The internet’s latest obsession? The Pink Sauce, a dragonfruit-spiked dipping sauce going viral on TikTok for all the wrong reasons. In a controversy some have likened to Daily Harvest’s dangerous Lentil Crumbles debacle, the colorful condiment has come under fire for a plethora of possible health and safety issues.
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Known to thousands of followers as Chef Pii, Veronica Shaw started promoting the “infamous sauce everyone is raving about” (as the bottle describes it) on the platform in June. The mystery surrounding the sauce’s flavor, which has been likened to ranch dressing, made clips of Shaw drizzling it over chicken tenders even more tantalizing. On July 1 at 11:11 a.m.—an homage to Shaw’s affinity for angel numbers—The Pink Sauce officially launched at $20 per bottle. And the drama began soon after.
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“The Pink Sauce has only been a product for 20 days, literally,” Shaw tells Glamour, emphasizing the speed at which her team is moving to correct mistakes and keep up with demand. “We have been going through trial and error just like any other business.”
As reviews of the sauce poured in, several customers say they received leaking bottles of rotten-smelling sauce in the mail. Approximately 50 packages were impacted, and Shaw was quick to offer refunds or replacements to those who received damaged bottles.
“It was our fault,” Shaw admits. “We should’ve used boxes instead of bags.”
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But it wasn’t long before users began to point out potentially dangerous discrepancies on the sauce’s nutritional label. The sauce’s original label claimed to contain 444 servings—another angel number—in a bottle. That’s a mathematical impossibility. Shaw later explained the error as a simple conflation of grams and servings. Each bottle contains 444 grams of sauce, amounting to 30 servings per container, and new labels for the sauce will reflect that going forward. But the biggest point of contention is the sauce’s ingredient list. Given that The Pink Sauce contains milk and relies primarily on natural preservatives, many worried whether it was safe to ship unrefrigerated. Shaw clarified that the sauce should be refrigerated after opening but insisted that the product has been quality tested and the brand is following FDA standards, although the sauce is still undergoing “lab testing.”
You might be wondering, Is this legal? Per “cottage food” laws in Florida, where Shaw is based, entrepreneurs using unlicensed kitchens can produce foods with a “low risk of foodborne illness” without a permit, as long as their sales do not exceed $250,000 annually.
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In a Twitter thread, a curious spectator tried to recreate The Pink Sauce at home, concluding after several attempts that Shaw had to be using mayonnaise instead of the milk listed on the label. In a TikTok pinned to Shaw’s account, she can be seen using what appears to be mayonnaise as an emulsifier.
“I’m not gonna address my process, just because of legal purposes with my trademark and stuff like that,” the chef says when Glamour asks about her recipe. “We are looking to go into stores. However, their production of my process is absolutely wrong. I’m being judged from a video that I made before The Pink Sauce was a product. I was on my way out to a pop-up shop and I wanted to put The Pink Sauce on the food that day. And I just created a video.”
Another source of concern is the sauce’s variation in color, sometimes appearing neon pink on camera and other times pastel. According to Shaw, the change in hue was intentional.
“When you put too much dragonfruit inside of the, you know, it makes you poop red,” Shaw says. “It’s like if you eat too much beets. So I didn’t want people like, ‘Oh, my shit is pink.’”
Still, outrage continues to build online. Labeling inaccuracies could pose serious health problems for those with food allergies.
“We use it, my children use it,” Shaw says. “I’m very aware of that allergy content and the importance of it…. They’re creating an issue because I created something great.”
Thankfully, the controversy didn’t prevent Shaw from inking a lucrative licensing deal with Dave’s Gourmet—a partnership that will put bottles of Pink Sauce on shelves across the country. According to a press release, Dave’s Gourmet will produce the sauce “on a commercial scale under the required food manufacturing guidelines,” with a few tweaks to the ingredients “to make the sauce less complicated, dairy-free, and clean of any preservatives, artificial colors or flavors.”
This post was updated with information regarding Shaw’s licensing deal on September 16, 2022.
