Hey saucy people,
Hope everyone is enjoying the first glimmer of warmer weather!
We just wanted to check in after a challenging couple of weeks. We’re still dealing with some extremely aggressive legal heat from a peanut butter company in North Carolina.
Here’s some additional coverage that has been published on our current situation since we last sent an email out in March:
CBS News: Federal lawsuit could force Sebastopol
chili crisp sauce company to close shop
This was and continues to be an unfortunate reason for our business to be in the news, but we are grateful for the coverage.
We wanted to let you know that, as hard as this has knocked us down, your support has picked us up and helped keep us moving forward.
We have been getting a lot of emails, and thought we'd answer the most common questions here.
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Any updates on the lawsuit?
Unfortunately, we have no developments to report. We are still hoping that Big Spoon Roasters drops their lawsuit and picks up where we left off with settlement negotiations. If they do, it will be because you helped! Thank you for speaking up on our behalf and sending emails to info@bigspoonroasters.com. We’ve been CC’d on many of them and are truly grateful to read all of your thoughtful and constructive emails.
Are you changing your name?
Not yet, but we’ve been noodling on it.
If we do change our name, it won’t be because we think we did anything wrong, it’ll be because we want to move forward without spending the next year tied up in legal fees and playing the lead role in a courthouse drama about condiments.
And honestly? As unnecessarily stressful as this has been, there’s something a little exciting about the idea of a fresh chapter. New name, same Sonoma County flavors, same team, same roots in Chinese culinary tradition. We promise not to pick anything boring. And yes, we’ll bring you along for the ride.
Do you have a GoFundMe set up to help with legal fees?
For now, we’ve decided not to ask for support in raising money for our legal defense. This lawsuit never should have happened, and we'd rather not funnel community resources into fighting something so absurd. This could change if this goes to a jury trial, as the owners of BSR are demanding, but we are hopeful we can resume settlement talks before that.
If we do ask for help in the future, it will be to support our rebuilding, specifically the creative work of rebranding. Putting positive energy into building something new feels a lot better to us than raising money to fend off powerful lawyers from a gigantic corporate firm.
We’ll share more when we’re ready. In the meantime, just knowing you’re in our corner means more than we can say.
Will you be returning to the farmers markets anytime soon?
We get this question more than any other. We miss seeing you all at the markets very much. But as a two-person business, we simply can’t commit to a weekly market schedule at the moment. When crisis hits, everything else takes a back seat. Production, events, and sales have all slowed while our business is in hot water with this legal challenge. For this reason, we don’t have a return date at the moment and likely won’t be back at markets anytime soon. We cannot offer local pickups either, unfortunately.
That said, we’re still restocking our retail partners! And we're looking for new ones, so help us help you get you chili crisp without having to pay for shipping :)
Are you still shipping orders?
Yes! Our online shop is fully stocked and we’re still shipping orders nationwide. Thank you for your patience if it takes us a little longer than usual. We’re doing our best to keep things moving along.
P.S. we love seeing the support from North Carolina :)
How can we help?
Whether you’ve been with us from the start or just joined our community recently, we’d love it if you helped us keep this momentum going by:
- Leaving a review for your favorite chili crisp
- Telling your favorite local stores that you’d like to see us on their shelves
- Cracking open a fresh jar and just savoring it. Hey, if you’ve got hardboiled eggs left over from the weekend festivities, Main Squeeze makes a killer egg salad sammich mix-in.
We truly cannot wait to be past this chapter. Thank you for reading and for all of your support. Hope to see you on the other side of it soon :)
xo+sauce
lani and nate
