Tech Talk

TikTok is known for making small businesses go viral overnight, product recommendations that cause a specific shade of blush to sell out everywhere, and convincing thousands of people to make salmon rice bowls for lunch every day.

But buzz on the platform has apparently gotten the better of some users, causing them to forget a tried-and-true rule: maybe don’t eat unidentified goo made by a stranger and shipped in plastic flat mailers during a record-breaking heatwave?

Since mid-June, a TikToker going by Chef.Pii has been posting about Pink Sauce, a homemade concoction that she’s used as a dipping sauce for chicken and cucumbers and poured on tacos, gyros, and Big Macs. People seemed intrigued — why is it pink? What does it taste like? And the bravest of them wanted to know, is it for sale? As it turns out, Chef.Pii would be selling it — for $20. What luck!

Customer reviews have started rolling in, with TikTok users recording themselves unboxing their Pink Sauce, examining the packaging, and doing a few sniff and taste tests while others look on in (understandable) horror.

For one, there’s not much consistency in the color and texture of the sauce. In earlier videos posted by Chef.Pii, the sauce was Barbie pink and smooth in texture, similar to ranch dressing. But some customers’ sauce is instead a pale pink and — maybe more concerning — chunky, as if it had curdled since packaging. In other videos, Pink Sauce is watery, sputtering out of a ketchup bottle-shaped container. Some of the bottles have glitter sprinkled on them, with labels affixed with what appears to be glitter glue. But what’s really made TikTok users question the safety of the sauce is the fact that nobody really knows what’s actually in it.

The nutritional labels on the bottles are riddled with typos and do not offer much clarity on what you’re putting in your body. For one, a serving size is one tablespoon, and the label says there are 444 servings in a bottle, which would be about 1.7 gallons. This could be a simple typo, or it could be the creator dropping cosmic hints in the form of “angel numbers” for her blessed customers. Ingredients are eyebrow-raising, too. “Vinegar” is misspelled as “vinger.” There’s apparently milk in it but no preservatives.

Some describe it as tasting and smelling like ranch. Others say it’s sweet and tangy. Guess I’ll never know.

In one truly heinous video, a customer puts on a pair of blue surgical gloves before unpacking a leaky bottle of Pink Sauce. The white mailer stained in pink is bad enough. But when they remove the “sauce,” it looks like someone threw up a gender reveal cake for a baby girl.

“It don’t even say Pink Sauce on this bitch,” they exclaim. The entire amount of sauce — all 444 servings — leaked and coalesced around the bottle like a papier-mache project made with ranch, tissue paper, and glitter.

Not everyone hates it, though. One person named Jade Amber unboxed her Pink Sauce from her car, wearing a pink velour tracksuit, sitting in her seat with baby pink quilted covers, with furry pink dice dangling from the rearview mirror. At a taste test at home, she squirted it on her lunch bowl.

“OK, so the sauce is good,” she says after chewing momentarily and stopping her video. She wouldn’t repurchase it, though, because it’s $20 for a flavor she’s tasted before (?).

Chef.Pii didn’t respond to The Verge’s request for comment, but she did post an apology video a day ago. The 444 servings was a mix-up, and her team would replace the labels for future orders.

“I’m only human, I’m not perfect,” Chef.Pii says. The product follows “FDA standard,” she says, but is currently “in lab testing.”

She also said she would work to lower the cost, a major complaint that people had. And if you missed out on ordering, not to worry — Chef.Pii says she’s working to bring Pink Sauce to stores.