Soya sauce

Description of product

Soya sauce (shoyu, tamari) is the best-known fermented soya bean product and is used to season and improve food. The ingredients are soya beans, roasted wheat or rice, salt and water. The salt content (17–19%) is relatively high.

The traditional method of production lasts at least one year. The nowadays normal chemical or enzymatic hydrolysis of the soya protein shortens this production time to a few days.

• See also: tofu, soya milk, miso

Possible application of gene technology

Soya beans as primary product:

• Soya beans: Internationally traded primary product soya stems in general completely or in part from genetically modified plants. GM-soya beans are grown on a large scale in the USA, Argentina and Brazil. Each year the EU imports over 30 million tons of soya and soya primary products from these countries.
• Some food companies process exclusively conventional soya raw material. However, it is not technically possible to keep a strict separation of conventional and GM-soya beans through all the processing steps. Therefore, even raw materials that are declared as "free of gene technology" contain a small amount (possibly up to 0.9%) of genetically modified material.
• Traditional soya products such as soya milk are generally produced not from mass-produced soya but from soya beans with special attributes. These soya beans are cultivated and handled separately. Therefore, these products do not contain any appreciable amount of GM-soya beans.

Enzym: protease

• Proteases can be produced using the help of genetically modified microorganisms.

Applications of gene technology are possible in the following ingredients that commonly are found in the soya sauce. However, the extent to which a particular product is affected by these possibilities cannot be stated with certainty:

• Flavour enhancer: glutamate
• Acidifying agent: citric acid

Labelling in the EU: If the soya sauce has been produced from GM-soya beans, then it must be labelled as such.

Enzymes and their method of production do not generally appear on the list of ingredients.