Tao Huabi

By late 1994, she stopped selling noodles and turned her restaurant into a specialty store to sell her sauces, primarily her chili oil sauce. In 1994, she borrowed two houses of the CPC Yunguan Village Committee in the Nanming District, recruited forty workers, and started her own sauce factory. By 1997, the company was officially listed and open for business. Though the brand was successful almost immediately after launching, it struggled to deal with competing brands with similar packaging. In 2001, the high court in Beijing finally ruled that other similar products could not use the "Lao Gan Ma" name nor imitate its packaging. Tao received 400,000 RMB (60,000 USD) in compensation.

In 1989, Tao opened up her own restaurant in Guiyang, Guizhou where she sold simple noodles with spicy hot sauce with soybeans. She became known as a "godmother" to poor students as she would always give them discounts and some extra food. Her restaurant began to gain popularity, particularly for its sauce. Customers would come to purchase the sauce by itself and Tao took notice. In the early 1990s, more truck drivers passed by Tao's shop due to the construction of a new highway nearby; she started giving out her sauces for free for the truckers to take home, marketing her sauce by word of mouth.

Tao Huabi (Chinese: 陶华碧; born January 1947) is a Chinese entrepreneur best known as the founder of Lao Gan Ma or Old Godmother. Tao is a member of the Communist Party of China and a National People's Congress deputy.

Tao was born in a poverty-stricken village, in Meitan County, Guizhou, in January 1947. She was the eighth girl in the family and wasn't taught how to read or write. During the Great Chinese Famine, she dug for wild vegetables and tried various ways to eat plant roots using whatever she had to try and make the little food her family had taste better.