The soy sauce that takes nine months

The slow, expensive thing you've been carrying as a cost has quietly become the only thing nobody can copy.

There is a bottle of soy sauce in your kitchen door. It cost about three dollars.

There's another one, made in Jurong. It costs $36.90.

Same beans. Same salt. Same water.

The difference is time.

At the Nanyang Sauce brewery: a few hundred clay vats. A hundred litres each. They sit under the sun.

Soybeans go in with salt and water.

Then nothing happens, slowly, for most of a year.

Industrial soy sauce is made with hydrochloric acid. A day. Two weeks at the outside.

Forty times faster.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

Those nine months nearly killed the family that owned them.

Tan Tiong How arrived from Fujian in 1942.

He brought two things. His grandmother's recipe. And a packet of mould.

By 1951 he was selling door to door. Off a tricycle. By 1959 he had a factory.

He was not unusual. Singapore had over seventy soy sauce businesses then.

Fewer than ten are left.

He died in 1996. A heart attack. No warning.

And no will.

Six children, holding a factory. His eldest daughter took it on.

"When he left, he left a huge gap," she said. "My uncles were the workers, they were not the entrepreneurs."

She made sure her son stayed away.

"You can make money from pen and paper," she told him. "If you got a degree, why come back and do all this kind of back breaking coolie work?"

So Ken Koh didn't come back. Not for twenty years.

Then, around 2017, he opened the books.

The company was losing money.

The sauce wasn't the problem.

"We were stuck," he said. "The price of the product had to stay the same... but the cost of ingredients was going up and margins were going down."

Nine months of land, labour, vats and sun. Priced against something made in a day.

A regional rival made sixty thousand bottles a day.

"That's probably our production capacity for a year," Ken said.

So he told the family. Sell it premium. Aged. Hand-brewed. Priced like it.

They said no.

An uncle put a number on it. "You cannot sell one bottle for more than $10!"

Here's what Ken changed about the sauce.

Nothing.

Go look at the bottle in your kitchen door. Then ask what you make that takes nine months — and who told you what it was worth.