Medan, Indonesia – When Michelle Tew, the owner of Malaysia-based food company Homiah, received a cease and desist letter from American-Korean celebrity chef David Chang last month, she felt “sadness and betrayal”.
The letter informed Tew that she had 90 days to stop using the term “chili crunch” on the labels of her sambal – a chilli-based condiment popular across Southeast Asia – as Chang had trademarked the phrase.
“David Chang is such a large name in the Asian-American food community and it felt very personal, even though I don’t know him personally,” Tew told Al Jazeera.
“The Asian food community is really like a family and, to go after a woman-owned business, to even think of that at all and not to have a friendly conversation first, I really wondered where his compassion was.”
Chang, who owns the Momofuku restaurant chain in the US and has since abandoned his trademark claim, began selling jars of “Chili Crunch” in 2020, but he is far from the first person to put such a product on the market.
Chilli-based condiments have been used across Asia since time immemorial.
In English, they have gone by various names, including chilli crunch, chilli crisp and chilli oil, depending on their consistency and the proportions of ingredients.
Tew, who learned to cook from her Malaysian grandmother, chose to call her product “Sambal Chili Crunch”, as sambal, which typically includes ingredients such as chillies, shrimp paste, garlic and palm sugar, is not widely known outside of Southeast Asia and she needed to find a way to explain it to a foreign audience.
The practice of trying to trademark generic food terms is not unique to Chang or the US food and beverage industry.
Arie Parikesit, a culinary guide who runs the Kelana Rasa food and tour business, said that while Chang had been trying to “monopolise” the term “chili crunch”, there had been similar cases in his native Indonesia.
“A similar thing happened in the Indonesian food and beverage world when the term ‘kopitiam’ [coffee shop] was accepted as a brand right submitted by a company that had recently been established and forced classic kopitiam entities that were decades old not to use this brand,” Parikesit told Al Jazeera.
“Trade name monopolies like this are clearly unhealthy and, instead of promoting Asian cuisine more widely, as David Chang and Momofuku have done, it creates a bad atmosphere among Asian food and condiment players.”
“Small heritage companies will also be affected. At a time where collaboration is key, this kind of old-style rivalry deserves to be left behind,” he added.
The need for a collaborative approach is underscored by the difficulty Southeast Asian food and beverage players face trying to get a foot in the door outside of the region.
Tew of Homiah said that Southeast Asian food is not widely known in many parts of the world, particularly compared with other cuisines.
“If you go to a supermarket in the US, there will be two whole aisles dedicated to olive oil, which is just one product. Then you might find half an aisle or a stand which has food from ‘other’ places in it, like Southeast Asian cuisine mixed together with other cuisines like Mexican.”
Jun Yi Loh, a Malaysian food writer and recipe developer, agreed that Malaysian food terms are not necessarily easy to grasp, which is why descriptors such as “chili crunch” need to be used.
“I’ve long held the opinion that one of the key reasons Malaysian food hasn’t blown up in the way that Singaporean or Thai food has in recent years is that our food isn’t as easy to describe or package in a sort of elevator pitch way,” Loh told Al Jazeera.
After weeks of outcry over Momofuku’s cease and desist letters, which were sent to dozens of small businesses in the US, Chang last week backed down, saying on The Dave Chang Show podcast: “I understand why people are upset, and I’m truly sorry.”
In a statement sent to Al Jazeera, Momofuku said: “When we created Chili Crunch, we wanted a name to differentiate our product from the broader chilli crisp category. We believed the name ‘Chili Crunch’ reflected the uniqueness of our product, which blends flavours from multiple culinary traditions, and bought a pre-existing trademark for the name.”
Momofuku said it had taken feedback from the community on board and now understood that the term “chili crunch” carried a broader meaning.
“We have no interest in ‘owning’ a culture’s terminology and we will not be enforcing the trademark going forward,” the company said.
While Chang may have done a u-turn, the episode has nonetheless left a nasty taste in the mouths of some of those promoting Southeast Asian cuisine abroad. Loh said the debacle had brought to light the legal tribulations that can come with running a business in a foreign market.
“It will factor into the minds of small business owners for sure,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I believe this event will be remembered as a frivolous case, initiated by Momofuku and David Chang with tonnes of hubris and very little thought,” Auria Abraham, the owner of Auria’s Malaysian Kitchen, a food company selling sambal, spice blends and kaya, told Al Jazeera.
Abraham, who moved to the US in the 1990s before launching her first product, Hot Chilli Sambal in 2013, said that the Momofuku furore has sparked a wider debate around who “owns” food.
“We have to accept and understand that no single country, entity or person can lay claim to things like condiments, ingredients or recipes,” she said.
Abraham said that Malaysian food has been shaped for centuries by immigrants who brought recipes that were shared, adopted and then modified to reflect the ingredients available in different regions.
“With that in mind, despite the distinct origins of a food item, it is now the culture of everyone that it has touched,” she said. “And that is the beauty of sharing food.”
