While not as ubiquitous as salt nor as common as soy sauce, fish sauce is becoming increasingly popular as a seasoning for a wide variety of dishes around the world. It is essential in Thai and Vietnamese dishes, less so but growing in Chinese cooking, and rising in popularity in those cuisines as prepared in Europe, America, and elsewhere. With many minerals and vitamins, fish sauce is much healthier than either of its largest competitors, salt and soy sauce.
The global market for fish sauce, according to a new report, could grow by about 4% a year this decade, from EUR15.7 billion in 2022 to EUR21.6 billion by 2030, further establishing itself as a necessary item for the kitchens and dining tables in homes everywhere. Global demand seems to be driven by growing affluence, household interest in healthy, home cooked dining, and consumer tastes and preferences for meals that might be less “boring” than usual in many societies and cultures. Despite its name (and its principal ingredient) fish sauce is not limited to seafood dishes but to a wide range of meat and vegetable preparations that may or may not include rice. It can be used as a cooking ingredient, or a condiment added to a prepared dish. It is produced worldwide from the Mediterranean, where anchovy is the main ingredient, to Cambodia, where it is based on freshwater shrimp, and many places and species in between.
One powerful constraint fish sauce producers face is consumer imagination, particularly in picturing how it is made. While it is true that one method in the past involved leaving fish in a jar to rot and dissolve, modern fish sauce results from safer, more sanitary processes for extracting liquids from fish. Rules for international trade and national quality controls, applied to sauce exported from southeast Asia, Mediterranean countries, or elsewhere, help calm consumers and make them more receptive to the product. Another challenge is that the most desirable fish sauce is made by traditional (but sanitary) methods, while most fish sauce is made by modern factory methods like other sauce or condiment manufacture. Traditional methods are labor-intensive, small-scale, and costly. This constraint is common in many food industries, however, and has resulted in an industry producing many varieties of fish sauce that now can be found everywhere from specialty shops to supermarket chains, and industrial-scale production for the HoReCa sector, all with sauces that differ in price and quality.
Global growth in this segment of the seafood industry is projected to be slow but sure thanks to the likelihood that any decline in consumption in restaurants in recessionary periods could be offset by rising consumption at home. One way or another, people will still want fish sauce.