The Sriracha Shortage Is a Very Bad Sign

For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland. Shortages of red jalapeños—the key ingredient in the famous hot sauce—have gotten bleak, in particular for the ultra-popular version of the condiment made by Huy Fong Foods. Grocery stores have enforced buying limits on customers. Bottles on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon are selling for eye-watering prices—as much as $50 or more. A few Americans have grown so desperate for their flavor fix that they’ve started pilfering the sauce from local restaurants.

A big part of the shortage can be blamed on Huy Fong’s fragile supply chain. The red jalapeños that give the sauce its citrusy-sweet heat are finicky about temperatures and are usually laboriously picked by hand. A huge portion of the peppers are also grown in particularly dry parts of northern Mexico, where many fields are irrigated with water from the Colorado River—itself a strained and highly contested resource. But all of that was just a teeing up, experts told me, for a final climatic blow: the punishing drought that has gripped Mexico in recent years, draining reservoirs so low that even water destined for agriculture has largely been cordoned away.

The sriracha shortage is hardly the worst crop crisis that’s being fueled by climate change. For years, Michigan cherries have been suffocating in too-high temperatures, while Florida citrus have been obliterated by hurricanes; India’s wheat crops have roasted, while rice around the world has been double-teamed by floods and heat waves. But to now see peppers in peril is its own special burn. Bred in some of the world’s warmest regions, chilis have long been a poster child of heat tolerance. They, more than so many other plants, were supposed to be okay. Now, though, as temperatures get more scorching and droughts continue to parch the planet, “I think we are going to see this more often,” Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told me. Sriracha’s troubles may turn out to be a bellwether for even more flavorless times to come.

For now, most pepper crops are still doing just fine. After suffering brutal heat waves last summer, several regions of California, one of the Western world’s pepper-growing hot spots, are now expecting a banner year, Allen Van Deynze, a pepper-breeding expert at UC Davis, told me. Even the drought conditions in Mexico that obliterated red-jalapeño fields last year have improved from their worst. Chili plants are a tough bunch to overwhelm. “They’re not happy unless your nights are above 60, and it’s 80 or 85 degrees during the day,” Van Deynze said. Red jalapeños have been on the leading edge of pepper-crop failure because they’re unusual winter peppers, and grow best at temperatures slightly lower than their cousins elsewhere, Murray-Tortarolo told me. But even their ideal is pretty balmy compared with that of some other summer crops: Tomatoes, for instance, are content at temperatures as much as 10 degrees lower than what peppers prefer, Van Deynze told me.

Many chili breeders actually tend to prefer working around the upper limit of their crops’ temperature range. Capsaicin, the chemical that imbues chili peppers with their tongue-tingling sear, evolved as a botanical defense mechanism—and peppers “crank it up when they’re under stress,” Stephanie Walker, a chili-pepper researcher at New Mexico State University, told me. “We say to people, after a stressful growing year, ‘We’re going to have nice, hot, flavorful chili peppers’” coming out the other end. Some experts also think that water is best used judiciously for peppers, especially in the weeks before they’re picked. Too much can dilute the fruits’ flavor—so some farmers will opt for minimal amounts of irrigation, Stuart Alan Walters, a vegetable scientist at Southern Illinois University, told me.

But past a certain threshold, peppers, too, will start to sizzle. Once temperatures reach about 90 to 95 degrees, pollinators stop visiting; flowers start to die without ever producing fruits or seeds. And as good as a bit of water rationing can be for pungency, peppers—like any other life form—will die when they don’t get enough liquid sustenance. The irrigation that sustains many pepper plantations can be a buffer when rainfall is scarce, but in times of extreme drought, those rations of water will end up curbed as well.

Nor are peppers immune to the climate-related issues that are already plaguing other crops. The planet’s gradual warming has cleaved many of the cold snaps out of winter—a problem for farmers who rely on the chill to pare back populations of weeds, and of insect pests and the many diseases they spread. “It’s crystal clear: We’ve seen a big uptick in viruses,” Van Deynze told me. Plus, heat waves and droughts can make plants more susceptible to blossom-end rot, a disease that leaves the tips of fruits blackened and dead. And with little respite from the heat, laborers are more frequently finding themselves plucking peppers in dangerous conditions, Walker told me.

Some tweaks to pepper production might help. Growers could shift North America’s prime pepper regions farther north, in pursuit of milder temperatures. Researchers are also already working on breeding more drought- and heat-tolerant plants, in anticipation of tougher years ahead. But there are no guarantees. Genetic tinkering can be slow, and it sometimes comes with trade-offs: When breeders select for climate resilience, for instance, they have to take great care to avoid losing pungency, or altering a pepper’s signature flavor, Murray-Tortarolo said. And there’s still “a physiological ceiling,” Walker told me, above which even the most carefully bred plants just won’t grow or reproduce. It’s hard to say exactly where that ceiling is, Walker said. But peppers, a champ among warmth lovers, may already be closer than scientists would like them to be.

Peppers won’t be wiped off the face of the Earth anytime soon. But losses and shortages of even a handful of varieties would sting. New Mexico’s Hatch green chilis are already under pressure from drought. Murray-Tortarolo worries about the future of some particularly rare pepper varieties in Mexico: black habaneros, a floral, earthy pepper from the Yucatán Peninsula; chiltepin peppers, which grow in the northern part of the country and lend their citrusy sizzle to seafood. Local dishes are now at risk, he told me. Flavors that specific, that distinct, are ones “you cannot replace.”

That’s the appeal of pepper products, and their greatest vulnerability. Each is an homage to the chili variety at the center of its recipe—and true aficionados aren’t usually keen on alternatives. The fermented sweetness of gochujang doesn’t match the umami kick of sambal oelek; Tabasco can’t scratch the same itch as Cholula. Even within the category of sriracha sauces, many devotees of Huy Fong swear by the superiority of their favorite brand. It’s not a problem consumers often run into with rice or wheat or even coffee. “If there’s limited availability from one origin, there’s usually an acceptable substitution from another,” Kraig Kraft, an agroecologist at World Coffee Research, told me. For peppers, though, losing a crop from the only hyperlocal region in which it grows could tank an entire product line.

The decline of any chilis will come with irony: The plants evolved a punishing spiciness that clearly inflicts pain on a variety of creatures, including us; now we’re warming the world enough to torment them. If our hotter planet ends up being a less spicy one, it’ll be because the weapon of heat has changed hands.