Picture it: A quirked-up entrepreneur with a little bit of swag, bustin' it down controversial style, with the sauce that is, tragically, not goated.
Such is the tale of TikToker chef.pii, creator of the now-infamous Pink Sauce that has taken over the app, not because everyone unanimously loves it (though some do), but largely because people are very concerned that the pink, slime-like condiment may not be fit for human consumption.
For an alarmingly long time, chef.pii failed to answer basic questions about this "pink sauce" she was dipping her chicken tenders into and planning to feed to others, such as, "What is the pink sauce made of? What are its nutritional statistics? Is it FDA approved?"
Here, we'll go over the facts of the Pink Sauce and go over the growing controversy surrounding the tale of chef.pii.
According to the product's website, Pink Sauce is literally a mix of water, sunflower seed oil, raw honey, distilled vinegar, garlic, pitaya (dragonfruit), pink Himalayan sea salt and less than 2 percent dried spices, lemon juice, milk and citric acid.
Of course, no one knew that when chef.pii, who goes by the pseudonym Carly Pii, began advertising her product on TikTok.
In mid-June, Pii began posting videos of herself consuming the Pink Sauce and serving it to others. For two weeks, the videos raised concerned comments from people wondering both why the hue of the sauce seemed to change from video to video and also what was in it. It wasn't until two weeks after Pii first debuted the sauce that she let viewers in on the ingredients (the changing hue of the sauce, she said, was due to different lighting in each video).
Though the ingredients of the Pink Sauce are all real foods - a fact that wasn't necessarily a given in the sauce's early days of virality when some guessed the sauce could be Pepto Bismol or ranch dressing with red dye - controversy still swirled around the sauce, mostly because of errors Chef Pii made in its marketing.
For starters, the nutritional facts of the sauce were initially riddled with errors, including a misspelling of "vinegar" and an astoundingly large "servings per bottle" of 444.
She also did not label that the product needed to be refrigerated due to its milk content, and to make matters worse, shipped it to customers in unrefrigerated bags, meaning several customers received rancid, exploded messes.
Chef Pii then apologized in a TikTok, chalking up the errors to the early growing pains of a new entrepreneur. That could have been the beginning of the end of the Pink Sauce controversy and the start of a successful career for a more careful Chef Pii.
. that was until she discussed the product on a livestream and in response to a question about whether she was seeking FDA approval, she wondered why she would need FDA approval because the Pink Sauce wasn't a medical product. FDA stands for "Food and Drug Administration," and one does in fact need FDA approval to sell food products.
This began to somewhat turn public opinion against Chef Pii, as people began to wonder if she had the requisite business skill necessary to sell food products safely.
Through the controversy, Chef Pii has made improvements to the Pink Sauce and it may indeed be getting closer to your local grocery store shelf. For starters, the nutritional facts on the label are correct, the product now contains dry milk instead of liquid milk, and there is a label telling consumers to refrigerate the product.
Pii told the Los Angeles Times in an interview that she is now manufacturing the sauce in a facility that's approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is in line with FDA standards.
Despite the controversies, the sauce seems primed to make it to shelves. Chef Pii has taken all the controversies so far on the chin and has incorporated them into her plan for developing the Pink Sauce. While it will still be some time until the general public can try the sauce for itself, at the moment it appears there's no reason why the Pink Sauce won't make it past FDA approval, provided Chef Pii continues to follow guidelines.
For more information on the Pink Sauce, check out our entry here.