How Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil Quietly Took Over the West
The Western discovery of Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil is, depending on who you ask, either a heartwarming story of culinary cross-pollination or a slightly embarrassing case of food media noticing something twenty years late. The jar with the unsmiling woman on the label had been sitting on Asian grocery shelves in London, New York, Sydney, and Toronto for most of the 2000s. Then, fairly suddenly, it wasn't just on the shelves. It was on hoodies and had saturated YouTube. This post traces the history, the founder, the strange moment of arrival, and where to buy a watercolour print of the jar if you've decided your kitchen has earned one.
The Western Discovery: A Timeline Nobody Asked For
Before the food-media virality, there was the immigrant-pantry story. Lao Gan Ma has been exported globally since the early 2000s and was a humble fixture in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Malaysian grocery stores across the West for nearly two decades before the broader food press caught on. Asian-American food writers have made this point firmly, most recently during David Chang's 2024 Momofuku "Chili Crunch" trademark dispute, when NBC News noted the obvious: Lao Gan Ma was in fridges long before chili crisp was in headlines.
The Western "moment of discovery" is best located in 2018. That September, the New York streetwear label Opening Ceremony sent models down a New York Fashion Week runway in hoodies emblazoned with Tao Huabi's face and the Lao Gan Ma logo. A Lao Gan Ma fanzine appeared the same month. Days later, the WWE wrestler John Cena posted a video on Weibo praising the sauce in fluent Mandarin to the bafflement of the wider Internet (bing chilling anyone?), which the Singaporean outlet Mothership covered and the rest of the English-language internet promptly screenshotted.
What followed was the food-press catching up. The New York Times, Bon Appétit, and others ran the obligatory glowing reviews and DIY recipes. In 2019, Chinese Food Culture fount Jing Gao launched Fly By Jing's Sichuan Chili Crisp on Kickstarter, positioning a premium, direct-to-consumer chili crisp at roughly four times Lao Gan Ma's price point, which had the side effect of dragging Lao Gan Ma into the same conversation it had spent two decades quietly winning. Then the pandemic hit, home cooking surged, and the jar became inescapable on social media.
By 2020, supply chain hiccups caused by the-thing-that-must-not-be-named had people reselling jars on eBay for absurd prices. By 2024, the chili crisp category was large enough to spawn a public trademark scandal, with Momofuku attempting to enforce ownership of the phrase "chili crunch" against smaller Asian-led producers before David Chang folded and issued a public apology. Lao Gan Ma, for its part, has never tried to trademark "chili crisp" in the US.
The Woman on the Label
Tao Huabi was born in January 1947 in Meitan County, Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces. Her family couldn't afford to send her to school, and she never learned to read or write. She was widowed in her thirties and left to raise two sons.
In the mid-1980s, she ran a food stall in Guiyang, the provincial capital, selling rice tofu and cold noodles. By 1989 she had scraped together enough money to open a small noodle restaurant, where she served her cold noodles with a homemade chili sauce (fOrEsHaDoWiNg). Customers reportedly started buying the sauce without bothering to order the noodles and local construction workers, fed for free during her stall years, helped spread the word.
The nickname "Lao Gan Ma," roughly "Old Godmother," came from her habit of feeding students and other locals who couldn't pay. In 1994 she converted the restaurant into a sauce-focused operation. In 1996 she opened a factory in Guiyang with around forty employees. The company was formally established in 1997.
Then came the long war with counterfeiters. Chinese authorities initially rejected her trademark application, which led to a flood of copycat jars using nearly identical packaging. Tao reportedly hired third parties to pursue knock-offs directly. In 2001, the Beijing high court ruled that competitors could not use the Lao Gan Ma name or imitate the packaging. She was awarded roughly 400,000 RMB (about $60K) in compensation. The trademark was finally approved in 2003.
Tao stepped back from day-to-day operations around 2014 as her sons attempted to switch from Guizhou chilis to cheaper Henan chilis, which produced a noticeable change in flavour that customers and Chinese food media did not appreciate. She returned to the company and reinstated Guizhou chilis. By 2017 her partial retirement was making Chinese trending lists under hashtags labelling her one of the country's most formidable women. She has consistently refused to take the company public and she's now estimated to have a net worth of over 1 billion dollars (the company valued at over 4 billion).
Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil Trivia Worth Knowing at a Dinner Party
- The portrait on the jar is Tao herself, used as a trademark since the brand's early years. The unsmiling expression is reportedly not stylised. It is just how she looked.
- During New York Fashion Week 2018, Opening Ceremony sold hoodies featuring her face. There is no indication the company arranged this.
- Forbes has previously listed her among China's wealthier self-made entrepreneurs, despite a company structure built almost entirely without external investment or loans.
- The product carries no Sichuan peppercorn. The numbing, tingly heat associated with Sichuan food is not part of Lao Gan Ma's flavour profile, despite Western shorthand often lumping the categories together.
- A beef-containing variant exists in China but cannot be legally imported to the US due to agricultural restrictions on Chinese meat products. I myself am not so keen on the idea of jarred beef...
FAQ
Where can I buy Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil?
Most Asian grocery stores carry it, often at substantially lower prices than Western supermarkets. Larger chains in the UK, US, Australia, and across the EU have started stocking it as well. Online retailers ship it widely, though shipping costs sometimes exceed the price of the jar itself.
Is Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil vegan?
The Crispy Chili Oil variant is generally vegan, containing chili, soybean oil, fried soybeans, MSG, sugar, salt, and aromatics. Other products in the Lao Gan Ma range contain pork or beef. Recipes have changed slightly over the years, so the back of the jar is the authority.
Why does Lao Gan Ma taste different than it used to?
This is a real and frequently litigated complaint. The most cited recipe shift happened in the mid-2010s when the company briefly switched chili sourcing during Tao Huabi's partial retirement. The Guizhou chilis were later reinstated, but fans periodically detect variation between batches.
What's the difference between Lao Gan Ma and Fly By Jing or Momofuku Chili Crunch?
Lao Gan Ma is the original commercial chili crisp, in production since the late 1990s. Fly By Jing, launched 2019, uses Sichuan peppercorn and positions itself as a premium product at roughly four times the price. Momofuku Chili Crunch, launched 2018, is a Western-branded entry that publicly credits Lao Gan Ma as the category's foundational product.
Hang It on Your Wall
The Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil watercolour print captures the jar with the careful imperfection only watercolour pulls off. The rough pencil outlines and small colour bleeds add life and a quirky style to match the original design. The godmother herself, rendered with the dignity she has earned through roughly thirty years of staring out from refrigerator shelves on six continents. It looks at home above a stove, on a kitchen shelf, or anchoring a gallery wall of food prints. It also makes a useful gift for the friend who has opinions about chili oil rankings, the housemate who keeps stealing your jar, or anyone whose pantry leans Sichuan.
See the Lao Gan Ma Crispy Chili Oil print at The Swedish Paintbrush →