There's A Happy Ending To Your Sriracha Love Story

Those little rooster-clad bottles may as well be filled with spicy red gold as far as its fans and its manufacturer, Huy Fong Foods, are concerned. And it looks like we won't have to say goodbye any time soon: Sriracha's Irwindale, California plant isn't going anywhere after all. Lovers of spice, rejoice! In light of this monumental development, we decided to look at the whole sorry Sriracha saga of 2013-2014.

The drama kicked off when some neighbors of the Sriracha plant complained that the sauce-making plant, which grinds up lots and lots of chiles every year for to make its hot sauce, was burning their eyes, making the whole town smell, and irritating their lungs. Not exactly pleasant, so in November a Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered the company to stop grinding peppers and figure out a way to get rid of the smell. Most of the complaints to an air-quality control board came from residents of four houses, the Pasadena Star-News has reported.

Obviously, these developments were alarming to Sriracha's legion fan base. People really, really love this sauce. Anecdotally, I once spent two weeks at a Chinese language camp in northern Minnesota eating nothing but rice and Sriracha, so I get why having a bottle of this on the table is indispensable.

Sriracha's troubles didn't end with the LA Superior Court. Earlier this year, the Irwindale City Council declared the plant a "public nuisance" and gave them 90 days to figure out the smell. That launched a campaign by some Texas politicians who visited the plant to encourage Sriracha to pick up and head south. The company declined to do so.

Which leads us to Thursday, henceforth known among Sriracha enthusiasts as Huy Fong Foods Day, or the day when the Irwindale City Council decided it was cool with the plant after all and dismissed its lawsuit against the company — along with the dreaded public nuisance label.

The company's apparently installed better air filtration that should keep odors from the plant out of the air, said its creator, David Tran. In a letter to the council Tran promised to keep it that way when pepper-grindin' season begins once more, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

At the commencement of this year’s chile harvest season, if the air filtration system does not perform well, then Huy Fong Foods will make the necessary changes in order to better the system right away.