Sauce for Good
- Danae Hendrickson
- Jun 4
- 5 min read
From the desk of Hatsadee “YoYo” Xayavongchanch, Founder, YoYo Laos Sauce
How might a spicy condiment help make countries like Laos safer? That's our goal at Yoyo Laos Sauce, a company I started in the UK 5 years ago.
My full name is Hatsadee Xayavongchanch, but everyone knows me as Yoyo. In fact, my nickname started out as “Yo,” but my mum would often shout for me more than once–and then that became Yo...Yo.... YoYo!
My sauce business began with a craving for the authentic tastes of Laos after I moved to the UK in 2015. I really missed my ‘jeow,–essentially the Lao word for ‘sauce’–which is a staple featured in almost every Laotian meal.
I grew up in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and from an early age I helped my mum sell ginger, chilli, and garlic at the Khua Din Market. It is these three core ingredients that I used to create my original ginger chilli sauce. I first made it for myself and my husband, and then I started to share it with friends and family.
I was really surprised by how much they enjoyed it. At one summer barbeque, a friend commented that if we started to bottle this, they would buy the whole lot! That thought stuck in our heads, and when I was struggling to find work in 2020, we decided to turn our sauce hobby into a business.
With help from our friend Michelle, we made our first bottle label design. We registered with the local authority for a food hygiene inspection, completed food safety training, and then started to produce the first batches in our kitchen at home.
I recall taking 27 bottles to our local market for the first time. It was such fun watching people try my sauces and seeing their response. Almost every time we met a new customer they would ask, “Where is Laos?”or even, “What is Laos?” My sauce became an opportunity to tell people about my home country and Lao food.
We sold out! People loved my sauce, and I was quickly making more. I started to receive interest from local stores who asked to stock it, and it felt like my small business was growing.
It was at this point my husband and I spoke about making an impact beyond just raising awareness for Laos and Lao food. I wanted to make a difference back home by supporting a worthy cause and helping change lives and livelihoods.
Travelling back to Laos fairly frequently, we enjoyed traveling to different parts of the country. By doing so we would often see the work happening on the ground to clear the country of unexploded ordnance (UXO), a legacy of the Secret War in Laos. We would often see teams from Mines Advisory Group (MAG) actively at work, and we’d call into the MAG Visitors Centres in Vientiane, Thakhek and Phonsavan.
With our Lao-British connection, it seemed fitting to support MAG (Mines Advisory Group), a demining organization working in Laos.
We decided to donate 10p (approx.13c) from the sale of every bottle to MAG to help make countries like Laos safer.
With Laos being the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world, it will take a 100 years to make the country safe with over 1600m2 of land being affected. So far this year in Laos, there have been 9 reported casualties including 3 deaths and in 2024 there were 46 reported casualties, including 9 deaths, 6 of which were children. A very depressing scenario.
Unlocking the land and freeing people from the fear of UXO is such a powerful and positive action. It’s holding Laos and its people back, and we must do what we can to support this cause.
Once we had established this partnership, it wasn’t long before our next piece of game-changing news. I decided to submit my sauce for the UK National chilli awards held every year in Bristol. After sending the sauces off in November, I didn’t really expect much. How wrong I was.
In February of 2022, we received an email with the results. I quickly scanned it to see if we had featured in the list. Gold winner! Fantastic news! Oh…and category winner for hot sauce! Then I read the words, “Overall Winner of the National Chilli Awards 2022..... YoYo Laos Sauce!”
I couldn’t believe it! Made in my kitchen, my YoYo sauce had been voted the Best Chilli product in the UK. I thought it was quite unbelievable.
Following this, a slew of other awards seemed to come, including the Great Taste Awards, a European Hot Sauce Award, and a feature in the Fire Eaters Guide to 101 of World’s Best Hot Sauces. More and more interest followed with more stockist enquiries both domestically and internationally, and so I began to expand my range to include milder and extra hot versions.
By late 2023, I’d moved out of my kitchen into a small unit and still by hand and produced around 8000 bottles a year, but I still couldn’t meet the demand. I needed to find a way to scale up production.
The solution came by chance, or that’s how it felt. On a trip back to Laos in early 2024, my husband found a bottle of “Laobasco” hot sauce in a Vientiane store produced by Mai Savanh Lao, a social enterprise, based in the capital. He contacted the email address on the back of the bottle, which led us to a social enterprise based in the Lao capital. Within 24 hours we’d met the CEO and visited the factory.
We loved their ethical values and had confidence they could produce our sauces at scale whilst also benefiting the social enterprise Mai Savanh Lao which continuously invests in its staff and various programmes to help the Lao people, particularly with malnutrition.
In September 2024, we successfully sent a shipment of some 36,000 bottles in a container to the UK under the Developing Countries Trading Scheme. The team in Laos even had a visit from the UK Minister for Trade, and I was invited to the UK Embassy for tea with the Ambassador!
Since then, my husband Frazer, has left his day job. Now we work on YoYo Laos Sauce together, and he now often gets referred to as Mr YoYo!
We were delighted this year to launch into Selfridges, voted the World’s Best Department Store a record four times, in London, and also sign a deal with our first supermarket chain. On the international front, we have exported sauces to Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and most recently Japan, and we would love to find a distributor for our sauces for the USA. Perhaps a reader may be able to help us reach this target?
I was very happy to send some of my sauces this year to Ohio for the Asian Festival in May, and the feedback was just so positive. I'm hopeful that YoYo Laos Sauce will one day be on the shelves in every US state. When that time comes, we will have raised a substantial sum for UXO clearance in Laos and prevented many tragedies from occurring. Many more families will live without fear. I look forward to that time.
Hatsadee Xayavongchanch (Yoyo)
May 2025
