Jing Gao
Chinese-American entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jing Gao is a Chinese-American entrepreneur. She founded the chili crisp brand Fly By Jing.
Jing Gao | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1987 or 1988 (age 38–39)[1] |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Known for | Fly By Jing |
Early life and education
Career
After graduating from college, Gao worked as a brand manager for Procter & Gamble.[7] She worked for BlackBerry.[8] She moved back to Sichuan Province in her early twenties and lived there for 10 years while working for a tech company.[2][4][5] While living in China she became interested in Chinese food culture, eventually quitting her job to train in restaurants.[2][4][9] She opened a restaurant, Baoism, in 2014 and in 2016 hosted a pop-up supper club branded as Fly By Jing.[2][9][5] She created a blog, Jing Theory, and wrote about food for other publications.[10][5] She developed a line of products under the brand name Fly By Jing, a reference to China's small street stalls that are so popular they are said to attract people like flies, for the Chinese market.[4]
After a Kickstarter campaign in 2018 with a goal of $35,000 raised $120,000, Gao relocated to the US in 2019 to start Fly By Jing as a direct-to-consumer company marketing chili crisp.[2][11][10][12][4] In 2020 the pandemic created an increased interest in homecooking, and a feature article about chili crisp in the New York Times that mentioned Fly By Jing increased sales of the product.[11]
In 2023 trade publication Nosh said Gao's products had "touched off the chili crisp craze that launched a million TikTok recipes during the pandemic".[13]
Her first cookbook, The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp, was published in 2023 by Ten Speed Press.[2] The book's photographer, Yudi Echevarria, won a James Beard Award for her work on the book.[14][15]