This cute soy sauce pouch could get rid of plastic packets for good

Single-use soy sauce packets for sushi take-out orders are now a whole lot more sustainable, thanks to a redesign that doesn’t use any plastic.

While sushi lovers in the U.S. are used to getting their to-go soy sauce in rectangular packets like they do their ketchup and mustard, soy sauce in Australia often comes in small plastic fish bottles with a screw top.

This typical mini fish-shaped bottle is cute, for sure, but the user is done with it in a few minutes. Its packaging lasts much, much longer by comparison, since plastics can take as long as 500 years to break down. Does the user experience really require packaging that lasts that long?

The Holy Carp soy sauce dropper, now available for preorder, is a plastic-free and fully compostable alternative that solves this dilemma. The kraft-brown-colored dropper is made from bagasse pulp (plant residue), and it comes in two pieces that snap together. The lid, which is shaped like a fish, decomposes in four to six weeks, not centuries.

Rather than a cap, the Holy Carp dropper dispenses sauce out of an opening under the fish’s eye, and restaurants fill them in-house. The dropper can hold sauce for 48 hours—probably longer than you’d want to keep your take-out sushi in the fridge anyway.

The Holy Carp dropper was designed by Heliograf, an Australian design studio, with Vert Industrial Design House, and made in consultation with sushi restaurants. Since customers usually grab a handful of those plastic fish-shaped bottles with their take-out order, the designers made their compostable version of the fish dropper bigger, with 12 milliliters of capacity.

The studios worked together in 2020, on Light Soy, a compostable fish-dropper lamp, to draw attention to single-use plastic waste, but with the Holy Carp, they’ve set their sights higher.

You just need one fish lamp for your room, but you need soy sauce every time you get sushi. And that adds up to a lot of plastic: Heliograf estimates that somewhere between 8 billion and 12 billion fish bottles have been used since 1950.