David Chang drops chili crisp trademark fight — apologizes after backlash

David Chang is simmering down.

The celebrity chef announced that Momofuku will no longer seek the trademark for the brand’s “Chili Crunch” product after backlash from the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

The company won’t pursue further defense for its cease-and-desist letters to businesses using the terms “Chili Crunch” and “Chile Crunch,” Chang, 46, explained on his podcast “The Dave Chang Show” with his guest, Momofuku CEO Marguerite Mariscal.

Momofuku sent seven cease-and-desist letters last month to mostly small businesses founded by Asian Americans who named their product one of the two names.

“First and foremost, I want to apologize to everyone in the AAPI community who’s been hurt or feels like I’ve marginalized them or put a ceiling on them by our actions,” Chang said on his podcast.

“I spent the greater part of my adult life trying to bring light to Asian food, Asian American food, Asian identity, what it means to be Asian American.

“I understand why people are upset and I’m truly sorry.”

Momofuku has a big business selling pantry items — including a spicy oil with bits of seeds and spices called “Chili Crunch” that it began selling widely in 2020 — and started going after businesses that sell a similar item.

Chang added that they chose to name their product “Chili Crunch” to stand out from the widely-known “Chili Crisp” from the brand Lao Gan Ma — and claimed to be unaware that the “Chili Crunch” term was nothing more than a generic descriptor for the common Asian condiment.

“When we were thinking about naming — and again, shame on me if I didn’t know this — but we named it chili crunch specifically because it was not chili crisp,” Chang admitted. “And we named it chili crunch because it was out of deference to chili crisp, which we associated with as Chinese, specifically carved out by Lao Gan Ma.

“Had I known, or Momofuku known, that chili crunch was a tautology, basically the same as chili crisp, we would have never named it chili crunch,” he said.

His company has the trademark for “Chile Crunch” but also wanted to claim “common law” rights to “Chili Crunch.”

“Chile Crunch” was first trademarked with that spelling after Momofuku purchased it from Chile Colonial, and the company filed for the “Chili Crunch” spelling trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office. The filing is still pending.

Mariscal, 34, added on the podcast, “The reason we received a cease-and-desist from Chile Colonial is the same exact reason that Momofuku was sending them out, which is if you don’t show the USPTO that you’re routinely defending your mark — and that’s from any size business, large, small — then you’re at risk of losing your trademark.”

The CEO added that this made the company “stuck in a dilemma.”

Despite the so-called dilemma, Chang concluded that the company’s “plan moving forward with this trademark is — and it’s a strange way of sort of taking the power away from it — by doing nothing.”

After the cease-and-desist letters were sent out, Chang was accused of being a “bully” toward small mom-and-pop shops that were selling the item.

“It felt like a punch in the gut,” Michelle Tew, who received a cease-and-desist letter alleging her company’s products were infringing upon Momofuku’s trademark rights, previously told The Guardian.

The 32-year-old Manhattanville resident is the owner and sole full-time employee of Homiah, a New York-based business selling Malaysian foodstuffs, including a Sambal Chili Crunch based on an old family recipe.

“It’s like trying to own ‘barbecue sauce’ or ‘mustard,’” Brooklyn-based Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry posted on Instagram. “It’s not a secret sauce.”