Soy Sauce Bottles Have Double The Spout To, Surprisingly, Stop Messy Spills
By Mikelle Leow, 13 Apr 2022
Photo 91730320 © Natalia Oskanova | Dreamstime.com
With the burst of umami it provides, soy sauce would be what many foodies call a revelation. In the world of design, however, aficionados are looking to the bottle.
Specifically, the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle. The elegant teardrop-shaped container with an imperial red cap holds a design secret that anyone prone to accidents would appreciate. It has two spouts—one for pouring, and the other to slow down the flow of sauce.
You would think that having two openings means double the soy sauce and more spillage. On the contrary, as recently uncovered by My Recipes, you could use one of the holes for when heavy pours are needed—say, while cooking. You could then switch to dispensing soy sauce in drops by holding your finger over the top hole and pouring the sauce through the other opening, so it can be served as a condiment.
Kikkoman confirms this detail on its website, dubbing the feature as a “control hole.” The company also cites a video by vegan food YouTube channel BOSH! which demonstrates this clever design.
The bottle was dreamed up by Japanese industrial designer Kenji Ekuan and his team, who went through over 100 prototypes before landing on the container with the drip-free spout, the New York Times reported in a 2012 profile. “Design is a source of life enhancement,” Ekuan would say.
The bottle draws from the teapot, but the designers inverted its workings.
You could say this was an outpouring of ingenuity.
[via My Recipes, Kikkoman, The New York Times, cover photo 91730320 © Natalia Oskanova | Dreamstime.com]