The scandal of the vanishing soy sauce...
Some time ago, Bovril mysteriously vanished from the shelves as has ordinary plum jam, though Bovril returned. Now, for some reason, Kikkoman Soy Sauce has bitten the dust too.
Kikkoman is arguably the best of the mass-market soy sauces (even sleb chefs on TV use the stuff - I think it goes beyond product placement, with so many using it), but can I buy it? Can I buggery.
Both Sainsbury’s and Tesco have dumped
it in favour of the Sanchi brand. Their Shoyu (soy sauce), however, while
smelling great, tastes of sod all. I even tipped a bottle into a small pan
and reduced it by a third, to see if that helped, but no. A poor flavour,
concentrated, is still a poor flavour, just a stronger one.
So where has Kikkoman gone? It’s always been a big seller, so I find
it hard to believe that supermarkets have dumped its conical bottle in favour
of the more shelf-friendly Sanchi, but I can’t think of any other reason.
I haven’t checked its wider availability, but the fact that both Sainsbury’s and Tesco have replaced Kikkoman with Sanchi seems strange. If one had stopped selling Kikkoman, I’d have expected the other to continue, as they would then boost their sales of the product (even the huge Amoy brand has been sidelined by Sanchi products at the moment).
I can only suppose that Sanchi’s distributors may have made the two supermarkets (and others too?), a very profitable deal to grossly over-promote their product to the detriment of customer choice.
Terrific…
Mystery solved:- The Kikkoman
website says this:-
We know that some of our loyal fans are having trouble finding Kikkoman.
Unfortunately, we have been unable to agree fair trading terms with a number
of supermarkets and as a result they have decided to stop selling our soy
sauce.
You can, though, still buy it at Waitrose, the Co-op and Somerfield.
And I don't think that scandal is too harsh a word, either. The supermarkets appear to have closed ranks in at attempt to force Kikkoman into submission. That has all the indications of a price-fixing cartel, and that is illegal.
If you are as pissed off as I am about this, you can voice your displeasure on Kikkoman's website here. You can tell Sainsbury's what you think of them here (ignore the word furniture in that link, it's irrelevant), but Tesco appear to have no means of being contacted by email these days (if you have an email address, please let me know, I'll post it here). Probably wouldn't do much good anyway; I bitched at them for years about staff parking in the disabled car park at my local store (Bidston Moss, Wirral), which accomplished nothing.