While the Sriracha sauce most familiar to Americans is a Vietnamese-American invention, the roots of the sauce actually lie in Thailand. In the 1930s, a woman named Thanom Chakkapak from the seaside community of Sri Racha invented a hot sauce intended as a cocktail sauce for seafood, which she called Sriraja Panich. Her family and friends encouraged her to take it commercial, and it became a huge success throughout the country.

The sauce is quite different from American Sriracha. The Thai version is made with garlic, prik chi faa peppers, vinegar, sugar, and salt which is fermented in casks for at least three months before being bottled, and has a more liquid consistency only barely thicker than Tabasco. It is popular with fish, fried food, seafood and khai jiao wok-fried omelette, as well as mixed into pad thai or combined with tamarind leaf for a tasty raw oyster shooter.

American Sriracha is little known in Thailand, and many Thais who try it find it excessively spicy, overpowering, and alien to their tastes, as well as packed with MSG, preservatives, and thickeners. They look askance at American habits of covering food with Sriracha until it completely takes over the flavor. However, many Thais who have lived overseas admit to learning to like the American sauce on its own merits, and hope to use the popularity of American Sriracha to help popularize the traditional Thai version of the sauce in the U.S.