This hot sauce has a story - and a distinctive taste

WHEN IT comes to staple condiments, some like it hot - and in the United States, the sum of that "some" is growing at a tongue-singeing pace.

American hot-sauce sales now top $600 million annually, with the potential to crack $1 billion in the next four years, according to figures cited by Reuters earlier this year. Take it as a sign that our tastes and eating habits, as a nation, are de-wussifying at a fiery clip. (Happy, Ed Rendell?)

And they're going global, too. Don't tell Donald Trump, who apparently eats his steaks well-done, but this chili-laden uptick might have something to do with America's burgeoning immigrant populations. In a 2014 analysis, consumer-research firm Euromonitor International drew parallels between increasing numbers of Asians and Latinos and the growing popularity of spicier fare, sauces included. All told, it's a prime, if crowded, time to break into the market.

That's what Lawrence Wu is trying to do. This past summer, the Drexel grad ditched a job in pharmaceuticals to bear down full-time on Wuju, a different kind of hot sauce he hopes will catch on in Philly and beyond.

Wu, 24, has a story that will sound familiar to many first-generation American kids. He grew up in Bernardsville, in North Jersey, the son of Taiwanese immigrants who run a small chain of restaurants called Asian Delite. They worked (and still work) very hard but took an unmistakable stance when it came to looping their kid into the family business. "My parents were pretty particular about me not being so involved," said Wu, who was encouraged to focus on his studies and extracurriculars (he's a classically trained cellist) instead.

Even though he wasn't running a kitchen or dining room, Wu, who now lives in Fairmount, still gleaned lessons from his parents' style of work. "Even though my parents steered me away from it, I could see they were really happy about being their own bosses," he said. "I couldn't imagine a life when I wasn't doing that."

In 2009, Wu started a five-year program at Drexel - based on a suggestion from an Asian Delite customer, no less - studying marketing and entrepreneurship. Shortly after graduating in 2014, he landed a sweet starter job at GlaxoSmithKline, selling asthma treatments to physicians.

But "I just wasn't too happy," Wu said. He wanted to do his own thing, and food seemed like a plum path in, as much as his parents tried to aim him elsewhere.

The spark came when Doug Roth, the father of a friend and former roommate, introduced Wu to a sauce he'd made. It was spicy, sure, but it had plenty of other stuff going on - fruitiness, tanginess, savory character. Enamored of the product, Wu asked to use it as a jumping-off point for something bigger.

Over several months, Wu worked on the sauce in R&D, tweaking it to emphasize the "heat to sweet ratio" - habanero, chili and curry providing the spice, cut by additions like mango, yellow mustard, orange juice and brown sugar. He eventually connected with a Lancaster-based contract packer to do a run of 1,000 bottles of Wuju - so named after Wu's joke with a Pi Kappa Phi frat brother, surname Judd, that the portmanteau would make for a catchy product moniker. His sister Serena, a graphic designer, put together the serene branding.

Though the logical next step in the equation would be to sell the stuff, Wu decided to give it away for free.

Inspired by another hot-sauce startup he'd come across, Wu took to the online community Reddit, offering up all 1,000 bottles of Wuju for free in exchange for honest feedback. Within hours, he had upward of 3,000 takers from across the country.

Wu and a team of friends raided every Philly post office they could find for shipping boxes, transformed his parents' garage into a makeshift mail room and pulled an all-nighter getting the behemoth order ready to ship out. A chronicle of the process, complete with photos, would later hit Reddit's front page, earning more than a million views.

This Web momentum, plus positive reviews from his thousand-strong guinea-pig pool, persuaded Wu to quit his job in July, in concurrence with the launch of a Kickstarter. To date, he's raised more than $61,000 on the crowdfunding site - and many of these backers, he says, were among those who got in on the initial Wuju run.

"It's so different from all the different sauces out there," Wu said of why the hot-sauce heads seem to be paying attention. "When you look at it, there's no mustard alternative to ketchup in the hot-sauce space."

That ketchup-to-mustard analogy is one of Wu's favorite ways to delineate his sauce from the field. He wants Wuju to be distinctive on the shelf.

But he's also distinguishing the business in other unorthodox ways: planning to donate 5 percent of his net to cancer research as a nod to his mom, Jenny, who's in treatment, and to his friend Cody Schuler, who died last year after a long battle with kidney cancer.

Wuju is still so new that Wu has yet to set up an e-commerce arm, though bottles are available at the Pennsylvania General Store, in Reading Terminal Market, and at Arch Street Gourmet, in Center City.

The small start isn't affecting Wu's grand plans. "When people ask, 'Where do you see this going?' " he said, "I just picture it on every table."