If anyone wants to compete with Siracha they would be best served by using marketing. That Siracha gets to skip spending on marketing after having developed a green field market just speaks to their competitive moat. They produce a high quality product at reasonable prices, if anything there isn't room to compete if not on marketing.
Once you have your place 'in the system' etc. you have incredible leverage.
The chocolate bars at my convenience store are the same, boring 20 variations for my entire life. They are not 'the best products' - they are just the products that will work through the system. It'd take a decade of consumer awareness to put something on par with 'Coffee Crisp' and then you have to get all of the gears of distribution to go along with it.
So what we end up up with in chocolate - and any number of other goods - is kind of a 'channel equilibrium' where products establish channel dominance (which requires scale), and then inch forward ever so slightly.
To see a 'new' product get to that level ... take a look at 'Swiffer' (cleaner) - basically, that's an institutional effort by P&G to 'disrupt' their own categories a bit and they've spent zillions marketing that. It's a trivial little thing, not much in the way of innovation, but when were talking consumer products at that scale, it never was about 'innovation'.
These companies do buy brands and scale them but even then brands meet their limit. 'Ben and Jerries' they can probably 10-50x in size ... but at that price point they can only go so far with the category. Odwalla ... sadly had to shut down.
In 2021 it is. They got to this place without marketing and by entering an already packed condiment market. Tabasco sauce had already been around for a century before they even started.
Tabasco and Sriracha are about as similar are ketchup and mustard.
I'm sorry if you can't appreciate the difference between the two but saying that the main thing different between them is the pepper is ludicrous as is saying they're meant for the same kinds of culinary use.
I don't care for either, having eaten far too much spicy food to taste anything but vinegar in either, but acting like there's a world of difference between them is just silly. If at any point you wanted hot sauce, either one would do despite your preferences.
Trying to put liquid tabasco in pho would be beyond disgusting. But you go on and think that they're interchangeable.
And similar does not mean identical, I'm fully aware there are differences.
Yes, putting Tabasco into pho soup is disgusting. Go try it and see what happens.
> I did not expect that.
Like I said, you clearly do not know what you're talking about. Your culinary experience appears to be limited.
> And similar does not mean identical, I'm fully aware there are differences.
Clearly you are not. This entire time, I've been arguing that they do not occupy the same niche in the world of condiments and you've been telling me that I am wrong.
My first reply to you says they have broad differences.
> I'd consider them like mustard and brown mustard, some broad differences but ultimately both versions of the same concept.
Anywhere you use mustard, you could also substitute brown mustard and vice versa.
This is not true for Sriracha and Tabasco.