A Pepper Shortage Has Your Favorite Sauce Selling as High as $80

For the second year in a row we are facing a world-wide shortage of catastrophic proportions. In sports, if your star player gets injured, that's catastrophic for the team. In this case, chili peppers are the star and Siracha Sauce the team.

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Back in April of last year, Huy Fong Foods, Inc., the nation’s leading sriracha sauce manufacturer, sent a letter to customers telling them to prepare for the impending shortage.

Mexico is by far the largest producer of the coveted pepper, but you'll also find red jalapenos here in Texas, New Mexico, and California, all of these areas have been experiencing megadrought conditions that past few years.

And if you didn't know, the popular hot sauce is made from sun-ripened red jalapeño-hybrid chili peppers. As it turns out the company started experiencing a shortage of their coveted chili pepper inventory three years ago, in July 2020. Due to poor weather conditions negatively affecting the chili crop this year that shortage has worsened.

And the shortage has now stretched into 2023.

It's so bad that some folks, fiending for Sriracha, are paying absurd prices to scratch the itch. And you know there are people willing to cash in by reselling their own home stocks for ridiculous prices.

Across eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Amazon, and Walmart, you'll find single bottles of Sriracha sauce being sold for anywhere between $30 to $80.

It is a quite popular condiment, especially here in the US. According to Fox News, "sale records show the company typically sells more than 20 million bottles of hot sauce per year."

Did you know that the sauce saw its beginnings in Thailand in the 1920s, and only really caught on in the US after 2011.