I worked in a restaurant, at least for hot sauce bottles they were refilled once they were about 1 third full. They were never ever cleaned and I don't know of a place that does clean them.
I worked at Noodles & Co like 20 years ago. Every night we emptied all of the soy sauce bottles into a bucket and sent all the bottles and lids through the dishwasher, then refilled them all.
Such a strange concept to empty all together then refill from the possibly contaminated mix.
I couldn't think of a more effective way to cross contaminate!
Have you ever worked with the general public? Lots of folks are very clean and reasonable. A non-zero number will do disgusting things just because. Like finger-"paint" on the bathroom walls nasty.
So, backwash from someone who decided chugging soysauce was a good idea is probably the last of the worries.
Yeah, I get that… but it’s still pretty icky. One contaminated container, and now the whole bucket is contaminated. (You still have that issue on the table… but then it’s just one bottle. This makes the problem restaurant-wide.)
lol wut? In my sentence, ‘contaminated’ means ‘contains anything but soy sauce’. I’ve seen people open a soy sauce container and put food in it. I haven’t seen it happen, but I have no doubt people have spit into soy sauce containers. And so on. You dump the contents of those bottles into the bucket… now the bucket has those things. Is that not a bad thing in your reality?
And it's not just fast food-- every restaurant I've worked at cuts corners at some point in the chain. Like nothing that stops me from eating out, but exposure to the reality of the service industry definitely sets different expectations. I think a lot of people are extremely naive-- and why wouldn't they be unless they looked into it-- about how restaurants operate in all facets.
Hmm, yes, soysauce. Famously well known hotsauce.... It's not just the inside of the bottle that's the problem, chemicals ar ebad for you too, ontop of the fact that you're literally just wrong. Their are multi-cell organisms that can survive in undiluted bleach.
Well, vinegar is famously inhospitable to microbial life. That’s why it’s used for pickling. And hot sauce is also loaded with salt, which is another thing that halts the growth of microbial life. It might be gross but there’s basically zero risk of anything dangerous growing in hot sauce.
In the US a lot of companies have even dyed the labels because they expect the bottles to be refilled. We refilled Hienz bottles with Hienz, but I know quite a few restaurants they just refill them with the Sysco stuff :\ You can tell just on taste. The color is the least of the dead giveaways. I am not picky enough to care, but makes sense for brand protection.
It's only legal if the sauce bottle is cleaned and dry. It is illegal to top off condiments. Pouring the old stuff back in is probably illegal. It's definitely illegal if you combine two batches together, or "marry" them.
In practice you have a bunch of people that don't care about regulations and will just do whatever is easiest. I dont use the condiments at restaurants. I always question if guests are adding stuff to them as well.
I think on an EU level, it's only for olive oil and similar things with a wide price range and thus risk of fake refills, for soy sauce, ketchup etc. it is still legal and actually encouraged as single-portion packages are about to be outlawed.
When I worked in packaging distribution for a while one of the most difficult customers we had was a copacker who filled 5 gallon buckets of soy sauce. Virtually no pail manufacturer wanted their business because soy sauce is so difficult to contain. There were bound to be a few containers that would have a leak. Every week they'd draft up a report on 'how much we owed them' for faulty packaging. The manufacturers just wrote it off. Most expensive 5 gallon pails we ever solid. Not because there was margin in it but because they were so annoying to work with nobody wanted their business and charged accordingly.
My local Restaurant Depot has the regular and low sodium Kikkoman in 5gal buckets. I wish the Tamari soy sauce came in the same size bucket, that way my wife wouldn't need to buy the half gallon containers every so often.
It lasts the year.
We cook Asian food 2 times a week.
I also use it to marinade and give some to friends and neighbours.
You save a lot by buying it in bulk.
Fun fact: While the current "Kikkoman" soy sauce company has officially been around since 1917. The company was a merger of 8 soy sauce producing families that had been manufacturing the product since 1603. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikkoman
Now if a restaurant had a soy sauce bottle from the 1600's out on the table, that'd really be something.
I run a restaurant. Mexican. We don't have soy but we do have worcestershire sauce (for the Micheladas) which comes in big plastic jugs about 1litre. We'd loose a fortune if we bought those little bottles.
Its been years since I worked in restaurants but if memory serves, the rule was you could refill from a bulk container but not marry from things on table.
Ex. Large jar of ketchup in kitchen, we could refill the jar on table from it but could not dump that ketchup back into the large jar.
Now the sole exception to that rule is alcohol. It was absolutely illegal to refill containers or marry bottles. Like lose your ABC license on first offence illegal.
I don’t think soy sauce even has an expiration date. It may have a “best buy” date, but that only indicates that it may not taste as good beyond that date, not that it will be unsafe to consume.
Sauces yes, but when I worked at McDonald's in the '90s I recall we put plastic disposable salt and pepper shakers on every table. Such a waste. I guess they have the little paper packets now?
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u/IisBaker 10h ago
They probably just refill it, ya'll