Who Makes The Little Packets of Soy Sauce in Chinese Takeout?

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We tend to associate soy sauce with Chinese food first, and with Asian food second. When you order Chinese takeout in the United States, you usually get a handful of little plastic packets of a black, salty liquid tossed into the bottom of your bag. If you have any of those saved takeout packets sitting in a kitchen drawer right now, take a close look at the fine print on the plastic. More likely than not, you will find they are manufactured by the Kari-Out Co. Based in New Jersey and founded in the late 1960s by Howard Epstein, Kari-Out is the undisputed giant of “small-unit packaging” for the American takeout industry. But while millions of consumers squeeze these packets over their fried rice every day, it raises a glaring culinary question: Is the sauce inside those Kari-Out packets actually real soy sauce?

The Truth About the Soy Sauce Packets

The short answer is that the black liquid in those little soy sauce packets from Kari-Out is not real soy sauce. Well known brands like Kikkoman Soy Sauce are naturally brewed, fermented, and aged over several months or even years from real soy beans. Kari-Out’s packet ingredients tell a completely different story: “water, salt, hydrolyzed soy and corn protein, caramel color, 0.1% sodium benzoate.”

Instead of a traditional fermented sauce, these packets contain what food scientists classify as “chemical soy sauce,” or soy sauce-flavored water. The intense, salty umami flavor is generated through acid hydrolysis, where vegetable proteins are rapidly broken down with hydrochloric acid. This industrial shortcut explains why the packets are incredibly cheap to manufacture, allowing restaurants to hand them out by the hundreds without denting their profit margins. On the other hand, real soy sauce can take months or even years to produce.

Is there a difference between soy & soya sauce? Discover the origin of the word soy, how a 1600s spelling slip named the bean & the truth behind soy boy myths. Read More: Origin of the Word Soy in Soy Sauce: The Surprising Source

The Legal Battle Over “Real” Soy Sauce Labeling

Kikkoman, the most well-known brand of soy sauce in America, does provide soy sauce in takeout packets and they have reasons to despise the packets we usually get with our takeout. Kikkoman, who has long touted its “naturally brewed soy sauce…still made just as it was more than 300 years ago…slowly fermented and aged for full flavor like a fine wine” went to battle along with Japanese officials with the chemical soy sauce makers and asked the United Nation’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international food regulation forum, to not allow the non-brewed soy sauces to be called soy sauce.

Specifically, they submitted that soy sauce should be classified into four types: long-term brewed, short-term brewed, non brewed, and mixed.

The International Hydrolyzed Food Council, a powerful trade group, and the USDA thought this to be discriminatory, saying that “These products have been manufactured here and around the world for decades and sold as soy sauce, and there have been no complaints from consumers.”

A U.S. delegate to the commission used a similar non-defense, saying “All we want is for the standard for soy sauces to be all-inclusive. We have people who make naturally brewed and hydrolyzed. We just have to make sure the product is safe and compatible, that’s all.” As of today, there is still no labeling distinction between brewed and non-brewed soy sauce.

The Soy Sauce Standard of Identity Hypocrisy

The refusal to legally distinguish between slow-fermented condiments and raw industrial chemicals highlights a glaring inconsistency in Western food regulation. Governments routinely enforce incredibly rigid “standards of identity” to protect historical, agricultural traditions from cheap imitations when it suits them.

Take the dairy industry as a prime example. Under strict FDA regulations, so-called American cheese, despite being a ubiquitous staple of domestic food culture for over a century, cannot legally be labeled simply as “cheese.” Because it is emulsified with milk proteins and vegetable oils, the law forces manufacturers to print “Pasteurized Process Cheese Food” on the packaging. The state actively protects the word cheese to ensure consumers aren’t misled into confusing a highly processed cheese product with a traditionally curdled and aged dairy product.

Yet, when an international conglomerate generates a black, salty liquid in a matter of hours using hydrochloric acid and corn protein, the regulators treat the word “soy sauce” as all-inclusive. The argument that a product should escape a strict standard of identity simply because “it has been manufactured for decades without consumer complaint” is a defensive double standard. It exposes a system where western culinary traditions are legally guarded, while centuries-old Asian fermentations are treated as generic, catch-all terms for cheap industrial substitutes.

The American Soy Sauce Paradox

When so many of us save up dozens of little packets of fake soy sauce to actually use in our cooking, it’s no wonder we know so little about it. The vast majority of consumers associate these little plastic packets and soy sauce in general exclusively with Chinese cuisine, almost all the authentic, high-volume soy sauce sold in Western grocery stores is actually Japanese.

Kikkoman, the undisputed leading brand dominating American supermarket shelves, is a Japanese style sauce (shoyu). Japanese soy sauces are traditionally brewed using an equal 50:50 ratio of soybeans to wheat, yielding a sweeter, more aromatic, and lighter flavor. Traditional Chinese soy sauces, by contrast, are brewed predominantly or entirely with soybeans, resulting in a much deeper, saltier, and more robust flavor profile specifically suited for high-heat wok cooking.

Because the average consumer has never directly compared a chemical packet against a traditionally brewed bottle, millions of people remain entirely unaware of what authentic soy sauce is supposed to taste like. Skipping the packets for real soy sauce will completely transform your cooking. For a lighter, sweeter Japanese profile, stick with an authentic brewed shoyu. For traditional, deep Chinese savory profiles, bypass the grocery store and visit an Asian market or shop online for an authentic fermented brand like Pearl River Bridge, Lee Kum Kee, or Koon Chun.