Things are heating up.
Momofuku’s David Chang, the New York chef once known for his punk rock philosophy that shook up the city’s white-tablecloth restaurant scene, is now accused of being a “tyrant” who targets mom-and-pop food purveyors.
Chang’s Momofuku, which has a large business selling pantry items — including a spicy oil with bits of seeds and spices called “Chili Crunch” that it began selling widely in 2020 — takes aim at companies that sell similar hot sauces.
“It was like a punch in the gut,” said Michelle Tew, who received a cease-and-desist letter alleging that her company’s products violated Momofuku’s trademark rights.
The 32-year-old Manhattanville resident is the owner and sole full-time employee of Homiah, a New York-based company that sells Malaysian food products, including a Sambal Chili Crunch based on an old family recipe.
MomoIP LLC – a subsidiary of Momofuku, which did not respond to requests for comment – currently owns a trademark for the term “chili crunch” and recently filed a trademark application for an alternative spelling, “chili crunch.”
The moves have infuriated the food world, with many insisting the phrases are nothing more than a generic descriptor for a common Asian condiment.
“It’s like trying to own ‘barbecue sauce’ or ‘mustard,'” Brooklyn-based Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry posted on Instagram. “It’s not a secret sauce.”
The Asian grocer has a whole wall of crunchy chili and crunchy items, but announced it would stop selling Momofuku’s.
Hew initially thought she was the only one to receive the letter, but soon realized that “at least five other companies” had received similar letters.
MìLà, a Seattle-based company known for its soup dumplings and founded by a husband-and-wife team, was one of them.
“It’s particularly disappointing because the AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) community is a small, collaborative space and there’s kind of a ‘we’re all in this together’ mentality,” said the co-founder Caleb Wang at the Post.
Asian condiments with a spicy oil and crunch element have long been popular.
Lao Gan Ma, a classic brand from Guizhou, China, dates back to 1984 and claims to have sold more than 1.3 million bottles of its “spicy crispy chili” worldwide.
Fly by Jing, which bills itself as a “premium chili crisp brand,” launched in 2018 and is now in more than 5,000 stores, including Target, Wegmans and Costco.
2008 “Top Chef” winner Stephanie Izard, who owns a thriving restaurant empire in Chicago and Los Angeles, previously sold a condiment called “Chili Crunch” under her This Little Goat label.
At one point, the product was renamed “The Crunch”. It’s unclear whether the change was related to Momofuku, and This Little Goat did not respond to a request for comment.
Tew, who had to spend thousands of dollars on legal services to respond to the letter, is currently waiting for the end, hoping that the “chili crunch” trademark will not be adopted or that Chang will change his mind.
His lawyer, Stephen Coates, called Momofuku a “brand tyrant.”
A costly legal battle wouldn’t do much harm to Momofuku, Hew said, but it would devastate his business.
“There is an imbalance of power,” she said. “If we were to change our packaging, we would lose important business worth tens of thousands of dollars. And if we were sued and had to go to court, it would be in the hundreds of thousands.
New York Post
