how chinese takeout, a jewish businessman from the bronx, and nasaapproved packaging have shaped the 50year reign of a wellloved american condimentright now, whether you&39re at work or at home, in a drawer somewhere near you is probably a packet of soy sauce&mdasha squishy, likely clear pouch of transclucent saltiness left over from a latenight chinesetakeout binge or a hurried workday lunch. these packets are remarkably common in terms of sales, soy sauce is the thirdmostpopular condiment in the u.s., behind only mayonnaise and ketchup.but as ubiquitous as soysauce packets are, no one knows where they first came from. the major players in the togo soysauce industry today&mdashkariout and w y industries&mdashdon&rsquot claim to have created the packet. some have attributed the design to ben eisenstadt&mdashthe founder of the sugarsubstitute manufacturer sweet&rsquon low and the designer of his company&rsquos trademark bubblegumpink packets&mdashbut that connection remains unconfirmed.the first sign of a soysauce packet that resembles the one popular today is a 1955 patent, filed by two men named harold m. ross and yale kaplan, that outlines a &ldquodispensing container for liquids.&rdquo the packet would hold &ldquoa single serving&rdquo of &ldquosauce or syrup,&rdquo which could be extracted with a squeeze.but a key feature of ross and kaplan&rsquos design that differs from soy sauce packets today is that &ldquothe flow of fluid will stop and any possible leakage will be prevented&rdquo as soon as the pressure is released. as anyone who has stained his or her shirt with errant soy sauce can attest, the brown, salty liquid isn&rsquot nearly viscous enough for this to hold true ross and kaplan&rsquos brainchild was much better suited to ketchup.from this vantage, soysauce packets appear not to be optimized for the substance they contain&mdasha substance that, it should be noted, isn&rsquot even technically soy sauce. packaged soy sauce is often a cocktail of processed ingredients that resemble the real thing water, salt, food coloring, corn syrup, msg, and preservatives. but soy sauce, strictly defined, refers to a fermented combination of soybeans and wheat whose earliest direct predecessor was first mentioned in writing in the year 160. lessdirect ancestors of modernday soy sauce existed in china as far back as about 3,000 years ago.in the millennia since, arguments have brewed over what exactly constituted soy sauce. william shurtleff and akiko aoyagi trace these disputes in their book history of soy sauce 160 ce to 2012. the manufacturers of traditional fermented soybean paste at one point banded together and, through a proposal authorized by the japanese government, contested the right of companies such as la choy and kariout to call their products soy sauce. these oldschool outfits outlined an elaborate classification system for varieties of the product. in the end, it was too hopeful, and the proposal was withdrawn in 2005. even though the soysauce packet&rsquos origin is an unsolved mystery, the story of how it became popular is not. that&rsquos the story of howard epstein, who, as the founder of the dominant soysauce brand kariout, is seen as the ambassador of packaged american soy sauce.epstein became interested in food packaging because his father manufactured the long, flimsy plastic packaging for freezer pops. epstein&39s first venture into his father&rsquos trade was a popcornpackaging business, which he bought for 5,000 over 50 years ago.that business failed to gain traction, and epstein, now 81, was looking for a change when one of his father&rsquos salesmen, who sold tea bags, suggested he consider the soysaucepackaging business. in 1964, epstein founded kariout, and he says he arrived to the industry right as it was becoming commercially viable. he ran his new business out of the popcorn factory he owned.at first, epstein was regarded with suspicion, primarily because he, a jew from the bronx, was different from most people in the industry. &ldquono one trusted me because it was the old times. the chinese ran the business,&rdquo epstein says. his attempts to sell his packets to wholesalers were met with apathy and even coldshouldered silence. &ldquoi had one potential customer,&rdquo he says. &ldquoi went in and asked him if he would be interested in selling my soy sauce. he didn&rsquot speak. he never talked to me.&rdquobut epstein persisted, and his familiarity with freezerpop packaging proved helpful in solving the problems with soysauce packets at the time they leaked and they were too flimsy. &ldquothe only difference is a freezer pop has a much longer bag,&rdquo epstein says.postrecession, many americans continue to eat at home, but now seek out highend condiments to replicate the restaurant experience.epstein&rsquos break came in the form of affordable air travel, which went mainstream in the 1970s. to serve the newly airborne hordes of families and businessmen, airlines began offering prepared foods onboard. epstein found his first major foothold as the primary provider of soy sauce for these inflight meals.cheap airfare also allowed epstein to travel the country in search of new customers. he was scouting at a time when chinese takeout joints were becoming as commonplace as nail salons and convenience stores in strip malls around the country. &ldquochinese business was growing at this time because china was not as businessfriendly,&rdquo he says. &ldquopeople were leaving china and coming into the united states to open a restaurant and cook. the industry was booming.&rdquohe soon built up a widespread network of customers, and kariout&rsquos products appeared in the chinese restaurants across the country. now, he estimates that kariout has a 50 percent market share. the company&rsquos soysauce packets remain ubiquitous&mdashepstein recalls finding kariout packets at a concession stand in rural iceland a couple years ago. &ldquowe&rsquove survived 50 years,&rdquo epstein says. &ldquoi never get sick of chinese food or soy sauce.&rdquo but has the american public gotten sick of soy sauce packets sometimes they squirt their contents in unintended directions, and they&rsquore fairly wasteful, often dispensing too much sauce, or not enough. but in the more than 50 years that they&rsquove been around, little has been done to change their design.reinventing a condiment package with decades of cultural inertia is difficult, but it has been done before. h.j. heinz company upgraded its traditional ketchup packets&mdashthe tearatthecorner annoyances that invariably produce messes and yield too little sauce&mdashby hiring an industrial design firm to think about alternate saucedelivery mechanisms. they came up with the dip & squeeze, a small plastic tub that can be opened fully from the side and dipped in, or opened partially from the top and squeezed out cleanly.can soysauce packets be made better too gary murphy thinks so. murphy, the founder and ceo of little soya, is an unlikely soysauce pioneer with a loud laugh. a texan, he has built up a business selling furniture and once worked as a legal courier in houston. even when murphy started working as a foodservices consultant, soy sauce was plain and ignorable&mdashjust another nuisance to deal with when eating latenight chinese takeout on the road.now, there&39s glutenfree soy sauce&mdashwhich is quite a departure from the fermented wheat paste of yore.his perspective changed when, in 2008, he was approached by jeffrey frederick, who helps oversee the food and beverages served at caesars palace in las vegas. frederick wasn&rsquot satisfied with the soy sauce being served at the casino&39s buffets&mdashhe deemed it too salty, too metallictasting, and lacking in the rich, savory dimension of flavor known as umami&mdashand its disposable packaging bothered him as well. when murphy, at frederick&39s request, sought out a more natural, authentic, and sustainable alternative, he found nothing. so he set out to make his own.on top of his packed work schedule, murphy went to grocery stores near and far, buying bottles of soy sauce to taste, sniff, and swish about. he&rsquod prowl aisles for hours&mdash&ldquopeople would get suspicious of me," he says&mdashand study the products&rsquo packaging and ingredients.what murphy found was that the market was concentrated among a few japanese brands, such as kikkoman, which all produced a similar brown liquid that has come to symbolize soy sauce in the u.s. murphy says that american soy sauce is sweeter than asian soy sauces, which leads to the metallic taste that many complain about. he says his sauce corrects this, and is glutenfree to boot. while this fact may play into american food trends, it&rsquos worth noting just how far a departure glutenfree soy sauce is from the fermented wheat paste of yore.but the most interesting feature of murphy&rsquos work for little soya is the packaging that frederick requested&mdashthe first meaningful improvement on the classic disposable soysauce packet. where the soysauce packet is straightforward and defined by right angles, little soya&rsquos packaging, which was modeled on existing packaging from other parts of the world, is quirky, rounded, and efficient. it is a small translucent plastic fish whose mouth puckers into a bright green cap, which can be screwed back on to save any unused sauce for later.the fish is not just a cute brand differentiator but also a means of avoiding waste. its top screws back on to save soy sauce for later&mdasha solution that murphy noticed had already caught on in korea, china, vietnam, thailand, and norway. little soya and its fish have seen a growth in popularity as the company has negotiated deals with gourmet homedelivery services, such as plated, which place a higher premium on aesthetics than the average chinese restaurant.the market presence of little soya&39s upscale, diettrendfriendly sauce plays into an industrywide rise in production of premium condiments. a report put out by the marketresearch firm euromonitor international last november stated that even as the economy has recovered, many americans still elect to eat at home, but now seek out highend sauces and condiments to replicate the experience of eating at a restaurant. sales of highpriced barbecue sauce, salad dressing, and soy sauce are seeing large gains as a result little soya, while still small, now brings in about 1 million in revenue per year.the cap proved useful in another, more unexpected context, too. after hearing that astronauts complained about the messiness of using traditional soysauce packets in space, murphy provided nasa with some of little soya&39s fish. while the fish might be the longawaited soysauce solution here on earth, mainstream soy sauce still isn&39t fully optimized for interstellar travel&mdashmurphy had to boost the flavors in the nasa batch because space turns people into lesssensitive tasters. 
