Pink Sauce went viral on TikTok. But then it exploded (literally)
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/22/viral ... loded/amp/Over the last month, a chef in Miami has been taking over TikTok with her signature product: Pink Sauce. Carly Pii, who uses the handle @chef.pii, posted a series of videos promoting her homemade condiment, drizzling egregious pools of deep magenta dressing atop gyros, fried chicken, french fries and tacos.
Notoriously close-lipped about what her sauce even tastes like, Pii spun the biggest internet mystery since cinnamon toast shrimp guy, earning herself internet fame (or infamy, depending on how you look at it).
Before Pink Sauce, Pii had fewer than 1,000 followers on TikTok, but now she’s racked up more than 80,000 followers and 3 million likes. For anyone peddling a product on TikTok, going viral might seem like the dream — but for this TikToker, it’s become more of a nightmare.
“We didn’t get the opportunity like other small businesses to go through trial and error, to learn through our mistakes and recover from them,” Pii said in a live video last night, streaming on her TikTok and YouTube. “We didn’t have that opportunity because we blew up so fast. We went viral so fast.”
....But the serving size snafu wasn’t the only issue at play. Aside from the misspelling of “vinegar,” the nutrition label says that the product — which is sold unrefrigerated with no instructions on how to store it — contains milk. Once again, she didn’t clarify until making her live video that she is apparently using dried milk and pitaya, which are shelf-stable.
The most dramatic moment in the story of Pink Sauce came after the first shipments of were delivered about two weeks ago in packaging that looks like a plastic bag. Sure enough, the pink sauce exploded in transit, creating a stinky mess.