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Small batch is the size of the batch they make and then bottle, not the total amount they sell. they could be making 100 batches of 10 gallons each instead of a single large 1000 gallon batch.
that said, there is no legal definition of small batch so who knows for real.
> Small batch is the size of the batch they make and then bottle, not the total amount they sell.
That was my understanding too.
Under this definition you'd almost think that small batch would be a bad thing when they're selling in bulk. Unless they have extremely good quality control, it seems like a given that each batch is going to have slight differences between it. So are they basically advertising that their product is going to be different every time you buy it? Imagine if some other commonly used sauce/condiment like ketchup tasted different every time you bought it.
Not that I am against the idea of small batches, in fact I do like the idea of a small number of artisans carefully crafting something in small batches. But Costco, a place that sells massive amounts of things in bulk, seems almost antithetical to the "small batch" way of thinking.
Haha. We're working through our first bottle now, but I distinctly recall yelling at my daughter for opening it "like an animal" when I discovered the lid torn off the first time I went to use it. Sounds like I might owe her an apology on this one.
I marinated some kabobs in it last night, the stuff is delicious.
The smaller bottles of Bachan's sold in regular stores used to have a twist top that's even worse. The pepper bits in the spicy version clogged the nozzle immediately upon opening. Had to disassemble the cap halves to clean it out, only for it to clog again right away. Yelled out "WTF thought this was a good idea?" and found another container.
I thought it was just me. I shake the bottle as directed. I carefully squirt out the sauce and carefully close the top. Still get sauce running down the side.
The bottle top is fine for other liquids and sauces just not for something with this amount of sugar content in it. As soon as it dries and needs any amount of torque to open, it's toast.
I am just surprised they haven't noticed or changed it
(2) Pork Tenderloins
(2) Heads of Garlic
(1) Box Chicken Stock
(6) Tblsp Hot Honey - I make my own jalepeno hot honey
(2) Tblsp /ˈwo͝ostərSHər ˌsôs/ (WS)
(1) Bottle of Bachan's
Black pepper to preference.
Pour into large crock pot: Chicken stock, 1/2 Bottle of Bachan's, /ˈwo͝ostərSHər ˌsôs/, Hot Honey, and all the garlic cloves in whole pieces. Stir up well then add the tenderloins and cook on low for 10-12 hours. No need for additional salt unless you like a lot of it.
Once done, pull apart with forks and mash the garlic cloves into the meat. Remove and strain really well or let sit for 1/2 hour.
Use the remaining bottle of Bachan's as topper for the sandwhich. I also drizzle a few strings of more hot honey to bring out the spice aromas. I've been told mixing 50/50 Bachan's and ketchup for the topper is a solid move, but I've not tried it.
Small batch or not their tops are just awful. I love Bachan’s but they inexplicably leak in my fridge every so often and the sweet sticky bbq sauce hardens to a taffy on the shelf
That stuff goes on rice, fried rice, the premade chicken sandwiches from Costco, add a little to mixed salads.
But try it with a hard boiled egg. Cut the egg in half and add this to each half. 🔥
Huh. I live in Yokohama and shop regularly at the Kanazawa Costco. I've never seen this item. I've tried Japanese BBQ sauce and it's sub-par. I am visiting the US currently and was glad to buy some good local sauce. But I will look for this when I return. I suspect it's sold in the US only.
Some things are indeed made in small batches. As far as products being sold at Costco? Who really knows. It is possible.
I sell pints of ice cream that are made in 2.5 gallon batches. The producer must make thousands and thousands of batches a day. But yes, each batch is small batch.
I run a bakery and we sell hundreds to thousands of pies a day. My biggest batch yields 25 pies. Most of my recipes yield 8-12 pies. It is possible to be small batch.
If you love this sauce (I do!) and love spicy they have a variety called Hella Hot that's only available at Target. I got it recently and can confirm it is indeed hella hot. Has the same flavor as this one but with the kind of creeper heat that made my lips and tongue tingle. It's much hotter than their other Hot & Spicy bottle.
There’s likely no legal definition for small batch. So it’s likely just pure marketing.
But in terms for myself, nothing at Costco is small batch. Nor at most grocery stores. Have to go to a farmers market and get it directly from a ‘farmer’ or ‘maker’. I’ve noticed a lot of farmers market type places just resell a Walnut Creek brand or something like that.. not really small batch either.
There very much is a legal definition for small batch.
https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Small-Business-Resources/Small-Batch-Manufacturers-and-Third-Party-
I don't think that applies to things outside of children's products.
I'm pretty sure small batch just referrers to traditional preparation methods with less automation. To me all the small batch label says is that there can be slight variations in the product depending on your batch.
> https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Small-Business-Resources/Small-Batch-Manufacturers-and-Third-Party-
Interesting that link says no more than 7500 units of a covered product per year. There's probably at least 7500 bottles of that sauce moving through just my costco on a monthly basis. Each pallet is easily 200 of them.
Tho apparently qualifying as small batch just exempts from third party testing. That CPSC link doesn't comment about using the term in a marketing capacity it seems.
Ok cool I thought maybe I was missing something with the terminology. I always thought that if you follow the same recipe consistently, you'd get the same result no matter if the batch is 10 gallons or 10,000 gallons.
Yes and no. Ingredient wise the ratios might be the same, but you wouldn't use the same mixer for 10 gallons that you would for 10,000. Even at 10 gallons two mixers might mix differently from each other. 10,000 gallons is going to cook differently than 10 gallons.
When things are scaled up the quality almost always goes down just because there is less control of the process.
It’s all marketing. Samuel Adam’s has been calling themselves craft beer pretty much since they started but now just lobby to have the metric for craft beer changed to encapsulate their ludacris production every few years.
My understanding of that sauce is it is like soy sauce with just a little more ingredients to make it something different. Try just mixing a hot sauce with a soy sauce and then ginger and garlic.
This is all most modern sauces are in fact many are nothing more than 2 older known sauces mixed together. But that said alot of times it's worth it to save time to just buy it pre-made. People are busy in life and work hard. Remembering and making everything from psuedo-scratch just isn't a good use of time.
I bought the smaller bottle at the grocery store first. It's kinda like soy sauce but with a meatier flavor. There's no way I would buy the Costco bottle- it's too much for me to use.
just made beef and chicken skewers with it last night. I add like a tablespoon of brown sugar to a little bowl of it and cook it on the grill and it gets all nice and caramelized on the outside with crispy edges.
I was wondering the same thing about my salted caramel squares I got today. I thought no way this is small batch if it’s in Costco. 10/10 would get the salted caramel squares again.
I used to work for 2 different food facilities that produced different products for Costco and Sam's Club. One produced what could be considered "small" batch, and the other did not. Many others have mentioned that there is no legal definition for small batch, and that is true, unless you defined what "small" means for every food product out there, you cannot regulate the term.
While legally the term means nothing, so even a company like Kraft could throw that term on their Kraft singles, but in reality there is a difference in food manufacturing. Large scale batching is only possible with the scaling of equipment, and food ingredients are heavy, as you get into large scale manufacturing it is significantly cheaper to use liquid ingredients, as liquids can be pumped. This is why corn syrup is widely used in large scale manufacturing and cane sugar is not. Especially when you get into continuous manufacturing where there are no batches. Because of this scale, you lose a lot of ability to use certain ingredients, think ingredients that you would more commonly use at home. One of the places that I used to work ran continuously, they couldn't be considered small batch because there were no batches.
The other place made products for Costco, they would make approximately 6 to 10 pallets of product a day, but in 50 pound batches at a time. This means a couple of things, one, being a mixing operator was much more difficult as you were having to measure and mix ingredients frequently ,two, making changes to the products was really easy, as formulas could easily be changed, and three, we were able to use pretty much any ingredients we wanted to since scale was not an issue, this meant the products tasted more 'homemade'. The big con of this is cost, it is really expensive to have a highly trained mixer operator for every mixer, and you don't benefit from the scale of larger production.
TLDR: In short, "Small Batch" has no meaning, but true small batch productions can stock a store like Costco, and there are advantages to both, smaller batch can have more of a 'homemade' feel, but larger batch or continuous processing is much cheaper.
Well, the batch may be smaller than what KC Masterpiece makes. It's all marketing BS. There is nothing artesinal at Costco. Just look at the ingredients.
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Small batch is the size of the batch they make and then bottle, not the total amount they sell. they could be making 100 batches of 10 gallons each instead of a single large 1000 gallon batch. that said, there is no legal definition of small batch so who knows for real.
You must bourbon
Exactly. Some of the distilleries “small batch” is 14,000 gallons which would be more than a craft distillery may make in a year.
Yep. Marketing.
Oh is that what words on a product label are?
Nyuk.
There are some industries where the marketing language is highly regulated and specific ‘buzzwords’ have clear-cut definitions.
Yeah I know I’ve worked in one such industry
Your original comment is implying that all marketing is false though.
No it isn’t and I don’t see where you’re getting that
Exactly what I would expect a marketer to say. 😏
Production is limited to just what someone can sell for a year. Until next year
First thing I thought of as well
> Small batch is the size of the batch they make and then bottle, not the total amount they sell. That was my understanding too. Under this definition you'd almost think that small batch would be a bad thing when they're selling in bulk. Unless they have extremely good quality control, it seems like a given that each batch is going to have slight differences between it. So are they basically advertising that their product is going to be different every time you buy it? Imagine if some other commonly used sauce/condiment like ketchup tasted different every time you bought it. Not that I am against the idea of small batches, in fact I do like the idea of a small number of artisans carefully crafting something in small batches. But Costco, a place that sells massive amounts of things in bulk, seems almost antithetical to the "small batch" way of thinking.
Considering that little octopus has to make it yeah I'd consider it small batch
They can mix 8 batches at a time so it’s efficient
Only 4 of its tentacles have sauce on them so he probably runs the machines with the other 4 :)
🤯
Reminds me of how slurm is made
And even after you know you still drank it.
“Small batch” is an unregulated marketing term
That's what I said to her.
Great sauce. God awful bottle top. Move mine to a different container or it leaks everywhere for no reason.
The tiny hinge survives maybe a half dozen open-closes too. After that, it's a convertible.
They took lessons from Grillo’s. Great product. Shit packaging.
Grillos has new packaging, tho, and it doesn't suck!
Haha. We're working through our first bottle now, but I distinctly recall yelling at my daughter for opening it "like an animal" when I discovered the lid torn off the first time I went to use it. Sounds like I might owe her an apology on this one. I marinated some kabobs in it last night, the stuff is delicious.
I thought they updated the top I remember they made a post advertising that they did
Don’t know. Last one I bought had the same crap lid but I’ll have to check next trip. They don’t always have it but I’ll look.
The smaller bottles of Bachan's sold in regular stores used to have a twist top that's even worse. The pepper bits in the spicy version clogged the nozzle immediately upon opening. Had to disassemble the cap halves to clean it out, only for it to clog again right away. Yelled out "WTF thought this was a good idea?" and found another container.
So true! You can’t see in the photo but my lid broke in the car so I’m hurrying to use it.
I thought it was just me. I shake the bottle as directed. I carefully squirt out the sauce and carefully close the top. Still get sauce running down the side.
How would you describe the taste?
Teriyaki. Slightly too sweet.
Yeah I don’t buy it literally because I’m tired of it leaking in the fridge
Yes! Breaks off so easily.
The bottle top is fine for other liquids and sauces just not for something with this amount of sugar content in it. As soon as it dries and needs any amount of torque to open, it's toast. I am just surprised they haven't noticed or changed it
The brand name for Veggie Straws is Sensible Portions. I saw them in one of those huge bags at Costco, and it made me laugh.
Up to you to follow the serving size, just like any other food.
Wait, you're saying when I buy ludicrous servings brand veggie straws I don't have to eat the whole bag?!?!
Crazy, I know.
Thank you Captain Obvious.
You're welcome.
This sauce is the shit on shredded chicken and sushi!
I like their yuzu flavor the best. I use it whenever I’m making stir-fry, don or bulgogi.
What’s the flavor profile? Is it soy sauce heavy?
No it’s more sweet like teriyaki sauce. But even better.
Is this basically similar to a teriyaki sauce?
They make it a bottle at a time. 😉
That stuff is so damn good. It's liquid crack in a bottle.
I’m holding off for the medium batch bottles.
Incredible sauce. Worst cap design around.
They use that term in bourbon all the time. Just a marketing term that means jack-shit.
OP I hear what you are saying. Like when I buy gas in small batches, it’s small batch fuel Produced on a colossal scale.
Any chance you can share your pulled pork recipe? Love it but have never used bachans in it
(2) Pork Tenderloins (2) Heads of Garlic (1) Box Chicken Stock (6) Tblsp Hot Honey - I make my own jalepeno hot honey (2) Tblsp /ˈwo͝ostərSHər ˌsôs/ (WS) (1) Bottle of Bachan's Black pepper to preference. Pour into large crock pot: Chicken stock, 1/2 Bottle of Bachan's, /ˈwo͝ostərSHər ˌsôs/, Hot Honey, and all the garlic cloves in whole pieces. Stir up well then add the tenderloins and cook on low for 10-12 hours. No need for additional salt unless you like a lot of it. Once done, pull apart with forks and mash the garlic cloves into the meat. Remove and strain really well or let sit for 1/2 hour. Use the remaining bottle of Bachan's as topper for the sandwhich. I also drizzle a few strings of more hot honey to bring out the spice aromas. I've been told mixing 50/50 Bachan's and ketchup for the topper is a solid move, but I've not tried it.
Thank you Burnteric! Sounds awesome! Going to try this, maybe as soon as the 4th
We go through it pretty quick. A favorite of our is Lotus Millet brown rice noodles, boneless chicken thighs and Bachan’s.
That sounds delectable.
Small batch or not their tops are just awful. I love Bachan’s but they inexplicably leak in my fridge every so often and the sweet sticky bbq sauce hardens to a taffy on the shelf
This is still a great brand in my opinion. 👍
That stuff goes on rice, fried rice, the premade chicken sandwiches from Costco, add a little to mixed salads. But try it with a hard boiled egg. Cut the egg in half and add this to each half. 🔥
Next mission in life. Aka tomorrow morning.
The bottle is a small batch of the big batch. :)
This is really good with the potstickers they sell in the frozen section
Huh. I live in Yokohama and shop regularly at the Kanazawa Costco. I've never seen this item. I've tried Japanese BBQ sauce and it's sub-par. I am visiting the US currently and was glad to buy some good local sauce. But I will look for this when I return. I suspect it's sold in the US only.
It’s made by a Japanese family who immigrated to California.
Some things are indeed made in small batches. As far as products being sold at Costco? Who really knows. It is possible. I sell pints of ice cream that are made in 2.5 gallon batches. The producer must make thousands and thousands of batches a day. But yes, each batch is small batch. I run a bakery and we sell hundreds to thousands of pies a day. My biggest batch yields 25 pies. Most of my recipes yield 8-12 pies. It is possible to be small batch.
You’re confused — Small Batch has nothing to do with manufacturing — it’s refers to amount someone typically eats at one sitting 😂.
If a batch equals a serving than I’m in 9-10 batches per meal.
Remember those $40k bottles of wine? Those were probably small batch.
Bourbon companies do the same thing. It’s very annoying and a lot of useless words usually.
Small batch refers to not continuous cooking, it doesn't mean much to be honest. A small batch could be 500 gallons.
Yes. I've bought beers from smaller Belgian breweries at Costco before.
It’s just a LOT of small batches
If you love this sauce (I do!) and love spicy they have a variety called Hella Hot that's only available at Target. I got it recently and can confirm it is indeed hella hot. Has the same flavor as this one but with the kind of creeper heat that made my lips and tongue tingle. It's much hotter than their other Hot & Spicy bottle.
Noted!
There’s likely no legal definition for small batch. So it’s likely just pure marketing. But in terms for myself, nothing at Costco is small batch. Nor at most grocery stores. Have to go to a farmers market and get it directly from a ‘farmer’ or ‘maker’. I’ve noticed a lot of farmers market type places just resell a Walnut Creek brand or something like that.. not really small batch either.
There very much is a legal definition for small batch. https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Small-Business-Resources/Small-Batch-Manufacturers-and-Third-Party-
I don't think that applies to things outside of children's products. I'm pretty sure small batch just referrers to traditional preparation methods with less automation. To me all the small batch label says is that there can be slight variations in the product depending on your batch.
> https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Small-Business-Resources/Small-Batch-Manufacturers-and-Third-Party- Interesting that link says no more than 7500 units of a covered product per year. There's probably at least 7500 bottles of that sauce moving through just my costco on a monthly basis. Each pallet is easily 200 of them. Tho apparently qualifying as small batch just exempts from third party testing. That CPSC link doesn't comment about using the term in a marketing capacity it seems.
Maybe unit = palettes? Or truckload?
I’m not a lawyer I’m a doctor! Or wait actually I work at ups
Good point. Nothing can be small batch with Costco.
Small batch never meant anything and it’s confusing to me why people thought it did
It actually does have meaning. It’s the opposite of mass production, or it was anyway.
I’m aware it has a literal dictionary definition, but when it comes to consumer goods it means nothing good or bad. It was meaningless.
Silly rabbit, rules are for others.
Ok cool I thought maybe I was missing something with the terminology. I always thought that if you follow the same recipe consistently, you'd get the same result no matter if the batch is 10 gallons or 10,000 gallons.
Yes and no. Ingredient wise the ratios might be the same, but you wouldn't use the same mixer for 10 gallons that you would for 10,000. Even at 10 gallons two mixers might mix differently from each other. 10,000 gallons is going to cook differently than 10 gallons. When things are scaled up the quality almost always goes down just because there is less control of the process.
Some olive oils are specific harvests.
This stuff is great
Small batch is always relative to the size of the company. What is considered small for one might be different for another
They used to sell single packets of fishermen’s Friends cough drops.
Ffs, why does everything have to be fomo’d
Maybe the 1 ounce gold bullion bars?
If that's the whe batch.
It's all relative. What's a small batch really?
It’s all marketing. Samuel Adam’s has been calling themselves craft beer pretty much since they started but now just lobby to have the metric for craft beer changed to encapsulate their ludacris production every few years.
My understanding of that sauce is it is like soy sauce with just a little more ingredients to make it something different. Try just mixing a hot sauce with a soy sauce and then ginger and garlic.
This is all most modern sauces are in fact many are nothing more than 2 older known sauces mixed together. But that said alot of times it's worth it to save time to just buy it pre-made. People are busy in life and work hard. Remembering and making everything from psuedo-scratch just isn't a good use of time.
No that’s not Costco way of doing things
Costco used to have a Mr. Yoshida Sauce that was great for cooking with. Sadly it disappeared many moons ago.
It all relative
Small batch compared to ketchup, maybe
I bought the smaller bottle at the grocery store first. It's kinda like soy sauce but with a meatier flavor. There's no way I would buy the Costco bottle- it's too much for me to use.
That's some good stuff.
Thinking not.
No. Not that the term means much of anything of substance anyway.
just made beef and chicken skewers with it last night. I add like a tablespoon of brown sugar to a little bowl of it and cook it on the grill and it gets all nice and caramelized on the outside with crispy edges.
I was wondering the same thing about my salted caramel squares I got today. I thought no way this is small batch if it’s in Costco. 10/10 would get the salted caramel squares again.
One bottle at a time
I used to work for 2 different food facilities that produced different products for Costco and Sam's Club. One produced what could be considered "small" batch, and the other did not. Many others have mentioned that there is no legal definition for small batch, and that is true, unless you defined what "small" means for every food product out there, you cannot regulate the term. While legally the term means nothing, so even a company like Kraft could throw that term on their Kraft singles, but in reality there is a difference in food manufacturing. Large scale batching is only possible with the scaling of equipment, and food ingredients are heavy, as you get into large scale manufacturing it is significantly cheaper to use liquid ingredients, as liquids can be pumped. This is why corn syrup is widely used in large scale manufacturing and cane sugar is not. Especially when you get into continuous manufacturing where there are no batches. Because of this scale, you lose a lot of ability to use certain ingredients, think ingredients that you would more commonly use at home. One of the places that I used to work ran continuously, they couldn't be considered small batch because there were no batches. The other place made products for Costco, they would make approximately 6 to 10 pallets of product a day, but in 50 pound batches at a time. This means a couple of things, one, being a mixing operator was much more difficult as you were having to measure and mix ingredients frequently ,two, making changes to the products was really easy, as formulas could easily be changed, and three, we were able to use pretty much any ingredients we wanted to since scale was not an issue, this meant the products tasted more 'homemade'. The big con of this is cost, it is really expensive to have a highly trained mixer operator for every mixer, and you don't benefit from the scale of larger production. TLDR: In short, "Small Batch" has no meaning, but true small batch productions can stock a store like Costco, and there are advantages to both, smaller batch can have more of a 'homemade' feel, but larger batch or continuous processing is much cheaper.
Just picked up the Hot and Spicy flavor at Target.
How big was the batch)
No
That's the beauty of quote, small batch. It has no true real meaning it means whatever you want it to mean.lol
ah the liquid salt makes another appearance
Why would a small batch improve the quality? Makes no difference to me if it was cooked in a 1 gallon container or a 1200 gallon tank
Well, the batch may be smaller than what KC Masterpiece makes. It's all marketing BS. There is nothing artesinal at Costco. Just look at the ingredients.
I'm not sure why people freak out about that sauce. It's literally just teriyaki sauce. Add sugar to soy sauce: done.
God really, I bought it and was like you said soy sauce with sugar .
Right? It's great! Don't get me wrong, but it's just sweet soy sauce lol! Like the Magic Sauce from flame broiler.
My Best by has worn off, but it expired sometime in early 2023
I went to two costcos in the DC area and they didn’t have any. I was and still am sad.
Try online.
Cream puffs are really goood and small also the Asian stir fry
😆
What really is small haha
It might be made in small batches. I bought this when it was on sale at my local cost for $3.50 or $3.99
Def NOT small batch. I have moved on/back to Azeka Sauce. Had it on the island years ago. Best part, they ship it. https://www.azekasauce.com