As an immigrant woman chef, Gao is forging her own quiet path toward her dream: creating a conversation about the flavors of her native Sichuan through healthful, high-quality packaged foods.

Gao’s Fly by Jing brand—which currently makes Sichuan Chili Crisp, Zhong Dumpling Sauce, and Mala Spice Mix—was Kickstarter’s highest-funded craft-food project, has sold over $200,000 in preorders, and has increased direct-to-consumer sales each month since launching in February. With Gao’s solid background in consumer packaged goods, expertise in Chinese cooking, and big-thinking ambition, Fly by Jing seems destined to soar into kitchens across the country.

作为一名移民女大厨，珍妮·高正默默地朝着其梦想努力：通过有益健康、高品质的包装食品，引发人们对自己故乡四川的味道的关注。

珍妮的Fly by Jing品牌由四川辣椒脆（Sichuan Chili Crisp）、钟水饺酱（Zhong Dumpling Sauce）和麻辣混合香料（Mala Spice Mix）三款产品组成，是众筹网站Kickstarter筹资金额最高的手工制作食品项目，其预售额已经超过了20万美元，而且自从今年2月推出以来，每个月的直销额都在不断增长。凭借珍妮在消费包装产品方面的扎实背景、中国烹饪方面的专长以及远大的志向，Fly by Jing似乎注定要成为美国家喻户晓的厨房调料品牌。

The flagship product, Sichuan Chili Crisp, is a multi-textured sauce that requires you dig in with a spoon to get at the big bright flavors from tribute peppers—an ingredient almost never found outside China. The chili crisp is a dip, sauce, condiment, or brine, depending on the day. It’s designed to be versatile. It works atop eggs or noodles, roasted into vegetables, or mixed with cream cheese and spread on a bagel.

The umami-heavy flavor even boosts sweets—in chocolate chip cookies or spooned over ice cream (really!). Above everything, it offers the kind of beguiling flavor that keeps you coming back for one spoonful after another until suddenly the jar is gone—and you’re no closer to being able to explain how the gentle heat and oily crunch pair so well.

该品牌的旗舰产品四川辣椒脆是一款多重口感的辣酱，需要用勺子去舀才能够尝到贡椒（基本上属于中国独有）那种浓郁香脆的风味。这种辣椒脆可以蘸食、做调料或者卤水原料，怎么吃都行。它的用途广泛：可以作为鸡蛋或面条的点缀，也可以搭配烤蔬菜，或与奶油奶酪混合之后撒到面包圈上。

这种浓郁的鲜香甚至还可以提升甜食的口感——例如巧克力脆曲奇里或者浇在冰淇淋上（真的吗！）。最重要的是，它所具有的诱人味道让人无法放下手中的勺子，并且你会很快发现瓶子突然空了。即便如此，你依然无法解释为什么那种微热的辣感和油脆感会搭配得如此之好。

Customers are intrigued, and to Gao, that’s part of the point. “I want to have a dialogue,” she says, to share the flavors she loves, to exchange and engage with people about them. “I wish I could sit down and tell each customer the backstory.” Gao created the sauce to help people taste Sichuan cuisine in a way they might not have before, to get them talking about the flavors and quality they might not have associated with it previously. The sauce’s creation also stemmed from her own realization that she’d drifted away from the cooking of her native Chengdu.

After growing up all over the world, Gao returned to Asia as an adult, working for Procter & Gamble, and realized she wasn’t the only one missing out on those specific flavors. “There’s so much depth and complexity to Chinese food, and nobody knew about it,” she says.

Gao founded an award-winning fast-casual restaurant in Shanghai, then moved on to cooking the foods she remembered in her private kitchen restaurant. As she took her pop-up dinners from Shanghai to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and the U.S., Gao says she saw the reactions people had to ingredients and dishes they hadn’t tasted before—at least in part because so much of the cuisine never even made it out of China. At the same time, she saw how Westerners looked at Chinese food—why they expected everything to be cheap and made from low-budget filler ingredients—and the systemic biases that prevented the conversation around this cuisine from being about quality, rather than price.

顾客对四川辣椒脆很着迷，而对于珍妮·高来说，这正是她想要实现的目标之一。她说：“我想和他们谈谈”，与他们分享她所喜爱的味道，并与他们交流和互动。“我希望能够坐下来，向每位客户讲述背后的故事。”珍妮制作这款酱汁是为了帮助人们以前所未有的方式来品尝川菜，从而引发人们谈论以前并未注意到的川菜味道和品质。这款酱汁诞生的另一个原因在于，她意识到自己已经与家乡成都的烹饪方式渐行渐远。

珍妮·高的成长经历遍布世界各地，她在成年后重返亚洲，供职于宝洁公司。她意识到，自己并非是唯一错失这些独特风味的人。她说：“中餐太博大精深了，但知道的人却少之又少。”

珍妮·高在上海创办了一家获奖的休闲快餐厅，然后开始在自己的私家厨房餐厅烹饪自己记忆中的菜肴。珍妮·高说，当她把自己的快闪餐厅从上海开到新西兰、澳大利亚、日本和美国时，她看到了人们对以前没有品尝过的食材和菜肴的反应——至少部分原因是因为众多的菜肴从未走出过中国国门。与此同时，她了解了西方人对中餐的看法。为什么他们觉得所有中餐都应该很便宜，而且由廉价的罐装调料制作；以及部分人对中餐的系统性偏见，而正是因为这类偏见，人们在谈论中餐时往往关注的是价格，而不是品质。

Gao decided to make a product that would blow that conversation up. Her products use peppers acquired only through the mining of sources and connections she’s developed during her years as a chef and restaurateur. But beyond the coveted chili peppers rarely seen outside Sichuan, the ingredient list is simple and natural: non-GMO oils and natural sources of umami, such as mushroom powder, seaweed, and fermented black beans. The brand is vegan, gluten-free, and all-natural—fitting the bill for what Gao’s millennial peers often look for in a product.

So it’s unsurprising that most of her products have sold via her own website to a loyal customer base. But Gao sits now on the precipice of wider success. Her brand is expanding rapidly: arriving in Macy’s for the holiday season, raising a seed round of funding to grow her team, and then heading quickly into natural foods channels. Fly by Jing is already on the path to be on Amazon and in Whole Foods soon, in hot pursuit of her goal—to become a household name associated with high-quality Sichuan foods.

珍妮决定制作一款能够提振这类对话的产品。产品使用的辣椒源自珍妮数年来作为大厨和餐厅老板所培养的独特资源和关系。然而，除了在四川之外很少见到的美味辣椒之外，其它成分都很简单和天然：非转基因油和天然鲜味来源，例如香菇粉、海藻和发酵黑豆等。该品牌是纯素食类产品，不含麸质，而且纯天然，这正是与珍妮同龄的千禧一代对食品的惯常诉求。

因此毫不奇怪，她的大部分产品都是通过其自有网站销售给忠实的客户群体。然而，珍妮如今正在向更大的成功迈进。她的品牌扩张的十分迅速：在假日季登陆梅西百货，获得了壮大其团队用的种子轮资金，然后迅速进驻了天然食品渠道。Fly by Jing已经蓄势待发，很快将登陆亚马逊和全食超市（Whole Foods），它正在快速逼近自己的目标：成为与高品质川菜有关的家喻户晓的品牌。

As she dives headlong into a wider audience, that growth means overcoming questions of authenticity and deflecting the inevitable comparison to Lao Gan Ma, the beloved and well-established brand of chili crisp and Chinese-style hot sauce. She says that is like comparing Cholula to Frank’s RedHot because they are both vinegar-based hot sauces. The only similarity between her sauce and Lao Gan Ma is that they’re both oil-based chili sauces. But people compare them because there aren’t many on sale here.

Gao stresses her product is about her own expression of Chinese flavor. “I’m not saying this is what Sichuan food is,” she says. “Everything is authentic to someone’s experience.” It’s about a conversation, one that Gao wants to have with anyone and everyone, about Sichuan cuisine: “It’s about bringing people around the table for a shared understanding, uniting them with amazing flavors.”

在她一头扎进更广泛受众市场的同时，其飞速增长需克服“正宗性”这类问题，而且人们必然也会拿它与老干妈这个备受喜爱、根深蒂固的辣椒脆和中式辣椒酱品牌进行比较。她说，这类似于Cholula与Frank’s RedHot之间的比较，因为它们都是醋制辣酱。她的产品与老干妈唯一的共同点在于它们都是油制辣酱。人们将这两者进行对比的原因在于这两款产品在美国销售的并不多。

珍妮强调，她的产品只是她自己对中式味道的表达。“我并不是说四川菜就是这个味道。”她说：“正宗与否与人的经历息息相关。”这款产品的目的是为了引发对话，一个珍妮希望与所有人开展的有关川菜的对话。“目的是为了让人们聚在一起形成一个共同的认识，并用一种赞不绝口的味道将他们连结起来。”（财富中文网）

译者：冯丰

审校：夏林