Plant produces sensory overload

Town sues hot sauce maker for overwhelming chili odor

The pungent scent of Sriracha chili sauce produced at the Huy Fong Foods factory in Irwindale, Calif., has the community up in arms. Production is in full swing from August to early November.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The pungent scent of Sriracha chili sauce produced at the Huy Fong Foods factory in Irwindale, Calif., has the community up in arms. Production is in full swing from August to early November.

IRWINDALE, Calif. — It looked as if things were really starting to heat up for this little Southern California factory town when the maker of the Sriracha chili sauce known the world over decided to open a sprawling 650,000-square-foot factory within its borders.

Irwindale resident Rafael Gomez, 34, expresses his complaints about the chili odors emanating from the production of Sriracha chili sauce at the Huy Fong Foods factory in Irwindale, Calif. Residents claim the odor from the plant is a public nuisance.

Getting the jobs and economic boost was great. Getting a whiff of the sauce being made wasn’t, at least for a few Irwindale residents. So much so that the city is now suing Huy Fong Foods, seeking to shut down production at the 2-year-old plant until its operators make the smell go away.

“It’s like having a plate of chili peppers shoved right in your face,” said Ruby Sanchez, who lives almost directly across the street from the shiny, new $40 million plant where some 100 million pounds of peppers a year are processed into Sriracha and two other popular Asian food sauces.

As many as 40 trucks a day pull up to unload red hot chili peppers by the millions. Each plump, vine-ripened jalapeno pepper from central California then goes inside on a conveyor belt where it is washed, mixed with garlic and a few other ingredients and roasted. The pungent smell of peppers and garlic fumes is sent through a carbon-based filtration system that dissipates them before they leave the building, but not nearly enough, say residents.

The odor is only there for about three months, during the California jalapeno pepper harvest season, which stretches from August to about the end of October or first week of November.

“This is the time, as they are crushing the chilis and mixing them with the other ingredients, that the odors really come out,” said city attorney Frank Galante, adding Irwindale officials have gotten numerous complaints.

City officials met with company executives earlier this month and, although both sides say the meeting was cordial, the company balked at shelling out what it said would be $600,000 to put in a new filtration system it doesn’t believe it needs. As company officials were looking into other alternatives, said director of operations Adam Holliday, the city sued. The case goes to court today.

Company founder David Tran started cooking up his signature product in a bucket in 1980 and delivering it by van to a handful of customers. The company quickly grew and he moved it to a factory in the nearby city of Rosemead. When it outgrew that facility two years ago he came to Irwindale, bringing about 60 full-time jobs and 200 more seasonal ones to the city of about 1,400 people.