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A new use for soy - 27th May 2022

Singapore is making lots of new foods. It's growing seafood in laboratories. It's making dumplings from tropical fruit. Now, it's making a wine from soya. Its name is 'Sachi'.

The wine uses water from tofu production. It's the world's first soy alcohol. Scientists from the National University of Singapore made the new wine.

A new company, SinFooTech, started selling Sachi last year. One half litre bottle costs $28.

Felicia Ng works for SinFooTech.

Felicia Ng: "At SinFooTech we wanted to valorise food waste – to actually upcycle all this unuse, under-utilised liquid waste. So, we turned it into something that is similar to wine, so we call it soya wine."

They add sugar and yeast to the water. Then they wait for two to four weeks.

But the water goes bad quickly. Fauzi Ismail says they have to work fast.

Fauzi Ismail: "So basically we have a very short period of time before the liquid itself turn sour and bad. So that is the major limitation we have. So it's advisable to do it between two to three hours before the product go, turn bad."

SinFooTech makes 2,000 litres of soy wine every month. This uses one percent of the tofu water. They could make a lot more.

Wine experts tasted the new product. They said it had a special flavour. Dannon Har wants to try it again.

Dannon Har: "I think that if people expect wine from this, it's not what they're going to get. I think it's something that is of its own and people should drink it – they are thinking that way.

"I haven't had much experience with it. I would definitely drink more of it, if that’s – answers the question. But it's still not my first drink of choice for sure."