Instantly recognisable and familiar to everyone, the classic soy sauce bottle is, or has been in everyone’s kitchen cupboard at sometime or another.
A simple study of form and function that works together, a perfect form that is both elegant and practical. The Table Type Soy Sauce Bottle is a great example of a creative modernist design that owes much to Raymond Loewy’s streamlined style.
As a form, the bottle designed by Kenji Ekuan is reassuringly familiar yet mildly exotic. The design was conceived in 1960 and was an immediate success. The design has practical and sturdy elements, such as a wide base for stability and the flowing tapering form suggests a teardrop and gives the bottle a soft organic shape. However this is sharply contrasted by the iconic red flat-topped cap, which has an ingenious double opening ensuring against drips when pouring.
It took three years for Ekuan and his team to arrive at the dispenser’s transparent teardrop shape. More than 100 prototypes were tested in the making of its innovative, dripless spout (based on a teapot’s, but inverted). The design proved to be an ideal ambassador. With its imperial red cap and industrial materials (glass and plastic), it helped timeless Japanese design values - elegance, simplicity and supreme functionality - infiltrate kitchens around the world.
Ekuan wanted a design that could be placed directly on the table and would make elegant centrepiece. Originally the Kikkoman Soy Sauce bottle was intended to be part of a table-top condiment set, but this never happened.
The successful design is made from dishwasher safe glass, it’s refillable and virtually unbreakable - an item intended to keep, re-use and enjoy.
More than 300 million dispensers have been sold, in more than 70 countries. In 2007, to mark its 50th year in the United States, Kikkoman issued a gold-capped version, and the company has also given souvenir bottles, bearing the image of Mickey Mouse, to groups of schoolchildren visiting the factory. But Ekuan’s original design persists.The Kikkoman Soy Sauce bottle may be just a sauce bottle but it shows that simple design principles mixed with functionality can have a longevity and become true design classics, everything has been considered even it’s re-use, quite futuristic thinking in the 1960’s and it still looks as contemporary and modern as it did when it launched 50 years ago.
Frazer Morgan
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