Running a soy sauce company from across the world

Taking "working from home" to another level

Here’s the thing: it is incredibly disorienting running an American soy sauce company from across the world. My body and home and family are in Taiwan, but for the past year and half, my attention has been fixated entirely towards the States. Every day, I log online and check our orders and track our growing list of stockists, imagining bottles thousands upon thousands of miles away from me being distributed across shelves and households. It’s a very surreal form of spilt existence. Home in one place, attention and ambitions in another.

Yet in a way, this unusual arrangement isn’t all that new to me. My attention has always been somewhat split.

I started out as a food writer in the States, specializing in Taiwanese and Chinese cuisine. At a certain point, the cognitive dissonance wore on me (in a similar way that it is now). I was writing about a region I was not physically inhabiting, and specializing in cultures I was familiar with by way of heritage and travel. Trying to describe their foodways from a distance felt disingenuous and out of touch. So I packed my bags and moved to East Asia to even the scales: first backpacking through China, then stationed in Hong Kong, and now based in Taiwan.

Today, I’m doing the inverse: selling a Taiwanese product into the American market. The good news (or the depressing news, depending on how you look at it) is that so much of marketing now happens online, on apps where presence is flattened into output. You do not need to be a resident of a place to specialize in it.

And so far, this arrangement has mostly worked. I’ve led marketing for HEYDOH since the beginning, though my co-founder Christine has had to step in for the parts that require a body on the ground.

The harder part has been the community-building, which is an essential part of running a modern CPG startup.

Christine & friends at a demo in NYC. Me not pictured because I’ve been in Taiwan the whole time and have never actually even seen our sauce on shelves yet!

In 2026, it is no longer enough to make a good product and get it onto the shelves. To make a real splash in our digital-first world, brands are now encouraged to stage small worlds around themselves: pop-ups, tastings, dinners, “activations” (lol!). Maybe it’s a backlash to all the digital trash we’re peddled every day. Maybe people are simply hungry to feel something real?

My team has been incredibly understanding about my lack of physical presence in the States. I’m a mom to a toddler and a newborn, and the whole reason I started this company was to create a relatively steady career path for myself outside of the ever-morphing and crumbling industry that is freelance journalism.

Taiwan with its affordability and low childcare expenses provides me the luxury of time. Which to me, is far more valuable than a six-figure pay check. I don’t need to be a slave to the rhythms of corporate America to live a comfortable life here. I can pursue projects that I genuinely enjoy, despite their subpar financial payoff. Most importantly, I have plenty of time to spend with my kids.

Unfortunately, there are parts of building a food brand from scratch that cannot be done through a screen and so I’m planning to be the States more next year for buyer meetings, trade shows, and the occasional pop-up.

But for now, this is the shape of my work: building something deeply rooted in Taiwan, where I live now, for an American market where I once lived, from a life suspended somewhere in between.

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Speaking of pop-ups, HEYDOH is throwing its first pop-up tomorrow in Brooklyn. To make the food, I’ve enlisted my friend Jocelyn Ueng, a Taiwanese American chef with a résumé that runs through The French Laundry, Satoyama Jujo, and most recently, Noma. She’s currently developing her own restaurant in the Hudson Valley, slated for 2027.

The menu is a tight ensemble of soy-simmered classics: kelp, jammy eggs, tofu, pork belly, and rice. Everything is braised with HEYDOH Classic Soy Sauce and finished with HEYDOH Silky Soy Sauce.

If you’re free, come on by. We’ll be having a raffle. Tickets are $16 online, $18 at the door. I won’t be there (obviously), but my charming co-founder Christine will.

And if you haven’t tried braising with HEYDOH Classic Soy Sauce yet, consider this your nudge. This is a recipe I developed for Christine to use on the demo circuit: something simple enough to prep ahead and serve to customers, but flavorful enough to show off the deep nuance of Classic. It also needed to be a dish she could hand someone on the spot—practical but persuasive after one bite.

Soy Braised Eggs

INGREDIENTS
4 to 6 eggs
1/3 cup HEYDOH Classic Soy Sauce
1 1/2 cups water
1 tablespoon Taiwanese rice wine or cooking sake
1 tablespoon granulated white sugar
2 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
2 scallions, trimmed

DIRECTIONS

Prepare at least 8 hours ahead of time.

Fill a small pot with water and bring to a rolling boil over high heat. Gently add in the eggs and cook for 9 minutes. Remove from heat.

Rinse under running water and peel the eggs. Set aside.

In a small pot, add all the other ingredients and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Stir until the sugar completely melts.

Turn off the heat. Add in the peeled eggs.

Let them cool to room temperature, then transfer to a container and store overnight to marinate or at least 8 hours in the refrigerator.

Take the eggs out and cut in half or to your liking to serve.