A Made in Hong Kong label carries a certain weight, because it means the sauce was made where the method was learned, not shipped off to a cheaper line that copied the label. At Ip Shing Kee every bottle is brewed in our own facilities, where we can watch the fermentation the way we have since 1946 and step in if a batch is off. We are not just a manufacturer; we cook with this stuff and we know what it should do on a plate.

Being good at Cantonese food means respecting time more than novelty. Our factory still sun-dries the way it always did, because the deep savoury note of a proper sauce cannot be forced by heat or chemicals without losing the roundness that makes it work with plain rice. We would rather the sauce lift the natural sweetness of your ingredients than bury it under a louder flavour.

That idea has guided us for nearly eighty years, in family kitchens and restaurant pass windows alike, and it is why chefs and home cooks end up buying the same bottle. The standards do not change just because the buyer does.

As we settle into the UK market we are bringing that same habit with us rather than a watered-down version for export. For the diaspora our name is a shortcut back to flavours they grew up with, and we do not take that lightly. Pick up a Made in Hong Kong bottle and cook with it a while; you will see why we have stuck to the old way when cheaper ones were available.

There is a temptation, when you sell overseas, to cut corners so the price looks better on the shelf. We have said no to that more than once. The Hong Kong name means something because the work happens here, and moving it elsewhere would change the thing people came for. What you taste in the bottle is the same as what leaves our Yuen Long line, with no export edition cut to a lower recipe.