What is the Pink Sauce conspiracy dominating TikTok?
Image: Chef Pii
What is the Pink Sauce conspiracy dominating TikTok?
Words: Ellen Kenny
Pink Sauce is raising a lot of eyebrows online for its suspicious labelling and resemblance to the sauce from the Teletubbies.
A food’s colour has a lot to do with your perception of it, before you’ve even tasted it. When something is golden brown, you know you’re likely in for a crunchy delight. If it’s green, you know you’re going to feel like an absolute health legend. And if it’s pink, you know you’re about to have a little treat, like cotton candy, or a strawberry ice-cream.
You probably don’t think that pink is the colour of what you dip your chicken dippers into, or spread across a taco. It turns out you would be wrong.
What is Pink Sauce?
Pink Sauce is a dip that currently has a chokehold on the food side of TikTok. It all started when TikTok creator Chef Pii launched her creation in June, releasing a string of videos of her trying the hot pink dip with a series of snacks, to the amazement of TikTok users.
A lot of Pink Sauce’s popularity comes from its mysterious origins. Chef Pii remained cryptic over what exactly the Pink Sauce was made of and what it tasted like.
Of course, this was a clever marketing strategy on the TikToker’s part. After keeping her cards close to her chest, users spent 20 dollars on Chef Pii’s product to figure out the flavour. I guess you could say they got lost in the sauce.
The Pink mystery continues
Chef Pii later released the full list of the sauce’s ingredients. According to the chef, her sauce contains water, sunflower seed oil, raw honey, distilled vinegar, garlic, pitaya, pink Himalayan sea salt, and less than 2 per cent of dried spices, lemon juice, milk, and citric acid. Pitaya is a fresh dragon fruit that gives the sauce its bright pink colour.
People brave enough to buy the Pink Sauce have compared it to a sweeter ranch sauce.However, users on TikTok have now raised suspicions about nutritional label errors.
According to reviewers, Pink Sauce’s label says one bottle contains 444 servings. But the label also says that one serving is 14.4 grams, meaning the bottle contains roughly 6.4 kilograms of sauce. It very clearly doesn’t, according to users who bought the bottle.
TikTok users then wondered, if the label is wrong in this way, is it wrong about anything else?
Some critics were concerned that the nutritional label says that the sauce contains milk, but it does not include storage instructions to keep the sauce in the fridge.
Another user pointed out that there are not enough preservatives in the Pink Sauce label to ensure that the product is “shelf-stable”. This means that it is not clear that the sauce can be safely left in a press for more than a year without being cooked or refrigerated.
Chef Pii has apologised for the label errors following viral controversy. She promised that her company is working on improving the clarity of Pink Sauce’s label. The TikTok chef has not as of yet clarified the nutritional value of her sauce, and the incorrect serving label still remains on her website.
A lot of these can be chalked to the errors of a fledgling business finding its feet. But you might want to hold off on ordering the Pink Sauce until things are a bit more clear.
If you really want to try some pastel-coloured sauce, I’d recommend mixing ketchup and mayonnaise. The true pink sauce.
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