TikTok's viral Pink Sauce was never about the sauce

Lille Allen/Eater

Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

Back in July, seemingly everyone had an opinion about TikTok’s Pink Sauce. That month, an online creator calling herself Chef Pii posted videos of herself making the sauce with perishable ingredients like eggs, milk, and pink dragon fruit puree, before shipping it out to consumers in the middle of summer. And when those who were able to get their hands on a bottle of Pink Sauce received their packages, viral chaos ensued. Concerns about the product’s safety — it apparently wasn’t shelf-stable — were rampant. Many TikTok users noticed that the nutrition label was inaccurate, perhaps with “angel numbers” swapped in instead of actual measurements of calories and sugar, and buyers reported receiving “rancid-smelling bottles” that had bloated from the bacterial growth inside.

The fiasco made headlines, which prompted Dave’s Gourmet, a condiment manufacturer that makes hot sauces and pasta sauces, to step in. The company agreed to produce Chef Pii’s viral recipe in its industrial kitchens, using a “hot-fill” packaging process that results in a shelf-stable product. The new and improved Pink Sauce debuted last week, and it is, in fact, not pink. Instead of the vibrant, Pepto-esque hue of the original, it’s a boring orange color that looks pretty similar to garden-variety spicy mayo. What’s more curious, though, is that when the arguably safer, decidedly more professional Pink Sauce hit the market, no one really seemed to care. It’s now priced at $10, a steep decline from the $20 that Chef Pii was originally charging for a bottle, and is available for purchase on the Dave’s Gourmet website. It didn’t sell out instantly, probably because our curiosity about Pink Sauce was never really about the sauce in the first place.

TikTok is a platform where the main attraction for users is to simply be part of the conversation. Look in the comments of any cooking video, and you’ll see what I’m talking about: A certain subset of TikTok users cannot resist criticizing a video’s amount of seasoning, whether or not creators are following professional food safety standards in their own freaking homes, and the toxic wastefulness of any affinity for single-use plastics. This speaks directly to why no one cared about the new and improved Pink Sauce after not being able to shut up about it earlier this summer.

Once the viral drama was over, so was the interest. No one was sitting around, eagerly waiting for the opportunity to get their hands on a bottle of what seems a lot like ranch dressing dyed pink with dragon fruit puree. The whole point of the Pink Sauce controversy was to simply relish in the drama.

— Amy McCarthy

Follow Amy on Twitter at @aemccarthy

More reading:

Further proof, via the Fader, as to why we’re just a bunch of messy bitches who live for drama, whether it’s Pink Sauce or any other scammy online creator.
YouTuber and food scientist Ann Reardon fully dissects the Pink Sauce controversy, taking aim at both Chef Pii and her countless online critics. It’s 20 minutes long, but still worth the watch.
Chef Pii is still thriving on TikTok, and you should probably follow her.

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