Jing Gao: Bringing Chinese Flavor to Supermarket Shelves

Pushkin. If you look closely enough at any success story, you'll see a lot of failure. Things go wrong, partner split up, businesses fall apart, and the story of my guest today, Jing Gao is no different. Jing's the founder of fly By Jing, a line of chili crisp and other condiments sold nationwide. After she lost her first food business to a former partner, Jing set out to create something that was all her own and that would create space for the appreciation of Chinese food in America. That's

Yeah, so I was born in Chungdu. It's the capital of Sichuan. And China is crazy about food, right everywhere in China. And China is as big as a continent, it is as big as Europe, right, and so there's so many different regional cuisines. There's so many culinary traditions. And even with all of that going on, like Cichuan is known as like the foodiest of all the foody places. People are just like absolutely crazy about food.

Yeah, would you say, it's a big part of the culture.

Huge part of the culture. People are just born, like your baseline, born as like a food obsessed individual, and yeah, people live for food. Tichran is also a super leisurely type of place. It's very different from cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where people are always on the go, and just like very fast paced, Chundu is slow. People are all about the art of living. They're always playing majong in the park, drinking tea, you know, having long dinners

Where do you guys move?

We moved to Germany. So I went to first grade in Germany in the Black Forest. I was the only

Yeah, and how old are you at that point?

I think I was in like middle school, almost high.

School and you settled there, right, Yeah, So.

We ended up living there for I mean, my parents were still there and we became Canadians. I went to university, came out and started working in Canada as well, So it was like the longest I'd lived anywhere.

At some point along the way, you you started going by by Jenny, right, Yeah.

So that happened pretty early. I think I was six or seven, and I just remember feeling like I needed something to try to fit in, I needed something to make me appear less foreign, and I figured Jenny was the best way to do that because my name Jing schren Gal was just impossible for the kids to pronounce. So I don't know where I came up with the name, but it sounded western enough, and so I went with it.

It's interesting because, I mean, you clearly spent enough time in China to start to develop and identity, even if you weren't aware necessarily what your identity was, and then you moved to these really homogeneous places. How did that affect a perception of what it means to be Chinese?

I mean, I think I tried not to be. I was young enough and adaptable enough that it was pretty easy for me to code switch. I think it's also just in my nature to try to blend in, you know. I think it felt more comfortable for me. It was like a shield that I had, no matter what situation I was in. So I didn't realize until much later just how much of myself I had kind of buried.

There were there conversations around your house or expectations about where you might sort of go to school and sort of make a career for yourself.

I actually wanted to go to art school and I. My parents were like hard, no, like, there's no way you're going to do that. And so I think we found a middle ground somehow in business school.

And this sounds quite like a middle ground. I'm gonna say it sounds like you conceded.

But I think I had like there was like an older girl I knew who went to business school and I thought that was so cool, and I was like, yeah, I want to do that, and I want to carry a briefcase and you know, look important when I'm walking down down the street. And I had no idea what business school was going to be like either. And when I came out of school, my first job was actually at a giant company, Procter and Gamble, which my parents were really happy about.

What's your job at Proctic? In Gamble?

So I was a brand manager. And at Procter and Gamble they owned so many different brands, right, each of them has kind of a brand manager that helms the brand sort of and grows its market share over like year over year.

Did it feel satisfying? Did it feel like you had found your thing?

I think it was a really great training ground for someone fresh out of school, But pretty quickly I got bored. You know, they have a way that they've been doing things for one hundred years, and there's not that many ways that you can kind of deviate and do your own thing outside of that. So after I would say like a year year and a half, I kind of got what I could out of it, and I didn't see myself there long term. So I started looking at,

Twenties, when did you decide to start working in food full time?

So I moved to Singapore with BlackBerry, then moved back to China and with a different job I was. I was in Shanghai. When I was there, I had started to spend a lot more time on food. I had my blog going. I had a lot of chefs reach out when they would come to China wanted me to take them around. I took Eddie Kwang around Shanghai Andrew Zimmer and so I was on their show.

Wait a second, but so then how did they How did they know.

You just through my blog? I guess you know.

So your blog got pretty pretty big.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like one of the few, like English language blogs about Chinese food in China. So I had a lot of people reaching out to me all the time. I was like starting to do food like more with food media, and I think at one point I just kind of knew I was ready to go into food full time. So when I left my job, I did not know what I was going to do. But I was like working on a number of different things,

And.

You know, we ended up opening the first modern Chinese fast casual restaurant in Shanghai that was like celebrating regional Chinese cuisines.

Wow.

It was called Baoism, and we opened that, I think in two thousand fifteen.

What did you learn from that experience?

So much? It was actually my first you know, entrepreneurial experience, and through that process, I think I learned so many things. But one of them was also the importance of like picking the right business partner. Because my business partner at the time, you know, who put up all the resources, was like, one day after we had opened and it was very successful, was like, you know, I think I don't need you anymore in this business, and egos got in the way and he figured that he could you

At this point, Was there any bit of you that was doubting your move into the food world.

I mean I was definitely scared. I didn't allow myself to sit still enough to really process how scared, shitless I was. I had just spent you know, two and a half years of my life on this restaurant that I thought was my baby, that was going to be my future. I saw so much of my own identity tied up into it. When I lost that, it just felt like, you know, everything was kind of in a very quick, shocking way, like pulled out from under me.

So you literally just jumped into the kitchen and just start making dishes. And I learned a lot, right.

Like pretty quickly. I started to just cook, and I started an underground supper club which I named fly by Jing.

Why fly by Jing?

By the way, so Chungdu giant food city. It's famous actually for a type of restaurant called fly restaurants like tengu got and literally translates to a fly restaurant, and it's a type of restaurant that is hidden hole in the walls mom and pop run and they're so named because they're said to be so delicious that they attract people like flies. So even though they're hidden, they never

Jing's a risk taker who left her job twice to try her hand at the food industry. I'm supremely impressed by the kind of courage that takes don't go anywhere more. We Jing Gao. After the break, Jing's blog and Suparate Club really gave her the platform she needed to feel like she could put herself back into the entrepreneurial world again. But of course it wasn't without its challenges. We have more from Jingau.

I knew that I didn't want to do a traditional restaurant model. I wanted something that could reach even more people, be scalable. I don't think at the time I thought a consumer packash could. I think it wasn't until like twenty eighteen that I started to actually think about a product. I visited California, actually went to a trade show called Natural Product Sex but West, which happens in Anaheim every March, and it's like the biggest collection of consumer food brands.

And chili crisp is this secific kind of sauce. You can explain what the chili crisp is.

Yeah, So chili crisp is a spicy, savory, sort of crispy textured hot sauce that is an oil based sauce and it's made by heating up oil and cooking dried chilies and a number of different like aromatics and different ingredients, and that becomes a condiment. It's almost like a hot sauce that you can really put on anything. And in China, every household has like their own version right that they've been It's like a family recipe that's been passed down,

And what does that look like when you go back to source ingredients for something like this.

I already knew what ingredients I wanted to use, and these were ingredients that I had sourced for, you know, years leading up to that point. Exactly exactly what I needed was a factory to be able to make it for me, you know, because I was cooking large batches in my kitchen, but you know that would take me hours and hours, and you know I would hand bottle hundreds of jars, you know, so I didn't know anything

Can you explain that, Like, how do you go from I have this recipe that works well for you know, creating at home versus the recipe that can actually scale and be produced at a larger volume.

Yeah, I mean it's just a lot of experimentation, a lot of tweaking, even temperature, you know, temperature of oil, which is so important when you're making chili oil because the right temperature draws out the flavor versus temperature is too high, it's going to burn the chili's something too low, it's not going to draw out the flavor. Change the temperature by a tiny little bit, and it has drastic you know effects, and so something like that versus the

And through that there's the possibility that you could make an entire batch potentially.

And that's how you have to waste everything. Yeah, gone up in smoke. It's definitely happened when I burnt all my chili.

Lord. Yeah, and when you're working with the big order that's fairly costly, I imagine, Yeah.

It can be for sure. How do I actually produce a giant batch? It costs like at least twenty to thirty thousand dollars and I definitely didn't have that to produce a batch the minimum order quantity. Yes, like they'll they'll help you figure out the recipe to the point where you know it can scale, but then you need to place your order and the minimum order quantity is quite high.

Wow. So so when it gets to that point, what.

Do I do?

From using Kickstarter to raise over one hundred thousand dollars to start production of her Chili crisp to seeing her dreams break and spill right before her eyes, what does she do? Then we're back with Jing Gao, who's explaining to us her founder's journey on Kickstarter.

I had known some friends who had run Kickstarter campaigns quite successfully. I called them up and I asked them, you know how they did it? So I studied their campaigns. After like a couple of months, I worked with some friends and we filmed video. We went to chung Du Film to video telling the story of what I wanted to do, and finally got the page to a point where I was happy. And yeah, we ended up launching the kickstarter the summer of.

That year, still the summer after the trade show. Yes, yes, this is all happening.

Quickly, Yes, And I reached out to some journalists who I knew were interested in Chinese food. I just cold emailed bunch of writers that I thought might be interested in this, and I had two people reached back out, and one was a writer for SI War magazine. One was a writer for New York Magazine. They somehow agreed to cover the Kickstarter campaign on the day that it went live, and so because of that coverage, we ended up going viral and getting fully funded after just one day.

That's an insane success story. Had you considered getting investors by other means, like, had you present it to investors?

You didn't know anyone that had money to give me, Like, I just did not know a single person that could give me that type of money. And so I felt like, if I'm going to do this anyway, like I might as well just do a Kickstarter and just you know, have that be an indicator of like, is this even going to work? I knew that there was a hunger for it, just wasn't being presented right. And so my thesis, I guess, was just that people were ready for a new paradigm about Chinese food.

Amazing thesis. So we have this hugely successful best case scenario kickstarter campaign. You get enough to fill a bunch of orders, correct, Yeah, I.

Ended up getting thousands of orders. And the great thing about Kickstarter, it was great because you know, you have a built in like initial customer base, and I ended up getting a few thousand customers. It actually allowed me to expand my offerings, like from just the Chili Crisp alone. At first, I was just gonna do the Chili Crisp, and I was like, Okay, well, if I hit like fifty thousand, then maybe I'll add like Drone sauce to the mix. And if I hit one hundred thousand, I'll

Were you were you nervous though? And filling these orders that like well, and like people are pre ordering but they haven't tried it yet, like these gonna be return ye people. Yeah.

Actually, the more successful the campaign was, the more nervous I was, because now you know, not only did I have to do one product, I had to do three, three times of complexity. There's still a lot of unknowns with the production.

Yeah, well, because you had him produced at that.

Yes, Because there's a lot of unknowns and I just knew like even at that point, so early on, like nothing ever goes the way that you plan it, and so I knew that there was going to be a lot of curveballs and oh yeah, a million, a million.

What were some of the memorable What was some of the most infuriated, Well.

Just you know, everything from the factory ordering the wrong types of shallots, so you end up with like hundreds of kilos of like a shalat that you can't use. And then like just misunderstanding is about like the size of the cap, the way that the bottle is sealed, the machinery that's required. Every single decision point, there's someone that's gonna tell you, oh no, we can't do that, like that's not how it's done, and have no solution to give you otherwise, right, And so it's like constantly

It's only a few years ago. How's your business changed from sort of building a brand identity around Kickstarter and fundraising from Kickstarter to to where you're at now? What change has occurred?

Well, I have a team now. I started without a team. I was just one person. I moved to La I moved into an Airbnb in Silver Lake, and I waited for the products to arrive because it was like going to be on sea freight because of the number of orders I had, like I had to fulfill it at a third party logistics company. There's no way I could like move palettes of product into my airbnb and do it myself as much as I wanted to.

And so were you able to afford that?

I was able to afford it with it with the Kickstarter funds. But yeah, that's where like another giant mishap happened. The three PL ended up, you know, not protecting the jars when they sent it out.

It's real quick to three PL meaning third party.

Party logistics company. Yeah, they literally shipped out thousands of jars of chili crist like next to each other with zero protective wrap in an envelope. And I discovered this right before Christmas in twenty eighteen and started receiving kind of the first angry emails from Kickstarter backers just being like, what the hell is this? Like literally pictures of oil pulled in an envelope.

I gotta say, like, because when you say it's an oil based hot sauce, I mean it really is, Like you can make quite a mess of thing.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to any spills.

Mixed with broken glass in an envelope. It was just a really bad situation. And so that was like as quickly as it started, I was like, oh, this is the end, Like this I cannot come back from this, you know. But luckily, by some kind of miracle, only about fifteen percent of the orders were broken, and the

You don't know any one of the US. I imagine maybe you know some people you know.

Exactly, I like, yeah, I mean I think I think must.

Have been lonely. Were you lonely?

Definitely? And I couldn't go home for the holidays because I had to answer customer service emails, you know. And after I would say about a year hired, my first employee went from there to now we have twenty employees and it's it's been kind of an insane three and a half years of growth.

Who was your first full time employee?

So, Stephanie, she is kind of like a Swiss army knife. I think your first employee needs to be that. She did everything with me from early days, like we were packing packages in my apartment, to customer service to ops, like literally everything. I remember when COVID first hit. We had a lot of uncertainty, right, Like we had no idea what was going to happen? Is China US like trade relation is going to crumble? Like am I ever gonna is this business? Is this the end?

You know?

And with kind of anti Asian sentiment happening with more and more just like hateful comments online about our products.

And Chinese sentiment was absolutely yeah crazy.

After exactly and so, and we definitely saw an uprising in kind of hateful comments like on our Instagram and stuff, and so there was a lot of uncertainty, but we could never have dreamt of like kind of what came after that, because the New York Times actually ended up doing an article about us in April of that year, so it was a height of COVID at the time, and it was an article titled your quarantine cooking needs Chili Crisp, and it was entirely about fly By Jing

How do you ship chili oil on bottle? How does that?

Oh, it's just like in a giant drum, like in a twenty kilo drum. Yeah, So we ended up bringing it all over here, bringing it to a local bottler here. And on the day of bottling, me and Stephanie we go. We're like dressed up in our lab coats with our hairnets, and we are so excited and as soon as they start running the machines, the chili crisp because it's so thick clogs the machines and the whole thing breaks, and they're like, and we're already late to fulfill our orders.

So how does hand bottling them? And again, if they're if you're shipping this this this oil based chili sauce in a drum, the separation that occurs is, I mean, how do you now make sure you're getting the right proportion of of.

Yeah, increasing it's very manual. It's very manual. So I think what they did was they actually separated the oil for from the from the bits and then they would do like the same weight for each proportion.

Got it, like the bits of chili. Incredible. Was there ever any question as to whether you guys might be respond like financially responsible for the machinery? Thank god, No, no, I never came into question.

Thank god. They were very kind to us. I think they saw just like how it full we looked, so they they Yeah, they were very kind. But yeah, so that was kind of the I would say that was like a very pivotal moment for the business because that floated our business. Because the entire time I was bootstrapping the company, I had no outside funding. The Kickstarter funding was not that much. And so finally at that point when we blew up like that through the New York Times,

Wow, through through fundraising, through no through just that article. Just through that article.

Yeah, because we kept taking pre orders, right, and so people would prepay for their products kind of like Kickstarter.

It's an incredible kind of mix of luck and not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like you're having these sort of rough experiences, but just you know, sort of like the right moment at the right time, the right thing happens to sort of be able to keep you.

It all comes hand in hand, like literally every great thing that's happened for us has come with giant challenges in the opposite direction and vice versa, right, and so it's it's it's just the rollercoaster of running a business that you expect and.

At some point in this process you used to end up going by your real name ging right, Oh yeah, right.

I it was during that time that, you know, when when we really took quarantine seriously and you know, I didn't leave my house for weeks. I remember having this kind of real lifeation that I felt different, and I realized it was because I guess I had been holding up such a shield for so long, so for so much of my life, that I didn't even recognize myself without it. You know, I didn't have to have a shield on when I was at home, when I didn't have to go out and be someone to someone else.

That I'm glad you killed Jenny and bro the forefront. So what's next for fly By Ging.

Yeah, so, after we grew the business ten x, we actually ended up attracting investors, and we brought on a private equity group in New York who's been really helpful in giving us the resources to grow the team, to expand into new channels, Like we want to be where our customers are and bring them even more products, and so we've expanded from just our own website to Amazon, to stores like Whole Foods, Target, Costco, Sprouts, Wegmans, all of these stores all across the country, and right now

Hustle that you just kind of made that actually made it works amazing.

So look out for our sauce on it's like right in the middle. It's the fifth one, you know, in the middle. Yeah, it is in the new seasons.

Amazing.

Yeah. So yeah, so really just like you know, growing the team and uh putting out great products and really just be on the forefront of also like having a point of view and like representing the culture. You know, I think there's been such a lack of voices in the food space, in any space, you know, for people that look like us, and really wanting to to be a voice with a point of view and also to create space for more voices like ours.

I love that you're not running from from having that point of view. Great, Well, I look forward to following the fly by Jing story. It's not settled yet, a lot of room to grow.

So yeah, it feels like we're still just at the very beginning.

So yeah, in credible. Well, thank you for taking the time to thank you, spep with us before we leave. Is there any advice you might have for young women entrepreneurs or either Chinese American or Chinese entrepreneurs trying to make a consumer brand in America.

Yeah, I mean I think that no matter what you do, you're going to have people that tell you that there's no space for that, that you know, it doesn't belong. And I think, you know, you just have to create your own space. So that would be my advice, just like you know, create your own space at the table when people tell you that there isn't cool.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Appreciate Jing Gao for coming on the show to share the secret sauce of her success. Jing story is a reminder that part of what makes successful people successful isn't that they don't fail, It's that they learn from their fields and in their fearlessness, they keep experimenting. If you're interested in checking out some flyby Jing Chili crispsauce for yourself, check the show notes for the website and send us