Our Story
Love Unspoken, Made to Last.
We didn't set out to build a sambal brand. We set out on a trip to Bali — one of us Taiwanese, hunting for something flavorful and healthy, the other Indonesian, finally showing someone the flavors of home.
She found Kentang Mustafa first — crispy, fiery potato matchsticks — and fell hard enough that we tried selling it back in New York. People loved it. But they kept asking for something else: the sambal on the side. Turns out nobody wants a dish they can only eat one way. They want the thing they can put on everything — eggs, rice, a sandwich, a slice of pizza at 1am.
For Erica, finding real sambal was a revelation. Grinding through stressful tech shifts in NYC, she wanted food with intense flavor that didn't feel like junk. But everything on the grocery shelf was a compromise. Commercial chili oils felt like heavy grease traps, and factory "sambal oelek" was cooked to 200°F and drowned in industrial vinegar just so it could survive three years on a shelf. It tasted like a machine made it. She wanted something clean, honest, and real.
For me, it's much more personal. If you meet me, I come off loud, goofy, funny — total IDGAF energy. But I'm kind of a liar. I use that goofy exterior to hide the stuff that's missing inside. When I watch Erica effortlessly call her mom on FaceTime whenever she has a free minute, I get jealous. My mom left when I was younger. Even though she came back later to make amends, we never built a real bridge. We aren't close. I don't even dare to text her.
So instead of talking, we ate. Whenever I visited Indonesia, she didn't say "I love you" — she just made white rice, fried fish, and fresh, hand-pounded sambal. Eating that sauce is the only way I know how to receive her love without speaking.
Doti is us putting that raw, unspoken connection into a jar. Hand-pounded, hand-fried, and made with real ingredients instead of a lab's worth of stabilizers. Shelf-stable until you open it — then it lives in your fridge, because it's real food, not a chemistry experiment. Some things don't need a shortcut to last. They just need someone willing to do it properly.
The Founders
Ima (Indonesian) and Erica (Taiwanese) are the founders of Doti Fresh Sambal — two friends who bonded over long tech workdays and the fact that nothing on a US grocery shelf tasted alive. While Erica was hunting for a real, honest flavor enhancer that wasn't a heavy grease trap or a vinegar bomb, Ima was recreating the hand-pounded chili paste that served as her family's only unspoken language of love. They make Doti hand-pounded and hand-fried in NYC — no shortcuts, no artificial preservatives. Just real sambal, shelf-stable until opened, then kept cold because it's actually real.