From 25 Kickstarter Backers To 12,000 Shelves: How One Chef Turned Sichuan Flavors Into A Retail Hit

Fly By Jing’s founder began with a handful of crowdfunding supporters and pop-up dinners; today her spicy sauces and noodles appear in thousands of grocery aisles, a growth story rooted in restraint and authenticity.

Jing Gao’s journey started with a modest Kickstarter campaign that drew only 25 contributions, and a series of underground supper clubs where diners first encountered her take on Sichuan food. Those early experiments served as a low-cost market test — proof that people would pay for the flavors she knew from home — and they paved the way for a packaged-food business now carried by more than 12,000 retailers nationwide. Shoppers, she says, responded not to a trend but to something she refused to dilute: the way she actually cooks.

Gao’s product moves have not been impulsive. Her team once released a spoon-served chili condiment — a texture and usage unfamiliar to many American shoppers — at the same time they were asking buyers to rethink what “Chinese” grocery products could be. The combination worked, but it demanded heavy consumer education and investment. “If you change too many things at once, you’re asking the customer to relearn everything,” says a food-brand strategist who has advised emerging snack companies. “Try one meaningful difference before you reinvent the whole category.”

That deliberate approach extends to how Gao develops recipes. Rather than running focus groups to chase a median palate, she tests against her own standards and watches what sticks. Her supper-club dinners in Shanghai drew guests who had never tried Sichuan dishes and still became enthusiastic repeat customers. Those experiences convinced her that genuine, personal choices often find a broader audience once given a chance to connect.

Small-scale rejection, Gao and outside advisers argue, is not failure so much as information. Early crowdfunding and pop-ups flagged what needed fixing and where to invest: packaging, distribution partners, supply-chain scale. A retail analyst notes that turning a restaurant flavor into a shelf-stable product typically requires sequential bets — recipe tweaks, then packaging, then scaled production — rather than one big leap financed by huge capital raises.

For cooks and entrepreneurs watching Fly By Jing’s climb, the takeaway is pragmatic: keep your early offerings simple enough for consumers to understand instantly, and let your personal point of view guide development. If you make a dish at home you believe in, consider what minimal change would let someone pick it off a shelf and know exactly how to use it.