San Francisco spice lovers swipe Sriracha from restaurants as prices skyrocket to $30

San Francisco Sriracha lovers are swiping bottles of the once-cheap condiment from local restaurants as a last resort amid the national chili pepper shortage.

Bay Area eateries are struggling to keep bottles of the hot sauce on their tables thanks to customers who can’t find Sriracha at any grocery store.

“They literally disappear,” Mariel Edwards, the operations manager of Oakland-based Senor Sisig’s, told SFGATE, calling the thefts “crazy.”

“We haven’t seen people take them, but there is a bottle that will go missing … It’s funny how, like, they’ll just not be on the table anymore.”

Other customers with arguably stronger morals have also called the establishment and asked whether they could buy bottles from the shop directly, Edwards said.

Most major grocery chains in the Bay Area ran out of their Sriracha stock last month in the wake of a chili pepper inventory shortage, creating a wild demand that has led shopkeepers to raise prices a whopping 651%, SFGATE reported.

The now-scare bottles, which used to sell for roughly $3.99, can now only be found in the city’s Koreana Plaza and are going for $29.99.

The few Bay Area supermarkets that haven’t yet run out of Sriracha have limited shoppers to purchase just two bottles at a time.

Sriracha supply has been rapidly decreasing since Huy Fong Foods, Inc. — the nation’s leading sriracha sauce manufacturer — announced in April that the spice shortage would heavily impact its products.

The California-based company started experiencing a shortage of chili pepper inventory back in July 2020, which was worsened in recent months thanks to poor weather conditions that decimated crops.