How One Beloved Indie Food Brand Is Dealing With Trump’s China Tariffs

Fly By Jing chile crisp is manufactured in Chengdu. Trump’s tariffs on China means everything is in flux.

Fly By Jing is one of the reasons everyone you know loves chile crisp. The punchy, direct-to-consumer brand was founded in 2018 by Jing Gao, promising to bring a “not traditional, but personal” taste of her hometown of Chengdu to American audiences, with products like Sichuan chile crisp, zhong sauce, and hot pot base. “We want to take Chinese food out of the so-called ethnic aisle and make it part of everyday cooking everywhere,” Gao told Eater in 2022. “Our continually expanding line of sauces, spices, oils, and dumplings is doing just that.” Now, Fly By Jing products can be found everywhere from your local shoppy shop to Walmart.

Fly By Jing is proudly produced in Chengdu, China. Which is starting to become a problem.

On March 4, President Trump announced a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods from China and Hong Kong, which came “on top of a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods put into effect just one month ago and a variety of older levies, including those that remain from the China trade war in Mr. Trump’s first term,” according to the New York Times. The tariff went up yet another 10 percent on March 8. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average household will pay $1,600 to 2,000 this year on imported goods because the tariffs on imports from China, as well as Canada and Mexico, and food prices overall will go up 1.7 percent. Already, the tariffs are affecting businesses that import Chinese goods, often for Chinese-American customers who can’t find those products or ingredients elsewhere.

Fly By Jing achieved its goal of bringing chile crisp out of the “ethnic aisle” and ultimately into Walmart. We spoke to the company’s COO and CFO Matt Dunaj about how it plans to keep Fly By Jing on the shelves in the face of volatile tariffs.

Eater: Are these tariffs affecting your business?

Matt Dunaj: It’s affecting us in a major way. I’d say up front, we’re expecting more challenges with the costs of our product and how we’re planning for the year. It changes the way that we budget and forecast. It changes the way we think about our ability to do new things. But most of all, the impact is uncertainty. Right now we can’t even know our budget for the year, because we don’t know what the tariffs are going to look like. So it’s extremely hard to make long term plans as things continue to change without any real notice or reason.

It seems impossible to keep track of. Right now it seems tariffs were 10 percent on goods from China and Hong Kong, and then on March 8 that was raised to 20 percent.

And that’s on top of tariffs that Trump implemented during his first term, that the Biden administration kept. So effectively, our tariffs have doubled in the last month through these new increases. We don’t know how long it’ll last. It seems like nobody knows. But we’re starting to think, which trade shows are we going to attend? What marketing events will we do? What does our team structure look like? We kind of have to wait and see.

At this point, is it changing how much you might produce or how much you might be charging for your products?

A price increase would be a last resort. In fact, last year, we were super proud to announce a price decrease, which is quite unprecedented. It takes a long time to change the price of a retail product for a grocery store; it can take up to 90 days from when you change the price to when it’s executed on the shelf. And in that time, the tariffs could change.

It’s very difficult to decrease prices. It took the entire team a lot of effort last year to effectively decrease our prices in a way where the savings would pass on to the consumer and not just be gobbled up along the supply chain. So if we were to say, costs are higher, let’s increase our prices to cover it, we may find ourselves in a position where those prices remain elevated and we’re not able to bring them back down.

You mentioned the tariffs could stifle your ability to do new things. Can you talk a bit more about how this affects your creativity?

We can’t manufacture our product in America without basically bringing all the component ingredients to America in their individual forms, which would be completely cost inefficient. We’re sourcing authentic ingredients in Jing’s hometown in Sichuan, China. There is no replacement for these flavors, and that’s really the nature of our business — our mission is to spread these flavors authentically to people. The tariffs put things on hold and it creates some uncertainty.

But it also means that we’re looking at ways that we can innovate to meet the consumer where we think they’ll be. People are very conscious of their grocery bills. We’re trying to innovate into categories that are lower price points for customers. So the newest product that we’re launching is noodles, at a lower entry price. You can buy a jar of our chile crisp for $9.98 at Walmart. The noodles will be a $3 to $4 item. It doesn’t stop what we’re doing. It just pushes us in a new direction.

I was going to ask about manufacturing the product in Chengdu, because it’s something you speak of as a real, positive aspect of the product. Why is that still so important?

The isolationist perspective of tariffs and the America-first perspective is antithetical to what we’re trying to accomplish, which is to bring people together: people all over the world, people of all countries, of all cultures, not just those who live in America. That doesn’t mean we’re going to change what we’re trying to do, we’re just going to get more creative. We’re going to have to adapt, and we’re going to have to be patient and see what happens.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.