City Sues Hot Sauce Company Over Fumes

For some people, Sriracha hot sauce may be too spicy to eat. For one small LA suburb, it's also apparently too spicy to breathe. The city of Irwindale has filed a lawsuit to try to shut down the local Huy Fong Foods factory, the LA Times reports, claiming that the odor coming off the facility has induced burning eyes, headaches, and scratchy throats for residents. "Given how long it's going on, we had no choice but to institute this action," the city attorney said.

Irwindale officials had met with Huy Fong to discuss ways of reining in the smell, but the company decided that there couldn't really be a problem, because its own workers had experienced no ill effects from the conditions. The Irwindale factory opened just this year, amid surging demand for the ubiquitous sauce. Click to read how Sriracha became an empire, almost by accident. (More Huy Fong stories.)