2024-04-13
20 分钟Dave is joined by Momofuku CEO Marguerite Mariscal to talk about challenges and next steps with the name “chili crunch.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Welcome to the Dave Chang show, part of the Ringer podcast network.
This is David Chang, not your normal podcast.
This podcast is gonna try to address the debate that's been playing out over the past few days over social media news about Momofuku enforcing its trademark of the term chili crunch.
If you haven't been following along, and not everybody has.
So I don't want this to be strange.
If you're listening to this, essentially what's happened is that when we started selling Momofuku chili crunch in 2020, and I know this sounds asinine, but it's true.
And it really was important to us.
We thought the word crunch would separate us from sauces like laugh and other sauces that had the word crisp.
But what we're learning this week, and in a painful way learning, is that the terms crunch and crisp are essentially the same thing in Mandarin.
In holding the term crunch as a trademark, momofuku can be seen as trying to own a piece of chinese culture and heritage, which is exactly the opposite of what we wanted to achieve.
It can also be seen that we're trying to squeeze people out of space and have, you know, trying to be a monopoly and not play nice.
I can totally understand how people could see these things, but.
And I don't know how I can have you trust me, but it's the truth.
This is not the case.
Anyway, I hope this podcast will be able to explain some of these things to you.
It's really complicated.
I mean, I don't think nuance is the right word, but there's a lot of information.
But most importantly, I wanted to accomplish three things.
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.
There's a lot of chefs that I'm friends with.