Through her brand Fly By Jing, Jing Gao is recalibrating centuries-old misconceptions about Chinese cuisine with a compelling story and even more convincing products.
Her first viral creation, the now-iconic Sichuan Chili Crisp, grew out of the piquant sauce base she cooked with during her stint as an underground supper club chef in Shanghai – an intense, complex carnival of electrifying spice, smoky chilli and fragrant oil.
“It just so happened that it translated really well into a shelf-stable condiment that you could not just cook with, but also just put on top of whatever – including ice cream,” says the native of Chengdu, the capital city of China’s Sichuan province.
That’s incredible considering how drizzling Sichuan chilli oil over vanilla ice cream wouldn’t have been part of the conversation among food lovers a decade ago.
Fly By Jing has been growing ever since it started in 2018, courting the likes of national food critics, celebrities and influencers around the world.
Yet, with the brand on everybody’s lips, Gao found she was at odds with herself.
Born to a nuclear physicist father and teacher mother, Jing had been known as Jenny for most of her life, a name she chose for herself at five years old to fit in with her Western classmates, and an identity she had kept for close to 30 years.
“It wasn’t until much further along in the journey of dedicating myself to food, and Chinese food in particular, and shining light on Chinese food culture, that I gained a sort of belief in myself,” Gao says. “I gained the inner strength to reclaim my birth name, and so I did that in 2020, well into the journey of entrepreneurship.”
In the last six years she has seen immense growth in understanding of Chinese cuisine, and Sichuan food in particular. Indeed, it was misunderstandings about her native cuisine that spurred her to leave a career in tech behind to start a food company.
“This is a really rich, diverse, complex cuisine that has over 5,000 years of heritage and history. And it’s so sophisticated that no one could ever possibly understand [it] completely,” she says.
“I was observing that there was this kind of misunderstanding about what Chinese food was, mainly because of a lack of exposure.”
Fly By Jing founder Jing Gao. Photo: Fly By Jing
Fly By Jing’s Sichuan Chili Crisp is marketed as even being good atop vanilla ice cream. Photo: Fly By Jing
Gao also points to the concept of “hierarchy of taste”, which presents the idea that cuisines such as Chinese and Southeast Asian are relegated to the lowest rungs due to the perceived socioeconomic status of immigrants from those countries.
“But this is a dynamic system because things change, times change,” Gao says. “A hundred years ago, Italian food was also similarly looked down upon when Italians first came to America. However, it’s evolved so much that today you can expect to pay top dollar for a plate of pasta at a restaurant.”
Gao wants the world to see the value of Chinese food and has accordingly priced her products on the “premium” side: the Sichuan Chili Crisp costs US$17 for a 6oz jar, compared with around US$4 for a 7.41oz jar of the widely available Lao Gan Ma chilli crisp at Walmart.
The Fly By Jing range includes the equally popular Zhong Sauce (a savoury-sweet condiment), and Chengdu Crunch, her newest creation.
Fly By Jing’s Zhong Sauce is inspired by the sweet, tangy, spicy and umami sauce usually drizzled atop Chengdu dumplings. Photo: Fly By Jing
The range has also expanded to include more pantry staples, including 10-year-aged black vinegar, three-year-aged doubanjiang (fermented bean paste), Erjingtiao chillies and rare Tribute peppers.
In November 2022, Gao published her first cookbook, The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp, which features recipes inspired by her time working as a supper club chef, from hongshao carnitas tacos to chilli crisp sundae with fish sauce caramel brittle.
Around the same time, she launched a Sichuan-inspired market called Suá Superette in Los Angeles, selling grab-and-go items prepared in-house; the aim was to make Sichuan food even more accessible to the public.
Gao hopes to expand diners’ knowledge of Sichuan cuisine beyond mala (numbing spice) to the myriad techniques and flavours that Sichuanese chefs have mastered.
We want to be seen as not a niche Chinese food product, but rather something that you can really imagine next to your Heinz ketchup
Jing Gao, Fly By Jing founder
Another way she’s doing that is through clever collaborations with other brands for products such as tinned smoked salmon with chilli crisp, and a new stew in collaboration with Sun Noodle – America’s best-known ramen brand – that will be available in Whole Foods stores across the US.
Soon, she will launch a spicy snack crossover with Singapore’s famed Irvin’s fish skin crisps.
With Fly By Jing gaining shelf space at major supermarkets in the US, the idea of a modern Chinese sauce brand being a household staple is not far from reality. It could perhaps even become the next Sriracha, the famous Thai chilli sauce adapted in the US by Vietnamese immigrant David Tran in 1980.
“So it’s through all these different touchpoints, so you’re not just seeing us in the ethnic aisle, but you’re also seeing it pop up in the snacks section, the frozen food aisle,” Gao says, excitedly.
Sichuan Chili Crisp was inspired by the sauce base Gao cooked with during her stint as an underground supper club chef in Shanghai. Photo: Fly By Jing
“If we are to evolve culture through our flavours, one proxy of that is that we want to be in every kitchen, we want to be in every household. We want to be seen as not a niche Chinese food product, but rather something that you can really imagine next to your Heinz ketchup.
“We realise that, with every jar of chilli sauce that we sell [or] with every palate we help to expand, we are also expanding their mind and hopefully the collective consciousness to create a culture and a society that is a lot more accepting of differences.
“That is actually our purpose with Fly By Jing: to evolve culture through taste by expanding palates and minds.”
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