crunch sauce since 2008. Then on March 29, Momofuku filed a trademark application for the term “chili crunch,” spelled with an “i,” and started sending cease and desist orders to multiple businesses selling chili crunch products, the Guardian first reported.
A jar of Momofuku chili crunch.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
Social media backlash immediately followed. Actor Simu Liu, who serves as the chief content officer for MìLà, a food and beverage company that makes frozen dumplings and chili crunch, challenged Momofuku to a blind taste test on Twitter last week: “Winner keeps the name, loser (it’ll be you) backs off.”
In a statement to The Times, a spokesperson for Momofuku said the company has seen multiple chili crisp products rebranded as chili crunch over the last year, and that the trademark was never intended to “stifle innovation in a category that we care deeply about.”
“When we created our product, we wanted a name we could own and intentionally picked ‘Chili Crunch’ to further differentiate it from the broader chili crisp category,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We worked with a family-owned company called Chile Colonial to purchase the trademark from them. They have defended the trademark previously against companies like Trader Joe’s.”
One of the voices critical of Momofuku threatening legal action against other chile sauce businesses was Fly by Jing chef and entrepreneur Jing Gao. She started bottling Sichuan chili crisp in 2018, and is often credited as the catalyst for the mainstreaming of chili crisp. She is also an investor and advisor in Homiah, one of the brands that received a cease and desist letter.
Gao’s own company, as multiple outlets reported, filed to trademark “Sichuan Chili Crisp” in 2019 only to see its application dismissed in 2020.
“The ‘chile crunch’ trademark should also not have been granted,” wrote Gao in a Substack newsletter titled “On Trademark Bullies.” “It is a descriptive term for a cultural product, one that has existed in Chinese cuisine for hundreds of years.”
A jar of Fly by Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp by Jing Gao. Gao is credited with starting the current chili sauce craze with the introduction of her chili crisp in 2018.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
What the newsletter and other stories did not mention , however, is that last week, on April 3, Fly by Jing filed again to trademark “Sichuan Chili Crisp,” according to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. Then on Monday, Gao said in a statement to The Times that she requested to withdraw the application.
Gao said Fly by Jing reapplied for “Sichuan Chili Crisp” as well as “Chengdu Crunch” “to safeguard against the potential that we need to defend ourselves against a larger power that may be threatened by our existence. In light of the events of the last two days however, we now believe that there’s been enough awareness raised about the descriptive nature of the term, that the USPTO will reconsider the chili/chile crunch trademarks, and we felt comfortable with filing a request to abandon the application for our product’s name, which we have already done as of Saturday.”
“Even if we were granted the trademark for Sichuan Chili Crisp, which we have now abandoned, Fly By Jing would not have used it to intimidate small businesses,” wrote Jing.
Yet if Fly by Jing had been granted a trademark, the company would be responsible for enforcing it, as outlined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. By not protecting your trademark, you could lose it.
If I had my way, neither term would be trademarked.
David Tran, founder of the Huy Fong Foods Sriracha sauce, never sought to exclusively own the term “Sriracha.” Instead, he trademarked his signature rooster logo and bottle.
I reject the notion that someone could exclusively own something so ingrained in my culture, a food I consider an intrinsic part of my identity. These trademarks will limit who can profit off a food with a connection to entire cultures. It would be like someone trying to trademark salsa macha and salsa verde. Wait, inexplicably somebody did trademark salsa verde, signaling a serious problem with the USPTO lacking the knowledge to accurately or fairly determine what’s descriptive or confusing when it comes to certain foods.
I, like many Chinese Americans, feel a sense of pride and ownership over the condiment typically made with garlic, other alliums, chiles and oil. Whether you call it crisp, oil, crunch or sauce, it’s a condiment that’s integral to the cuisines, cultures and experiences of Asian Americans around the world.
Michelle Tew, founder and CEO of Homiah foods, called receiving her cease and desist letter a “punch in the gut.”
“Homiah’s Sambal Chili Crunch product is personal and based on a family recipe from my Granny Nonie dating back to countless generations of Nyonya heritage in Penang, Malaysia,” Tew wrote in a statement on LinkedIn. “I was shocked and disappointed that a well-known and respected player in the Asian food industry would legally threaten me — a one-woman show operating on a much smaller scale — from selling a product that is part of my family’s history and culture.”
The move to trademark “chili crunch,” whether intentional or not, will only serve to whitewash an entire genre of chile sauces. Although some of the sauce companies have strong financial backing — according to Forbes, Momofuku raised $17.5 million in funding last year with $50 million in sales, MìLà recently raised $22.5 million and Fly by Jing raised 12 million last year — many of these products are made by small AAPI-owned companies.
All deserve a piece of the more than $3 billion hot sauce industry in the United States. And that number is expected to nearly double in the next decade, according to a market report by Fortune Business Insights.
A jar of chile sauce can be found on most tables at restaurants serving dumplings in the San Gabriel Valley.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
Melody and Russ Stein’s pizza company Pi00a (pronounced pie-oh-ah) started selling jars of chili crunch when they launched a ghost kitchen in Koreatown last year with their children, Taysia and Rylan. Pi00a is a Deaf- and family-owned business, selling Neapolitan pizzas with Asian influences and a mission to provide jobs for the hard of hearing.
For a soppressata pizza, Melody came up with her own version of chili crunch, something “sweet and spicy” that goes with the Italian dry salume, she said over the phone with her daughter as interpreter. “People liked it and started asking for jars of it,” and Pi00a now sells about 100 jars a week through its online business and 40 retailers.
“We just started our small business, it costs a lot of money to rebrand. It’s very difficult to absorb any added expense. We just hope [Momofuku] realizes the impact this has on the community and they drop the trademarks.”
Kansas City chef James Chang, who makes a chili crunch of his own, wrote in an Instagram post referencing the cease and desist letters, “While I have not received one yet it’s only a matter of time. … For someone that has railed against how ethnic aisles in grocery stores do not have enough minority-owned brands [David Chang] is doing just the goddamn same. Instead of creating a community he wants to create a monopoly.”
A collection of chile oil, crisp and crunch.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
You can find a jar of chile sauce that’s half oil, half chile-and-garlic sediment on the tables at most restaurants serving dumplings in the San Gabriel Valley. Many make the sauce themselves.
Before it was a trendy condiment found at every superette (and even Costco), there were half-empty jars of Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisp with crust around the lids in my fridge and on my family dinner table. My Chinese grandmother and uncle introduced me to Lao Gan Ma spicy chili crisp in the late ‘90s. It’s a sludge-like combination of dried chiles, crispy onions, MSG and fermented soybeans. For years I called it chili crunchy. I could never remember the name, and simply asked for more of that “chili crunchy stuff with the stern lady.”
The sauce was created by Tao Huabi in Guizhou, China, in 1984. Hers is the face on every bottle.
Nearly a decade ago, I brought Lao Gan Ma to a hot sauce taste-off with the late Jonathan Gold and Kogi BBQ chef Roy Choi. The chili crunchy stuff with the stern lady on the bottle was the clear winner.
“Sauce invented by our ancestors, our version perfected for 30+ years … ,” wrote the makers of Bowl Cut chili crisp on Instagram. “No one should own a trademark for the description of a sauce that’s been around forever.”
Chili crunch belongs to everyone.
Deputy Food editor Betty Hallock contributed to this report.
A gig drivers organization filed a lawsuit against Uber, alleging the company violated their rights by not providing a sufficient appeals process for deactivated accounts.
The lawsuit was announced Monday during a news conference by Rideshare Drivers United, an independent organization that represents more than 20,000 app-based drivers in California.
The organization, represented by attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, said thousands of drivers have been terminated with little to no explanation, many of whom had worked as drivers for years and had high ratings.
“Drivers want to stand up for themselves and for basic fairness, and we can’t when there is no fair appeals process,” said Jason Munderloh, the chairman of the organization’s Bay Area chapter.
The lawsuit is the latest in a long battle between drivers and major ride-hailing service companies. Uber, a frequent target of lawsuits, has often faced claims of labor violations and vehicle collisions.
The tension could reach the November ballot, as the ride-hailing giant attempts to curb the laundry list of legal action. Uber is advocating for legislation that could cap how much attorneys can earn in vehicle collision cases.
Rideshare Drivers United said Monday that Uber is violating Proposition 22, which passed in 2020 and was upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2024. The legislation was a win for gig economy companies, allowing them to classify drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, provided certain requirements are met.
Uber is violating a clause in the proposition that requires the company to provide an appeals process for drivers who are terminated, the organization said.
“Uber has had six years of hiding behind Prop. 22 on issues favorable to it and ignored the law when it seemed inconvenient,” Munderloh said.
The lawsuit seeks a statewide judgment that Uber has failed to comply with Proposition 22, along with an opportunity for the thousands of deactivated drivers to appeal their terminations. The suit also seeks reactivation and back pay for drivers who were unfairly terminated.
Uber denied the claims in the lawsuit and reaffirmed that it offers a clear appeals process, in compliance with Proposition 22, a spokesperson told The Times.
“This is a baseless lawsuit by an opportunistic trial lawyer seeking to overturn Proposition 22 and the will of California voters,” the spokesperson said. “We’ll fight this publicity stunt in court while continuing to strengthen drivers’ voice on the platform.”
The company posted on a blog Friday that details its termination and appeals process. Every deactivated driver is given a reason for termination and offered a review process for more information. Drivers can then appeal, and the appeal is evaluated by a real person, according to the website.
Rirdeshare Drivers United said drivers are often terminated for vague reasons and are met with endless automated chatbots when inquiring about their terminations.
Drivers who request an appeal are either automatically denied or given the runaround without being offered an actual appeals process, Liss-Riordan said.
Devins Baker had given about 18,000 rides for Uber in eight years and boasted a 4.96 rating when his account was unexpectedly terminated just before Christmas in 2024. An automated message from the company claimed Baker had driven recklessly and offered no other information, he said.
He wasn’t told what resulted in his termination, but said that during his last ride, he had to drive defensively to avoid crashing into a vehicle that was merging recklessly on the freeway.
Baker had to hit the brakes to avoid the collision, and the passenger, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, fell off the seat.
Baker was not offered a chance to appeal, he said.
Proposition 22 carved out a new classification for gig economy workers, affording them limited benefits, but not the rights granted to full-fledged employees.
The legislation received strong financial backing from Uber.
A group of drivers challenged Proposition 20 in 2024, claiming the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with the state Legislature’s authority to provide workers’ compensation protections to drivers. Their claims were ultimately rejected by the state’s highest court.
Ride-hail drivers have long raised concerns about low wages, minimal workplace protections and exploitative practices.
More recently, they have grappled with rising gas prices amid the war in the Middle East, which has driven some away from the ride-hailing business.
“The pay is not good in the first place. We do what we can to create a solid framework for ourselves and our families,” said Munderloh, who works as a part-time Uber driver. “It’s hard enough with how little they pay us, and then even that is taken away.”
Various gig companies, including Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, have said Proposition 22 is a crucial component of their businesses and threatened to shut down in the state if the proposition were struck down. These companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign to sway voters on the proposition.
When Infowars, the website founded by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, came up for sale two years ago, an unlikely suitor stepped up. The Onion, a satirical news outlet, planned to convert the site into a parody of itself.
That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.
On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’ Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Guerra Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”
Mr. Jones had no immediate comment.
The battle over Infowars has been a long and fraught saga, and Mr. Jones — a notorious peddler of lies and invective — has used his bully pulpit for more than a year to crusade against The Onion’s efforts to take over the platform. The site is in limbo because of a series of defamation lawsuits against Mr. Jones filed by families of victims of the mass shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which Mr. Jones falsely claimed was a hoax.
People who believed his lies that the shooting was staged subjected the families to years of online abuse, harassment and death threats.
In 2018, the families of two Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones for defamation in Texas, where Infowars is based, and relatives of eight other victims sued him in Connecticut. In 2022, a jury in Texas awarded the parents of one victim $50 million.
Mr. Jones declared bankruptcy later that year. A trial pitting him against the parents of a second victim was delayed indefinitely by that move. Later that year, a jury awarded the families and a former law enforcement official who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut a total of $1.4 billion.
Mr. Jones appealed the Connecticut verdict, the largest defamation award in history, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In October, the justices declined to hear the case.
To help satisfy Mr. Jones’s debts to the Sandy Hook families and other creditors, Judge Christopher Lopez of U.S. Bankruptcy Court ordered in mid-2024 that a court-appointed trustee sell off equipment, intellectual property and other assets owned by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company.
In late 2024, a sealed-bid silent auction drew only two contenders: The Onion’s parent and a company associated with Mr. Jones. The trustee and the families chose The Onion’s bid, despite its potential to yield less cash than the rival company’s. Mr. Jones and his lawyers cried foul, and Judge Lopez intervened, saying that the process was opaque and that The Onion’s bid was not obviously superior. He rejected plans for a do-over of the auction, instead directing the families to seek a liquidation through Judge Guerra Gamble’s court in Texas, where the first defamation case was heard and won.
In August, Judge Guerra Gamble ruled that a court-appointed administrator would take over and sell Infowars’ assets, reopening the door to The Onion. “We’re working on it,” Ben Collins, the chief executive of Global Tetrahedron, wrote on social media on the same day as Judge Guerra Gamble’s ruling.
The Onion’s proposal, worth $486,000 in its initial six-month term, does little to satisfy the enormous damages awarded to the Sandy Hook families. The families have been fighting to collect since Mr. Jones filed for personal and business bankruptcy. Mr. Jones is expected to lose access to his studio and equipment as part of the deal, Mr. Collins said.
The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site with satirical echoes of the fringe conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones is known for. Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially planned to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”
Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker hopes to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy, he said.
“I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview. During a recent trip to Philadelphia, he traveled to the Liberty Bell to film a video in character as the new creative director of Infowars.
“The goal for the families we represent has always been to prevent Alex Jones from being able to cause harm at scale, the way he did against them,” said Chris Mattei, the lawyer who argued the Connecticut families’ case in court. The deal with The Onion promises “to significantly degrade his power to do that.”
The Onion also plans to sell merchandise and share the proceeds with the Sandy Hook families.
“We are excited to lie constantly for cold, hard cash, but this time in a cool way, and we’ll make sure some of it gets back to the families,” Mr. Collins said.
While broadcast programming is “out of my lane,” Mr. Mattei said, “satire and humor can be universal. If their programming can be of interest to Jones’s former audience, and help bring them out of the dark, that would be wonderful.”
In the meantime, the company has been filming satirical videos in antipation of the court’s ruling. One of them features a fictional anchor from the satirical Onion News Network, “Jim Haggerty,” who defects from the mainstream media to become a conspiracy monger. He will be played by the actor Brad Holbrook.
“For 35 years, I was part of the problem,” Mr. Haggerty intoned in a dramatic trailer released by The Onion. “But now, I’m free of my corporate shackles, and my only business is freedom.”
Apple, one of the world’s most valuable companies, is getting a new chief executive, marking a new chapter in the story of what has become arguably the most influential company in consumer technology.
The Cupertino, Calif., smartphone maker said Monday that John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, will become Apple’s chief executive on Sept. 1.
Tim Cook, who has served as chief executive for roughly 15 years, will become executive chairman of the company’s board of directors, the company said. He was long expected to step down soon.
Under Cook’s leadership, Apple’s market capitalization grew to $4 trillion from about $350 billion, according to the company. Its revenue ballooned from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Apple also expanded its business under Cook’s tenure, including its presence in entertainment with Apple TV and Apple Music. People also use other services such as Apple Pay and iCloud to store their photos, videos and other content.
The leadership transition marks a new era for Apple, which turned 50 years old in April. The company has revolutionized technology, selling popular consumer electronics including iPhones and smartwatches.
But the company has lagged behind as its rivals such as OpenAI, Google, Meta and more move quickly to dominate the artificial intelligence race. It has also had to grapple with tariffs and criticism for manufacturing its products in other countries, such as China and India, during President Trump’s second term.
“These will be big shoes to fill and the timing of Cook exiting stage left as CEO could make sense but also creates questions. Apple is making a major transition on its AI strategy, and longtime CEO and legendary Cook leaving now is a surprise,” Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said in a statement.
In a statement, Cook expressed gratitude for his time leading Apple. The 65-year-old succeeded chief executive and co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011 after he passed away from pancreatic cancer.
“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor,” Cook said in a statement. “He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”
Ternus was widely expected to be next in line as chief executive.
In a statement, he said he’s worked at Apple for nearly his entire career, including under Jobs. He described Cook, who will work with him during the transition, as his mentor.
“I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century,” Ternus said in a statement.
Ternus has served as Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering since 2021, working on new products such as the iPad and AirPods. Before that role, he was on Apple’s product design team in 2001 before becoming vice president of hardware engineering in 2013, according to the company.
“Ternus’s work on Mac has helped the category become more powerful and more popular globally than at any time in its 40-year history,” Apple said in its news release about the transition.
In the fiscal year ending in September, Apple reported revenue of $416 billion and a net income of $112 billion. Worldwide, there are more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices.
Apple’s stock was down less than 1% in early after-hours trading, changing hands at around $271 a share.
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