Singapore's new tofu wine

A new sustainable foods industry has sprung up in Singapore. Companies are producing everything from lab-grown seafood to dumplings made from tropical fruit rather than pork. The latest addition to these environmentally friendly products is a soy wine named 'Sachi'.

Produced using wastewater that's a byproduct of tofu production, Sachi was developed by a team of food scientists at the National University of Singapore. The world's first alcoholic beverage made from soy whey went to market last year. Start-up SinFooTech sells the wine, which retails for $28 a half litre.

Felicia Ng, business development manager of SinFooTech, sees it as a noble enterprise.

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."

At their distillery, SinFooTech add brewer's yeast and sugar to the liquid, which is then left to ferment for two to four weeks. The main limitation on production is time, as soy whey can quickly turn sour. This is a challenge for operations manager Fauzi Ismail.

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."

Producing between 1,000 and 2,000 litres of soy wine a month, SinFooTech's reusing less than one percent of the wastewater from the tofu factory. This leaves huge room for scaling production if it proves popular with consumers.

At the Sachi launch event, food and wine critics were given the opportunity to taste the new product.

Dannon Har writes for Spill Magazine.

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."

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