The brand's chili crisp recipe also calls for something called "semi-winter rampa, or rapeseed oil" - though Gao is quick to distinguish it from "European rapeseed or canola oil, as the FDA makes us write it." A yellow-flowering member of the mustard family, semi-winter rapeseed is sown before winter, flowers in spring, and tends to carry flavor rather than impart it, making it a choice vessel for Fly by Jing's complex condiments.įly By Jing's Chili Crisp was an instant hit, but the brand hasn't stopped there. That's how highly those small, red seeds were (and continue to be) coveted. Painstakingly (and painfully) harvested by bare hand once annually from a small plot of land in Sichuan, the tribute pepper is so named because for 300 years, the village of QingXi - by many accounts the peppercorn's preeminent grower - made a point of expressing a portion of each harvest to China's imperial courts.
Gao's highly personal take on Sichuan chili crisp - Fly by Jing's flagship product - involves 18 ingredients, some of which can only be found in China's Sichuan Province.įor obvious reasons, we couldn't exactly pry every little detail out of the proprietress, but she did say that the most essential ingredient is the peppercorn of the tribute pepper, or gongjiao, which Fly by Jing employs widely across its inventory. We spoke with the entrepreneur about launching a successful startup amidst a pandemic, how Fly by Jing went from a small operation to being sold at Whole Foods and Target stores nationwide, and what's next for the rising brand. Guests loved her chili crisp so much that she decided to bottle it and build a Kickstarter page. One thing lead to another, and Gao ended up quitting her tech job and opening a restaurant in Shanghai. "My hypothesis is that people were ready for a new paradigm." "I was realizing that so little real Chinese food made its way out of China and wanted to shine light on that, and represent it on a global stage," she told Insider. "There was an active prejudice against Chinese food as being dirty, cheap, and unhealthy."įirst and foremost, Gao wanted to grasp and address those perceptions for herself, and in the process, a company was born. I’m proud of the Fly By Jing team and how far we’ve come in four short years to transform the ‘ethnic aisle’ of the grocery store into a destination of bold, global flavors and innovation, and look forward to making these flavors accessible to even more people, furthering our mission of evolving culture through taste."I wanted to shift the way people saw Chinese culture and food in the US," says Fly By Jing founder Jing Gao, who in 2018 launched one of Amazon's top-selling "hot sauces" (although that term doesn't quite do it justice), a personal take on Sichuan chili crisp.
In addition to the continued support from the woman-led team at our first institutional investor Prelude Growth Partners, we welcomed onboard PENDULUM®, a Black-owned, strategic growth investing platform designed for founders of color, whose mission is to create bigger and more inclusive rooms, setting us up for the kind of guidance and stewardship that I believe will truly propel us towards our goals. It’s a fact that women are massively under-represented when it comes to capital and fundraising, but the data is bleaker still for women of color, which is why it also deeply matters where founders of color accept capital from, and who we choose to bring along on the highs and lows of this journey with us. We’ve closed a $12M round of funding to continue propelling our growth and further our mission of evolving culture through taste. We recently announced something big at FLY BY JING.
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