Today we’d like to introduce you to Jing Gao.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I spent the last 25 years of my life hiding behind ‘Jenny’, a name I chose at age five to make life easier as a kid growing up in Europe. It’s no wonder my search for identity and heritage later in life brought me back to my hometown of Chengdu in China, where I’ve spent the last ten years finding meaning and my place in the intersection of food with culture, tradition, and modernity.
I delved deep into Chinese food culture and its regional cuisines, so varied and diverse it felt more like a continent. I was stunned by the depth of this 5000-year heritage that no one outside of China seemed to know about, and what started as a personal quest to reconnect with my roots soon became a passion project to shine a light on this cuisine and culture.
I left my corporate job, opened a restaurant in Shanghai, studied Sichuan cooking with the masters, and tried to figure out my place in it all. The idea of tradition and ‘authenticity’ never really sat right with me. It felt terminal and doesn’t allow a culture or its people to evolve. When a culture doesn’t evolve, it dies, and I wanted to help push it forward.
I started to develop my own deeply personal expressions of these flavors. Like me, they were rooted in tradition but also in evolution. I was finally starting to find my voice, with food as my medium.
This journey came to a head when I started an underground pop-up dining concept I named Fly By Jing: an ode to Chengdu’s famous ‘fly restaurants’- hole-in-the-wall eateries so good they attract people like flies, and as a nod to my birth name — which I was just starting to reconnect with but still a bit uncomfortable responding to. I was beginning to peel back the layers, but there was still more work to do.
Fly By Jing, in its current form as a spice and condiment company, was born out of a suitcase. Whenever I took to the road to host a dinner somewhere in the world, my bags were packed full of high-quality ingredients that I couldn’t get anywhere but China. I understood why — there was little demand from the West stemming from a lack of awareness, and moreover, hundreds of years of bias against the cuisine and its people.
But whether it was New York, Tokyo or Sydney, people instantly connected to these flavors. Many were surprised that these nuances existed in Sichuan food, and most had never even heard of some of these ingredients. Seeing people from all walks of life connect over these flavors that were so deeply personal to me planted a seed. I thought to myself, how can I create more spaces of belonging like the one I was carving out here?
In 2018, I traveled to California to attend Expo West, the largest natural food show in the US.
I spent days wandering through thousands of stalls but could barely recall any Asian food brands by the end. Not surprisingly, there was even less diversity within the buyers and retailers walking the halls. It dawned on me that not only were entire groups of people being left out of healthy eating, but that the size of this missed opportunity was massive, as this was clearly not representative of what America looks like or how it eats.
When I went back to Shanghai, I knew it was time to upgrade my suitcases packed with ingredients to something bigger. I decided to launch my business in the US with the spices and condiments I was creating in my kitchen and make these flavors more accessible to everyone. I knew it was an uphill battle against centuries of false narratives about Chinese cuisine, but it was worth it if we could take back this narrative, help redefine it, and show people just how high-quality Chinese food can be.
I launched my first product on Kickstarter that summer, Sichuan Chili Crisp, an all-natural chili sauce that I developed as a foundation for a lot of my dishes. It became the highest-funded craft food project on the platform. It was clear that we were ready for a new narrative about Chinese food, one that did not conform to preconceived notions of value, taste, and tradition.
I highlighted the ingredients that I had spent years sourcing in the mountains and countryside of China, starting from my restaurant days. Many of these had never been exported before, like Qingxi’s elusive gongjiao, a variety of Sichuan pepper so intoxicating and rare it was given exclusively as a tribute to the emperor, or the prized amber-hued caiziyou, cold-pressed semi-winter rapa oil that’s been used in Sichuan cooking for thousands of years for its health benefits and intensely nutty flavor.
I knew my products wouldn’t taste like anything else on the market because they weren’t made like anything else. I was finally getting closer to finding what I was looking for when I first moved to China ten years ago, a voice that was undeniably my own.
After launching direct-to-consumer in February of 2019, we started to grow from our initial Kickstarter base as word-of-mouth spread about our products and the media started paying attention to this versatile new condiment called chili crisp- a heritage category that’s been around in China for many decades.
Despite our early traction, many investors I met with dismissed it as a fluke. They told me my company (Chinese food) was too niche and would never cross over to the mainstream (i.e., make money for them), despite data showing that Chinese food was the most popular cuisine in America based on the number of restaurants alone and that no single brand has yet risen to capture a share of mind and represent a new standard of quality.
For a long time, it felt like one step forward and two steps back. I was accepted to a prestigious tech accelerator where business leaders told me to tone down my mission of rewriting false stereotypes and bringing diversity to natural foods and instead just focus on the delicious attributes of the sauce and the chili sauce set because “consumers aren’t interested in the mission behind the business.”
I wondered if they meant that or just that they weren’t interested in this mission in particular. White investors told me they had a hard time believing Chinese food faced any prejudice at all, because “that wasn’t their experience”.
These were the uphill battles I knew I would face in building this business, but it still stung to hear. I was a kid again, on the first day of school in Germany, indignant to the gaze of my classmates, who I recognized even at my young age, saw me as the Other. I had the simultaneous feeling of wanting to be seen and to disappear all together.
I decided to bootstrap the business, learning the ins and outs of running a direct-to-consumer company along the way from books, podcasts, and the wisdom of other founders. We steadily grew about 30% month over month.
That was until March of 2020.
Increased tensions rose from xenophobia, trade relations soured, and overtly racist comments started popping up on our social media pages. “We don’t need anything else from China right now” “What’s this made of? Bats?” Production ground to a halt in China. I braced myself for dark times ahead.
But when quarantine began, things quickly started to change. Forced to cook at home, many reached for our products, which made it easy to add complex flavors to the food they were already eating. We were flooded by emails from customers telling us how much our products have given them comfort in difficult times.
And then in mid-April, Sam Sifton wrote about us in the NYTimes.
Nothing could have prepared me for the impact. In one week, we sold more than we had in the entire previous year. It was an overnight success, several years in the making.
The elated highs of the moment quickly dropped down to the lowest of lows as the reality of the pandemic’s impact on global supply chains hit me. We sold out of many months of inventory in a few days as I scrambled to start production in China, where they were just starting to come back to life after several months of strict lockdowns.
I wish I could say it was smooth sailing from there, but I could fill a saga with the comedy of errors that ensued over the next four months as I battled global logistics delays, ‘random’ customs inspections, and the machines at our co-packer literally breaking under the weight of our hot sauce set, forcing us to bottle 30,000 jars by hand.
As the tide of support rose, so did the crescendo of racially charged comments online, ranging from the unimaginative variation of “$17 for chili oil? I could get this for $2 in Chinatown.” to the eloquently worded take-down, “Any Chinese food that is ‘high-end’ isn’t authentic and is a capitalist marketing attempt.”
It was the same reductive dismissal that I had been hearing for years, whether explicitly from potential investors or implicitly from the stubbornly white-washed natural foods section. It was a narrative that stripped Chinese food and its people of their value. And at the end of this long road, I was exhausted. I was done convincing people of my worth. I decided instead to hold up a mirror. What is it that makes you think Chinese food and the people creating them aren’t worth more than the value you ascribe to them?
Fighting for acceptance was a feeling I was all too familiar with. As a child of immigrants who had to prove themselves and their right to exist everywhere they went, I was naturally conditioned to achieve. My feelings of self-worth, internalized at a young age, was measured in accomplishment and output.
When I think back to late nights laboring over my stove in Shanghai, those long, exasperating days at factories in rural Sichuan, or crying in the bathroom of an office building after yet another investor I met dismissed me and my vision, I persevered the only way I knew how, by donning a hard shield, emblazoned for battle. I fought so hard for an illusion of me that I no longer knew the person beneath the exterior.
Then one day, a few weeks into quarantine, something shifted. It dawned on me that I couldn’t recall the last time I was in my own company for this long without the need for protective armor. Incredibly, I felt peace in just being.
I looked in the mirror and no longer saw the battle-worn Jenny who I’ve known for the last three decades of my life. She had carried me far, but it was time to peel back the layers. It turns out that what I was seeking all this time was right here in front of me.
That was the day I came back to Jing. In a world that constantly demanded justification for my existence, finally embracing my birth name felt like a small but radical form of self-love and acceptance. I was finally home.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
In 2018 (the year of its launch), Fly By Jing established an exciting new category of premium Asian condiments from the ground up, starting with its famed Sichuan Chili Crisp. In the past year, the company has innovated to greatly expand the category with new innovations, including Sichuan Gold, which brings all the addicting umami notes of mala (spicy and numbing flavor profile) to this hot sauce-meets-chili oil. The one-of-a-kind flavor was featured in Season 19 of First We Feast’s hugely popular YouTube show Hot Ones and is now on stands across the nation in Whole Foods Market. Fly By Jing’s versatile, intensely flavored, and best-selling hot sauces (crafted meticulously in Chengdu, China) are widely used by customers to complement and enhance a surprising range of foods—from pizza to ice cream—becoming a condiment game-changer and instant household favorite.
Fly By Jing has shifted the landscape of healthy eating in America in four short years and worked to evolve culture by raising consciousness about Chinese food and flavors, leading the field with authentic, premium products that have no artificial preservatives and are Non-GMO Project certified. Essential to that mission is product placement in ‘mainstream’ hot sauce and condiment aisles (not in ‘ethnic’ or ‘international’ sections), which the company has recently achieved nationally at chains including Target and Whole Foods. Fly By Jing has partnered with major culinary brands like Panda Express, Shake Shack, Disney, and more, which contribute to a broader appreciation for diverse culinary traditions and has inspired many more food companies to prioritize cultural authenticity and representation in their products.
Following the success of a co-branded tinned smoked Atlantic salmon with Fishwife, Fly By Jing has inspired many other food brands to introduce authentic, addicting Sichuan flavors to their products in 2023, including The Caker, Little Sesame, Daring Foods, Sun Noodle, Louisville Vegan Jerky Co, and Last Crumb. Fly By Jing continues to partner with global restaurant chains, including a successful menu expansion at Shake Shack UK and a test at Panda Express, which instantly sold out.
Through culinary innovation, Fly By Jing is celebrated for bringing traditional Sichuan flavors and ingredients to a wider audience and encouraging people to explore and embrace new tastes. Additionally, the brand has elevated cultural appreciation and awareness by educating consumers about the complexity and nuances of Sichuan food, as well as all marginalized cuisines and the people who make them. Fly By Jing has helped bridge cultural gaps and encouraged a deeper understanding of Chinese culinary traditions. The brand is on a mission to evolve culture through taste and elevate the consciousness of all by expanding palates and minds.
Fly By Jing is actively expanding the chili crisp market by providing unparalleled access to authentic Chinese ingredients. Through its commitment to sourcing the finest and most genuine elements of Chinese cuisine, the brand is redefining the concept of chili crisp. By incorporating rare and high-quality components sourced directly from China, Fly By Jing enhances the depth and complexity of flavors in its products. This not only elevates the taste experience for consumers but also fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation of the rich culinary heritage behind each ingredient. As a result, Fly By Jing is not only growing the chili crisp market but also creating a gateway for individuals to explore the diverse and vibrant world of Chinese cuisine in a truly authentic and accessible manner.
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
That I am fluent in German!
Pricing:
- Our chili sauces average $15 at retail
Contact Info:
- Website: https://streaklinks.com/BzYViKelZfHpwo5nowtaG756/https%3A%2F%2Fflybyjing.com%2Fshop%2F
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flybyjing/?hl=en, https://www.instagram.com/jingtheory/?hl=en
