Fly By Jing: what happens when the price was the point
Fly By Jing built an eight-figure brand on a single, unfashionable idea: that Chinese food should cost more. Founder Jing Gao took a $5 supermarket condiment, rebuilt it with better ingredients, priced it at $15, and turned the markup into an argument. Then, in 2024 and 2025, she took that same product to 2,000 Walmart stores at $9.98 and launched a mild, non-spicy version. That is not a small tweak. It is a brand quietly negotiating with its own founding thesis.
Perception
Fly By Jing reads as premium the moment you see it. The jar is heavy glass with a matte label, Chengdu typography, and a tagline that does a lot of work: “not traditional, but personal.” That line is the entire positioning compressed to four words. It preempts the authenticity police (this is not your grandmother’s recipe) while claiming a different kind of legitimacy (it is mine, and I am from there).
The product itself is the message. Where the category leader, Lao Gan Ma, is dark, oily, and industrial, Fly By Jing is crunchy, aromatic, and loud with Sichuan peppercorn, the mala tingle that most Western-facing Chinese products sand off. Gao sources Tribute peppers from Sichuan, adds mushroom powder for umami, and keeps it vegan and free of preservatives. The recipe is a spec sheet you can taste. That is how you justify triple the price without saying “luxury” once.
The brand voice is confident to the point of confrontation. Gao has said her goal is to be “unapologetic,” to stop defending her culture to people with distorted ideas about what it should be. This is rare. Most brands built by immigrants or their children soften the edges for the mainstream. Fly By Jing does the opposite. It dares you to find it too much. That refusal to translate itself down is the differentiator, more than the mushroom powder.
Structure
Chili crisp is a crowded shelf pretending to be a niche. The positioning spread runs from cultural staple to celebrity spinoff.
| Brand | Founded | Price (jar) | Positioning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lao Gan Ma | 1997 | $5-7 | The default. Diaspora ubiquity, zero marketing |
| S&B (La-Yu) | 1960s | $4-6 | Japanese pantry heritage, crunchy garlic legacy |
| Trader Joe’s Chili Onion Crunch | 2020 | $4 | Private-label dupe, mass-market entry drug |
| Momofuku Chili Crunch | 2020 | $12-15 | Celebrity-chef restaurant CPG, David Chang halo |
| Fly By Jing | 2018 | $14-15 | Premium Sichuan, mala-forward, founder-as-argument |
Fly By Jing and Momofuku occupy the same price tier from opposite directions. Momofuku descends from a restaurant empire and a famous chef; the brand borrows Chang’s credibility. Fly By Jing ascends from a Kickstarter and a supper club; the brand builds credibility from provenance and process. One is a chef extending a name. The other is a category arguing for its own worth.
That distinction matters because it defines what each brand is actually selling. Momofuku sells access to a chef’s taste. Fly By Jing sells a revaluation of an entire cuisine. The second is a bigger idea and a more fragile one, because it depends on the premium holding. If the price drops, the argument weakens.
The price is the point
Most founders treat price as an output. Fly By Jing treated it as the thesis. Gao has been explicit about the mechanism: “There’s been no incentive for manufacturers in China to go through the effort of exporting something of quality if they’re being told that no one’s willing to pay more than $2 for something.” The $15 jar was not a margin decision. It was a corrective. It said the discount you are used to paying for Chinese food is not a fair price, it is a bias with a barcode.
The market agreed, at least for a while. The 2018 Kickstarter raised $120,031 from 1,683 backers, then one of the most-funded craft food campaigns on the platform. The Sichuan Chili Crisp became the number one best-selling hot sauce on Amazon within six months. Revenue grew roughly tenfold in the second year. Prelude Growth Partners put in $5 million in 2021, then led a $12 million round with Pendulum in 2023. That capital did not fund a better recipe. It funded distribution, which is where the thesis started to bend.
Here is the tension. A premium argument is easiest to make when the product is scarce and the buyer is self-selecting. It gets harder at 12,000 retail doors. It gets harder still at Walmart, where the same sauce now sells for $9.98, a price the brand justified by citing four years of supply-chain efficiencies passed to the customer. That is an honest explanation. It is also a $5 haircut on a product whose original job was to prove that Chinese food is worth paying up for. You cannot spend years teaching the market that $15 is the fair price and then quietly agree it was $9.98 all along without spending down some of the belief you built.
The Momofuku test
In March 2024, Momofuku filed to trademark “chili crunch” and reportedly pressed smaller, often Asian-owned brands to stop using the term. Gao responded on LinkedIn that she was “disheartened” to watch a large player go after minority, women-founded businesses, and called it “ridiculous to try and take ownership of a generic cultural term.” She was right, and the position was good for the brand. Fly By Jing became the voice of the small operators against the celebrity incumbent.
The complication is what surfaced underneath. Fly By Jing had itself filed to trademark “Sichuan chili crisp,” in 2019 and again on April 3, 2024, plus an application for “Chengdu Crunch.” On April 8, days into the public fight, it withdrew both. The brand that positioned as the defender of the commons had been trying to fence off a corner of it. Withdrawing was the correct move and the fast reversal was well handled. But the episode exposed the real question the brand keeps circling: is Fly By Jing a cultural steward or a category owner? Those are different jobs. A steward protects the generic term for everyone. An owner tries to own it. You can be one convincingly. Being both at once is what got Momofuku in trouble in the first place.
Identity
The name is the most disciplined thing about the brand. “Fly By Jing” references Chengdu’s cang ying guan, the “fly restaurants,” hole-in-the-wall spots so good they draw crowds like flies. It is specific, untranslated, and slightly off-putting to a Western ear, which is exactly the point. The name does not reach for you. It assumes you will come to it. That is the confident posture the whole brand is built on.
Gao herself is the other half of the identity. Chengdu-born, raised partly in Europe where she went by “Jenny” to fit in, ex-Procter and Gamble brand manager, then a restaurant operator in Shanghai before the supper club that became the brand. She reclaimed “Jing” around 2021, and the personal arc maps cleanly onto the brand arc: stop translating yourself for other people’s comfort. When the founder’s biography and the product’s positioning tell the same story, the brand becomes hard to copy. Momofuku can hire a Sichuan consultant. It cannot hire Gao’s reason for existing.
The risk is that identity this tightly bound to a person and a premium does not survive a pivot to mass without fracturing. The advent calendar at $98 and the mild, non-spicy “crunchy garlic” SKU at Whole Foods are aimed at two different customers who want two different things from the brand. One wants a cultural object. The other wants a nice condiment. The brand currently tells both of them the same story, and the story was written for the first one.
Foundation
The proof points are real and they are operational, not just narrative.
Distribution went from roughly 4,000 stores in 2023 to more than 12,000 doors by 2025, spanning Target, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Albertsons Safeway, Walmart, and Costco. The product line extended past chili crisp into Zhong sauce, spice mixes, noodles, a chili crisp ketchup collaboration, and a Costco-exclusive noodle pack at $12. There were collaborations with Shake Shack and Mixt Greens, a cookbook, and a New York Times feature during the 2020 pandemic that turned a supply crunch into a demand spike. In 2025 the company formally shifted its center of gravity from direct-to-consumer to retail. This is a brand that executes.
What could break the positioning is scale colliding with meaning. Chili crisp has almost no moat at the product level. Trader Joe’s sells a credible dupe for $4. Every grocery chain now has a private-label crunch. Fly By Jing’s only durable defense is the premium and the story that earns it. The retail pivot solves a growth problem and creates a positioning problem at the same time: the more shelves you win on price and availability, the less you look like the brand that argued price was the point. The mild SKU compounds this. Removing the mala removes the one sensory feature that made the product feel uncompromising.
The positioning gap
Fly By Jing’s problem is not the pivot. Going to retail and lowering price to reach more people is a defensible commercial decision, and Gao made the fair-cost argument well. The gap is architectural. The brand is running a premium cultural argument and a mass accessibility play through the same jar, the same name, and the same voice, and those two strategies want opposite things. Premium wants scarcity, intensity, and a customer who came to it. Mass wants availability, mildness, and a customer it goes to.
The fix is to stop making one product carry both jobs. Keep the flagship Sichuan Chili Crisp priced, packaged, and spoken about as the uncompromising original, the thing that proved the thesis. Then build the accessibility play as a clearly distinct tier with its own logic, so a $9.98 Walmart jar and a mild garlic crunch read as a deliberate range, not a markdown on the hero. The advent calendar and the Whole Foods mild version already imply a good-better-best structure. The brand just has not named it, which means the market reads the cheaper, milder moves as the premium one losing conviction rather than the range expanding.
The deeper move is to decide what “unapologetic” means once the audience is everyone. It is easy to be unapologetic to 1,683 Kickstarter backers who chose you. It is harder at 12,000 doors where most buyers found you by accident next to the sriracha. Fly By Jing built the strongest founder-led food positioning of its cohort on the idea that Chinese food deserves a premium. The next phase depends on whether the brand can keep charging for that idea somewhere, even as it learns to be cheap everywhere else. If the premium anchor disappears into the mass, the argument that built the brand disappears with it, and what is left is a very good chili crisp competing on price against Trader Joe’s. That is a fight the thesis was invented to avoid.