[imagesource: TikTok/@Chef.Pii; Collage By Hazel Zavala]

Put aside the pink sauce you think you know because this viral TikTok sauce is on a whole other level.

Honestly, I don’t know a single sauce that has been so convoluted with controversy.

Coloured with dragonfruit, this Pink Sauce was created by Chef Pii, pronounced “pea”, a private chef in Miami.

Pii started promoting the “infamous sauce everyone is raving about”, as the bottle describes it, on TikTok in June. Despite the mountain of criticism, her $20 Pink Sauce is already sold out.

There’s a lot of mystery around Pii and her colourful condiment, with her real name kept relatively under wraps (even though Glamour identified her as Veronica Shaw), as well as the fact that the taste of the sauce is still a secret:

@chef.pii♬ original sound – PINK SAUCE QUEEN 👑💖🤤

@chef.pii #fyp #viral #wingstop #reaction ♬ original sound – PINK SAUCE QUEEN 👑💖🤤

There’s also been a plethora of possible health and safety issues alongside labelling issues, something that Pii chalks up to being in the very beginning stages of a small business that is “moving really, really fast”:

“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.”

The Pink Sauce website lists the condiment’s main ingredients as honey, chilli, garlic, sunflower seed oil, and dragonfruit:

But an earlier label had a more complete list of ingredients, including, most controversially, “milk”:

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.”

Per The LA Times, Pii has since changed “milk” to “dry milk” and also referenced needing to refrigerate the sauce.

Before that, several customers received leaking bottles of rotten-smelling sauce in the mail as the product was shipped in bags instead of boxes:

“You are selling rotten sauce to people in the summer heat,” TikTok user Misha Curiel said in a video criticizing Pink Sauce last week.

That video was watched more than 830,000 times, showing the strength of the #pinksauce trend.

Approximately 50 packages were impacted, and Shaw was quick to offer refunds or replacements to those who received damaged bottles.

@chef.pii #fypシ ♬ original sound – PINK SAUCE QUEEN 👑💖🤤

The sauce’s nutritional label also caused a stir:

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.

Besides all that, the changing hue of the sauce doesn’t sit so well with critics and customers.

@chef.pii♬ I Love You by Young Slo Be – ʚ❤︎ɞNanami’s Wifeʚ❤︎ɞ

Some bottles appear neon, while others have been more pastel. Pii puts this down to dragonfruit ratios related to certain bodily functions:

“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.’”

Anyway, Pii says she uses the sauce all the time. Her children even eat it, with nobody getting sick.

She is convinced that she’s receiving as much hate as love because “they’re creating an issue because I created something great”, adding in another instance that “the haters are not taking my light away”.

I guess not, when that light is hot pink.

[sources:latimes&glamour]