Jing Gao
Coming home to Jing.
Jing Gao built Fly By Jing around the flavors of Chengdu. Along the way, she reclaimed her name—and found a new rhythm in motherhood.
For much of her life, Jing Gao introduced herself as Jenny. She had moved from China to Germany at five; children struggled with her name, and an English one seemed to make things easier. The adjustment lasted nearly three decades. Long before she built a food company around the name Jing, she was learning how much of herself to carry into a new place.
Her parents’ academic careers kept the family moving. Childhood took her across Europe and eventually to Canada, while visits to Chengdu returned her to relatives and the food she remembered. Later, staying home during the pandemic, she found an unexpected ease in being away from conversations in which she felt obliged to prove herself. She decided to use her birth name again. The company had already been pointing her there.
Fly By Jing began with flavor and an audience close enough to see across a dinner table. After working in technology, Gao returned to China, trained with chefs and opened a modern Chinese restaurant in Shanghai. An underground supper club followed. The chili crisp that delighted its guests became the starting point for a business that could travel farther than a restaurant or a single evening’s meal.
Getting that business underway was frightening. Gao delayed her Kickstarter campaign for months, unsure about putting something so personal before strangers. She eventually treated it as a test of whether moving her life from Asia to Los Angeles made sense. The campaign was fully funded on its first day and brought her the first thousand customers. Their willingness to order gave her a reason to make the move.
Then the jars began arriving broken. Newly in Los Angeles, staying in an Airbnb and knowing hardly anyone, Gao had hired a logistics company to send out the first Kickstarter orders. She had explained that glass needed protection. A customer’s photograph showed what had actually arrived: a mailing envelope holding shattered glass and chili oil. The money had already gone into making the product.
Gao emailed the backers, explained the problem and promised replacements. About 15 percent of shipments broke, she recalled in a June 2026 Shopify interview. Customers answered with reassurance. The episode established a habit of talking openly to the people buying her food, including when things went wrong. For a founder beginning again in an unfamiliar city, those exchanges were an early form of community.
By March 2026, Entrepreneur reported Fly By Jing’s sauces and noodles in more than 12,000 retailers nationwide. Gao still described her own palate as the starting point for product development. The scale had changed; the person deciding what tasted good remained at the center of the business.
That insistence has a price. Her chili crisp contains 18 ingredients, Gao told Shopify, with depth coming partly from fermentation. She sees charging for that complexity as connected to a larger question of how Chinese food is valued. A jar on a supermarket shelf carries an argument about craft as well as something to spoon over dinner.
At home, motherhood introduced another measure of time. In an interview with Babyletto after the birth of her son, Gao described how a baby’s need for attention drew her into the present. A life organized around the next objective now made room for moments that could not be hurried toward a business result. She wanted to share Chinese food, language and the Sichuan dialect with him.
Her own comfort food in that early period was congee: soft grains, broth and whatever protein or toppings suited the moment. She spoke of rice, millet and quinoa; pork, fish and tofu; peanuts and chili crisp. The meal was adaptable, familiar and personal, carrying the same freedom that had made cooking a way back to herself. Her advice to other new mothers was similarly practical: be kind to yourself and ask your community for help. Passing food and language to her son gave those everyday choices another purpose: making the culture she had rediscovered part of his earliest experience of home.
Gao’s story keeps returning to that word, personal. The name on the jar once felt difficult to use in daily life. Reclaiming it made the business and the woman behind it speak the same language. Food gave her a way to make that introduction on her own terms.