Yao Zhao brings a big smile and the type of positive energy and charisma often associated with startup founders. He’s sharp, enthusiastic, and deeply passionate about bringing the tingling flavors of Sichuan spice into the American kitchen. Despite having zero experience in the food and beverage industry, Yao has built a successful and growing business based in Washington D.C.

Born and raised in China, Yao attended China’s Foreign Affairs University, a highly regarded feeder school for the country’s diplomatic corps. After graduating, he traveled extensively before enrolling at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) based in Washington, D.C. Following grad school he spent several years abroad, returning to the United States about a decade ago to join the World Bank as a clean energy specialist.

His resume reads more like a policy wonk than a a food entrepreneur - expertise at a leading international development institution, a top echelon graduate degree, and a high degree of global experience.

Yet somewhere along the way his focus shifted. Inspired by the distinct taste and sensory experience of Sichuan peppercorns from his home province, Yao began experimenting with ways to introduce the spice beyond Chinese cuisine.

The result was 50Hertz, a small but growing brand that has drawn national attention from The New York Times, The Guardian, and Food & Wine. The company is named after the frequency of the tingling sensation - a nod to the effect of the Sichuan peppercorn itself.

We spoke with Mr. Zhao about the origins of 50Hertz, the challenges of building a small business amidst sweeping tariffs, and his ongoing efforts to make Sichuan spice a staple in American kitchens.

Why don't we start with what brought you to DC originally? You have a really interesting journey for someone who is now a food entrepreneur.

I originally came to DC for grad school. I completed my undergraduate career in Beijing and was actually supposed to be a Chinese Diplomat. I went to the Chinese Foreign Affairs University which is similar to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where we learned everything about international relations, from languages to diplomacy. After completing school I just realized that I didn’t necessarily want to pursue a government job so I traveled for a year backpacking in India and Southeast Asia before applying to grad school. I got into Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and moved here for grad school in 2011.

After two years I ended up with a Masters degree in economics and energy with a focus on clean energy. Immediately after graduating I moved to Abu Dhabi working for the International Renewable Energy Agency. I worked in the Middle East, Africa and India and then after two years I wanted to move back to DC so I found a job at the World Bank and moved back exactly 10 years ago this year (2015).

What was your pull back to DC?

I knew I wanted to come back to the US and I liked DC. I have a lot of friends from grad school who are still here and really appreciate how international the city is. I also travel a lot and this is a great place to be based if you love to travel since you can fly to Europe or take a nonstop flight to Asia. At the time I moved back I also had this passion for working at the World Bank which is sort of like the holy grail if you want to work in international development. So all things considered I definitely wanted to be here.

So you come back to DC, you're working at the World Bank, this would have been 2015, right before Trump's first presidency, but right at the end of the Obama era.

Yeah, I think it was very interesting because I moved back in May of 2015 and in June 2015 DOMA was overturned. I remember we went to the Supreme Court to celebrate and I think the US was in this very rosy place but within a year everything had turned around.

So what was the catalyst for starting 50Hertz? You have a great job at the World Bank at this point.

After a few years working for larger international organizations I realized I actually wanted to do something more creative. My job was very research heavy so I wanted to try something different but didn’t quite know what that was going to be. At the time I was working in the US under the G4 visa which is the World Bank visa and in order to even explore other career avenues I had to get a US Green Card. I applied through the “Einstein” visa and got it which really freed up my options because with a Green Card I could do any job without needing to be sponsored.

At that point I said, okay now that I have this, what do I really want to do? After more self exploration I realized I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I like building connections and trying to make things happen.

The direct trigger for 50Hertz was when I went home to China in 2018 for Chinese New Year. I was born and raised in Chongqing which is a city in Southern China. It's actually a city of 34 million people (For contrast, New York City has 8.25M) even though not many people in the US have ever heard of it. It’s a super cool city now, it’s trending on Tik Tok! I went for Chinese New Year and my mom was making a cucumber salad and then finished it off with this numbing tingly oil and I was like, wow, this is an amazing flavor. I had grown up eating it but just hadn’t had Sichuan flavor for a while. I brought a bottle back to DC and one night my partner was cooking a pasta dish and he used a bit in the pasta sauce. He is from England and had never had Sichuan before and just loved the flavor and the buzz. That sparked the idea for me that Sichuan could go beyond Chinese food and could be something quite unique.I realized there just wasn’t really a set of products with Sichuan that was easily accessible in the US and thought that I could do something about it.

I think that creating and selling a product can sound straightforward but there are a ton of things that have to happen to actually get something on a shelf - everything from packaging design, finding manufacturers, registering a trademark, finding sellers, getting all of the food safe approvals, and everything else. What was that process like?

So I took a very slow and steady approach. Basically, I spent 2018 and 2019 preparing. When I started I didn’t have a product. I knew I wanted to make Sichuan oil but didn’t known anyone in the industry. I ended up flying to China and cold calling potential manufacturers and suppliers. Doing business in China is very casual so they would invite me to come see their factory and look around. I'm from the region and speaking the dialect and knowing the customs and language was just incredibly helpful. Over the summer I visited a few manufacturers and sourced with my own friends and family to see what brands they really liked.

After a couple of visits I was able to convince a partner to work with me. The initial batch was just 100 bottles. I tried to make it easy for them to say yes since I wasn’t asking for too much and didn’t ask them to change the formula on the front end. All I asked them to do was use my own design and label. So I started with a small batch of 100 bottles. It wasn’t as easy as just placing an order and getting it. They actually had to ship the oil to California where I had a bottler who would bottle the 100 original bottles for me and then I went out to California to get them. So I tried to make it easy for everyone where my chosen manufacturer just had to import a barrel of the oil to California and then my bottler in California only had to put together 100 bottles which I was paying a premium for.

That’s a lot of logistics to put together for someone who has never worked in the food space, were you working full time too?

I was still at the World Bank at the time so it was definitely a lot!

“I remember going back to Hana market after that every day to see if anyone was buying anything. It was actually selling and I was so happy to see it selling. ”

So at this point you have 100 bottles, what did you do with them?

I knew intuitively I wanted to do direct to consumer but I just wasn’t ready for that phase. At the time I was slowly building out the website and spent maybe $400 hiring someone online to help build the initial site. But the very first bottles I sold were at Hana Market over on 17th street.

They were my very first retailer and have been carrying my product ever since we launched. I literally just walked into the store with some of our product and asked the two owners, who are so nice, to see if they would carry it. They were amazing and said yes to selling one case. I remember going back to Hana Market every day to see if anyone was buying anything. It was actually selling and I was so happy to see it selling. I still follow that approach of walking into a retailer with a sample to see if they could would be open to carrying it.

So you have maybe 75 bottles left after selling to Hana Market, where did the others go?

So the other bottles I used to reach out to people I admired who I thought might be interested. One example is Fuchsia Dunlop, she’s a British cook and cookbook author who is probably the most famous person right now who writes about Chinese food. In 2019 she had a cookbook about the food of Sichuan and was going on a US food tour. I went to New York to see her and gave her a bottle of our oil. A year later she posted on Instagram about our product. I woke up that morning to so many messages. She had made dan dan noodles with the oil and had given us a shoutout. It was so fun that that even a year after we gave her a bottle she was still using it.

At this point it’s been about 2 years since you had the initial ideal. You’ve sold or given away all of the bottles in batch one and you’re still small but steady. At what point do you feel like 50Hertz transitioned from a fun side project to a full scale business?

Let’s fast forward to April 2020 right in the early days of the pandemic. Everyone was hunkered down at home and at that point the 100 bottles were long gone but I had the supply chain kind of figured out so decided to open the website. After years of slow preparation everything happened quickly. I opened the website and soon after Fuchsia posted on Instagram which is when all of our small second order sold out. I started packing all the orders at home, literally packing hundreds of bottles. About two months later in June 2020 I got an email from a journalist named David Leonhardt from the New York Times. He reached out and wanted to write about 50Hertz. I was super excited and he warned me at the time that we had to be ready. It’s funny looking back about how naive I was. I prepared 1,000 bottles in advance of the article getting published and thought that there was no way we’d sell all 1,000.

The article was published July 2nd, 2020. I woke up at 6am that morning to check our orders and nothing had changed. I thought it had flopped and now had 1,000 bottles of inventory that were never going to sell. But the article actually released an hour later at 7am and by 7:15 we had sold out of all 1,000 bottles. The phone didn’t stop ringing for 3 days and we ended up selling 22,000 bottles!

What did your partner think about all of this? I’m sure your apartment was just covered in packages!

He has been so supportive and to be honest I absolutely could not do this without him.

“I thought it had flopped and now had 1,000 bottles of inventory that were never going to sell. But the article actually released an hour later at 7am and by 7:15 we had sold out of all 1,000 bottles. The phone didn’t stop ringing for 3 days and we ended up selling 22,000 bottles!”

Do you feel like there is a big education barrier to understanding Sichuan spice?

Oh, yeah, for sure. I think my biggest marketing challenge is whenever I mention Sichuan pepper people immediately associate it with chili peppers because there’s a natural association between pepper and heat even though Sichuan peppers aren’t spicy.

The other part is that I started with the oil so people assume we’re just an oil company. We spend a lot of time educating which is why the peanuts we have are super helpful, because you don’t have to educate people about how to eat peanuts. They know it’s a flavorful peanut which lowers some of the barriers to trying Sichuan pepper.

Can you walk me through how you think about selling through new retailers? Your products are at Hana Market, where else?

So we have sell at Hana Market, Rice Market, and Each Peach Market. Essentially these are all places that accept direct supply meaning we don’t have to use an expensive distributor (editor note: big groceries stores often use distributors who are very expensive for small businesses). The other element is that these aren’t huge national chains. For Hana, Rice Market and Each Peach Market I was able to actually speak with the owner/manager and convince them to take a bet on a local product. A lot of these shops are places where people go to experience new products, so that exploration is really good for us.

Under the current administration we’ve seen the implementation of massive tariffs. Obviously there’s a lot about this in the news but from your perspective, as a small business owner, what are you seeing?

It’s been tough. So the total tariff on our peanuts right now is 170%. Even when I launched peanuts a while ago it was +25% but after the inauguration it immediately went up to +10% and then it has escalated to +145% since the inauguration so that plus the original 25% means in total we have 170% tariffs. I mean it’s not just me, everyone is feeling the pressure but at this point it feels like there just won’t be any business between the US and China.

We don’t want to profit from tariff fluctuations; our goal is to make Sichuan more approachable. I know we’re already a pretty premium brand so we really want to avoid raising the price. We’ve been absorbing the cost and and trying to sell through any inventory we have in stock which could last us about the next two months. But things are super stressful especially because there’s so much uncertainty. I mean I don’t see how a global economic battle between the US and China would benefit anyone, it feels like a lose lose situation. I definitely hope this season passes.

I know you have places to be so for my last question I have to ask, what’s next for you and 50Hertz?

We're so small right now but we do have a big dream. I think my whole my mission is to elevate Sichuan cuisine and pepper. I want Sichuan pepper to be the new wasabi. Maybe 40 years ago if you asked the average American what wasabi was nobody knew. Because Japanese food has become so prevalent almost everyone now knows what wasabi is. I want the same thing for Sichuan pepper. It’s such a unique flavor and my mission is to introduce it to an entirely new audience.

So, how do we get there? I think it’s partially going to be product led. When we launched the peanuts our revenue, our customer engagement, and our reorder rate just went up a lot because it was a type of food that was accepted by so many people.

So we are going to continue to innovate and expand into cashews and nuts. We’re also doing a really fun project with Bluejacket Brewery where we collaborated on a beer brewed with our tingly Sichuan peppercorns. We’ve done a few beer collaborations with them and have really enjoyed it.

For myself, I want to be the Sichuan pepper guy. I feel like with my background and heritage I can really speak to it. Also, right now, we don’t really have any competition and in some ways I wish there was competition because it would really prove that there is a market for this product.

Yao’s “Best Of” List

Le Diplomate - I know it’s low hanging fruit but I love brunch at Le Dip. It opened when I was in grad school and whenever I went while I was in school it felt like such a luxury treat. I hadn’t been in a while and went back this past weekend and was just so impressed with how well run it is.
Mama Chang - It’s a Chinese restaurant in Fairfax that’s amazing. They have a dish called the Farmer’s Stir Fry that’s heavy on the vegetables and green pepper and is amazing. Any of Peter Chang’s restaurants are great.
Bread Furst - Hands down the best sandwiches and pastries. They also carry our products which is fun. I love to go on a walk through Rock Creek Park and end up there for a coffee and croissant.
Yao doesn’t drink but he still had a few recommendations for us where he loves to join friends.
Dacha - I live a block away from Dacha and it’s such an institution. Their food is actually quite good too.
Lost Generation Brewing - The owners Anna and Jared are the nicest people, they actually brewed our first collaboration beer!
Gemini - I like the whole concept of wine and pizza. They actually used to be Komi and then closed during the pandemic, opened a gyro spot and then later opened Gemini. It’s a great spot to go catch up with a friend.
Paddleboarding in Georgetown:
- It’s so therapeutic to be out on the Potomac and definitely not something that everyone does or knows about.
Rock Creek Park:
- This one feels obvious but Rock Creek Park is our Central Park. During the pandemic I would go there for a weekend walk with my best friend from grad school and we would just chat it out. It’s an amazing resource to have right in the middle of the city.

An Interview with Yao Zhao, Founder of 50Hertz Tingly Foods

Yao’s “Best Of” List

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Favorite Place For A Drink?

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