The Best Brand Of Soy Sauce According To 57% Of People

If you're under the misconception that you should only be grabbing that bottle of soy sauce when you're whipping up Asian cuisine, you may need a refresher on exactly how useful the staple ingredient can be in your kitchen. As Christopher Kimball's Milk Street explains, it can be a fantastic, slightly more complex substitution for regular salt in just about any dish. Or, as Kikkoman suggests, incorporate it in salad dressings or marinades to really give whatever you're making a burst of that umami flavor.

It's not even a question that you need to have a bottle of soy sauce available in your kitchen for your culinary adventures. However, anyone who has visited the section of their grocery store where the soy sauce is knows that there's typically a handful of brands, and all the bottles look to be containing nearly the same product. Sure, there are some variances, with light or low-sodium soy sauce options available from some brands, and you may avoid the store brand ones to go for actual name brands, thinking they'll be a higher-quality product. However, amongst all those brands, which bottle should you get?

Mashed surveyed 614 consumers in the U.S. to get the scoop on what brand they deemed the best soy sauce — and it was a landslide, with one particular company receiving the vast majority of the votes.

The 614 survey respondents were unanimous in proclaiming that Kikkoman was the best brand of soy sauce, with 57% saying it was their preferred brand. The company itself has quite the history — as per the Kikkoman USA website, the brand started as a family-run business back in the mid-1600s, and has been in North America since 1957. And, the data aligns with what the survey respondents expressed, as Kikkoman is also the #1 soy sauce in the United States based on sales data from November 2020 to November 2021.

If your store happens to be out of Kikkoman (perhaps because everyone else snatched a bottle or two of the brand), survey respondents flagged La Choy as the second best brand, as it received 25.74% of the votes. Several other brands that you may recognize were nearly tied for the lower positions, with Lee Kum Kee, Kimlan, and San J coming in at 6.19%, 4.56%, and 3.42% of the survey votes. The one brand that the fewest survey respondents flagged as their favorite was Pearl River Bridge, which only received 3.09% of votes.

So, if you're waffling between which bottle of soy sauce to buy, Kikkoman is a solid first choice based on both survey data and sales data. As a Reddit user wrote in a thread on the product, "Kikkoman is to soy sauce in Japan what Heinz is to ketchup in America" — a total classic.