The most controversial factory in the United States isn’t poisoning anybody’s water or killing elderly people or even slowly deforming the unborn fetuses of women who wandered through its invisible fallout. No, the most controversial factory in the United States is making hot sauce.
The grinding and the sheer quantity of chillies used to make Huy Fong’s products have resulted in what some Irwindale residents find to be an overly oppressive redolence in the air near the factory, enough to cause heavy breathing in asthmatics and bring tears to the eyes of children. In 2012 the city began receiving complaints about the spice in the air. In October 2013, the city filed a lawsuit against the company, calling its scent a public nuisance and seeking a halt to its operations.
At a contentious meeting in April, the city council declared the factory’s smell a public nuisance. Finally, in May, with the help of the Business and Economic Development Office under Governor Jerry Brown, Tran and the city came to terms over the smell, and the city lifted its nuisance declaration.
Available through the end of October, the Saturday tours are filling to capacity, even with slots for 2,100 people a day. I’m here for a private weekday tour of the factory as a journalist, and the morning atmosphere is muted.
Workers hoist the trailers and dump their loads into hoppers, and conveyors pull the peppers inside the factory, where from a stainless steel gangway, I look out on a half acre of machinery that is grinding the jalapenos. This is the heart of the factory’s controversy, and metal ducts rise from the machines up through the ceiling 20 feet above.
Inside, the smell was noticeable but not particularly offensive or overpowering, though reports have cited some people on recent tours coughing and sneezing. If anything, the overpowering scent of the production area on my visit was garlic, a key ingredient in Sriracha and the chilli garlic paste. A worker cracks the lid off a blue plastic 55-gallon drum, revealing the bright red ground-chilli base. Thousands of these drums, manufactured in-house, fill up a massive warehouse space, and nearly all of them will be filled during the roughly three-month chilli harvest season.
I watch as a hulking machine takes small bulbs of clear plastic and blows them up into the familiar hot sauce squeeze bottles, screen-prints them with the red rooster label information, and spits them out into a pile on a conveyor belt.
This line, the fastest of the nine, can create, fill, and seal about 11,000 bottles of hot sauce an hour.