The Asian Pantry Is Getting the Graza Treatment—Here’s Where to Start

If you’ve ever given someone a nice bottle of olive oil as a host gift, you might find yourself reaching for a $25 bottle of soy sauce or a $30 bottle of sesame oil next time..

With the explosion of brands like Sessy and Heydoh, Asian pantry staples are getting a glow up. I called the phenomenon “Grazification,” named after the trendy olive oil brand Graza. The company didn’t invent olive oil, of course, but it did make the category look and feel a lot more fun and approachable. Its signature green squeeze bottles turned olive oil from something you might decant into a ceramic cruet—or hide in the cabinet—into something you could proudly leave next to the stove or tuck into a gift basket. The brand’s use-case names helped, too: Sizzle is for cooking, while Drizzle is for finishing. The classic duo costs $37.

Now, “Grazafication” is coming for soy sauce, sesame oil, and gochujang. These foundational Asian pantry ingredients are being transformed into premium, design-conscious products with a strong POV and Instagrammable good looks.

It’s pantry premiumization with a little more personality—and a much better label.

For years, shoppers have been trained to think of soy sauce, sesame oil, and gochujang as inexpensive supporting players. They live in squat plastic bottles and tubs, often surrounded by dozens of nearly identical options. The packaging is usually functional, not aspirational. You buy them out of necessity, not because you want to give them as a birthday present.

The new generation of Asian pantry brands is challenging that idea. They’re saying these ingredients deserve the same attention we give to single-origin olive oil, aged balsamic vinegar, specialty coffee, and finishing salts.

“People already understand paying more for a good olive oil or an aged balsamic, and I think Korean pantry staples deserve that same respect,” says Food Network star chef Esther Choi, founder of Sessy. “You’re paying for a producer’s craft and a chef’s judgment about what’s actually worth bringing home.”

That’s the pitch: not a prettier bottle just for the sake of looks, but a new way of valuing the ingredient inside it. These brands are giving shoppers a reason to care about how a pantry staple is made, where it comes from, and what it can do beyond its usual assignment.

Sessy launched late this summer with the Korean pantry essentials Choi considers foundational: soy sauce, sesame oil, and gochujang, sold together in the Korean Pantry Essentials Set for $38.99.

Chef Esther Choi with her Sessy Korean Pantry Essentials Set

The decision to start with basics was intentional. Choi says she was encouraged to create an easy Korean barbecue marinade or hot sauce, but she instead wanted to begin with the ingredients that form the backbone of Korean cooking.

“All expertise is built on top of the basics,” she says. “You start small, master the foundations, and build on top of that knowledge.”

The products are made in Korea with the Sempio brand, and Choi says the soy sauce is naturally fermented, savory, and more umami-forward than sweet. The sesame oil is made with 100% cold-pressed sesame seeds, while the gochujang is naturally aged for a smoky, sweet flavor.

But Sessy’s biggest departure from the traditional Korean pantry may be the visual identity. The bright, cheeky packaging is designed to feel more like a modern lifestyle brand than a grocery-store staple.

Sessy founder Esther Choi with her brand’s soy sauce

“A lot of chef-driven brands just slap their face on the label, but we wanted to do something richer and more interesting,” Choi says. “The brand feels like a sassy unni [Korean for “older sister”]—playful, confident, never stiff or old-fashioned.”

Sessy makes that shift especially visible. Its Korean staples feel chef-approved and deeply rooted, but also bright, playful, and completely at home on a modern American kitchen counter.

Heydoh is making an even more direct comparison to the olive oil aisle. Founded by cookbook author Clarissa Wei, the Taiwanese brand offers two single-origin soy sauces made with black soybeans grown by small farmers in Taiwan.

The Classic Soy Sauce costs $22.99, while the Silky Soy Sauce costs $13.99. The brand also sells Brown Rice Vinegar for $14.99.

Wei says the idea came while writing Made in Taiwan, her cookbook on Taiwanese cuisine and realizing that widely available commodity soy sauce was changing the flavor of her recipes.

“Most soy sauces on American grocery store shelves are made with conventional yellow soybeans,” she says. “We use single-origin black soybeans grown by small farmers in Taiwan—a variety bred specifically for fermentation.”

The Classic is the all-purpose bottle, with a robust flavor and tasting notes reminiscent of dashi and chestnut. Silky is twice-fermented, lower in sodium, and designed for finishing, dipping, and drizzling.

The sleek bottle is part of the argument. Rather than leaning on the familiar red-and-gold visual cues associated with many Asian sauces, Heydoh’s bottles look like tiny illustrated travel posters, with creamy labels, punchy blocks of carefully curated color, and a whimsical hand pouring soy sauce across a Taiwanese mountain landscape. The result feels like vintage art rooted in place—more like a keepsake from a dream vacation than something you’d expect to find in the soy sauce aisle.

The brand’s slogan says it all: “Soy sauce so good you can sip.”

And that is precisely the kind of language that turns a condiment into a tasting experience.

JANGIN is taking Korean fermentation in a more chef-driven direction. Founded by Nadia Cho and chef Mingoo Kang of Seoul’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Mingles, the brand offers two sauces: the Gochujang Cooking Sauce and the Gochujang Finishing Sauce, each $22. The duo is $40.

The distinction between the two is not just marketing. The cooking sauce is based on yak gochujang (a richer, stir-fried version of the paste) and is designed for marinades, glazes, braises, and stir-fries. The finishing sauce draws from cho gochujang (a vinegared version) and is brighter, fruitier, and more acidic, with green plum, lemon, and citrus.

The packaging reinforces that sense of distinction, pairing smooth, frosted glass for the finishing sauce with a matte squeeze bottle with soft, rounded edges for the cooking sauce. Together, they give a quiet-luxury feel.

“We wanted to bring that proper technique to American home cooks rather than asking one product to do two jobs,” Cho says.

JANGIN is also helping make gochujang less intimidating. Instead of selling a thick paste that requires additional mixing, the brand does the sauce-building for you.

“What you find in Korean markets is a paste,” Cho says. “Ours is a sauce. A lot of American readers feel intimidated by a raw paste—they don’t know where to start with it.”

The result is a product that feels restaurant-adjacent without requiring a trip to Seoul—or a pantry stocked like a Korean grandmother’s. Cho says the finishing sauce is unexpectedly good on fries, mac and cheese, raw oysters, shrimp cocktail, and steak.

That versatility is another key part of the Grazafication formula: The product has a strong cultural point of origin, but it is not boxed into one cuisine.

Sooki is doing for sesame oil what Graza did for olive oil: making the oil itself feel worthy of attention.

Sooki Premium Toasted Sesame Oil costs $29.99 for 8.5 fluid ounces and is made in South Korea from whole white sesame seeds. The seeds are lightly roasted and mechanically pressed to create a golden oil with a smooth, buttery flavor rather than the dark, super toasted profile common in many conventional sesame oils.

The brand was inspired by a family ritual. Sooki’s founders grew up bringing bottles of fresh sesame oil home from Korea because they couldn’t find the same quality in the United States.

“We were watching consumers become increasingly interested in high-quality olive oils and other pantry staples, and it made us wonder why sesame oil wasn’t being talked about in the same way,” says Joseph Choi, Sooki’s co-founder, CMO, and creative director.

Sooki’s packaging leans into that personal history with playful characters inspired by the founders’ mother and the early-2000s cartoons they grew up watching. It’s nostalgic, but not old-fashioned; Korean, but not overly literal.

The bottle is designed to be left out, not hidden away.

“We wanted to make something people would be proud to leave on their kitchen counter or bring to someone’s home as a gift,” Choi says. “The oil itself is beautiful, and we wanted people to have an immediate visual connection with it.”

The product also has the kind of broad-use appeal that makes a premium pantry item feel worth the splurge. Use it over warm rice, in bibimbap, as a dipping sauce with salt, over vegetables—or, if you’re feeling chaotic, on popcorn or vanilla ice cream with honey.

There are a few reasons these products are arriving at this particular moment.

For one, shoppers have become more interested in the quality and origin of everything in their kitchens. Olive oil, salt, and vinegar have already been transformed from anonymous ingredients into objects of expertise. The same logic is now being applied to soy sauce, sesame oil, fermented chile pastes, and other Asian staples.

There is also the simple fact that more people are cooking Asian food at home. Korean restaurants, Taiwanese cookbooks, Chinese regional cuisine, and Japanese ingredients are no longer niche interests. They are part of the mainstream food conversation—and shoppers want pantry products that match the quality of what they’re eating at restaurants.

Choi also points to the influence of Korean food, K-dramas, and K-pop, which have made people more curious about the ingredients behind the culture they’re consuming.

But the brands are not merely chasing visibility. They’re correcting a long-standing problem with the American grocery aisle: the tendency to flatten distinct cuisines into one generic “Asian” category.

“Many mainstream supermarkets have a tendency of reducing Asian cuisines into one vague flavor profile,” Choi says. “The modern American family deserves to have legit staples that are worthy of my chef kitchen.”

The short answer: Start at a “shoppy shop.” The term, coined for the wave of highly curated boutique grocers stocked with Instagram-famous pantry goods, is basically shorthand for the kind of store where you go in “just to look” and somehow leave with fancy vinegar, tinned fish, chili crisp, and a $20 condiment you absolutely did not plan to buy.

Many of these brands are still primarily sold online, but specialty food shops are the best places to find them in person. Try Onggi in Portland, Maine, a fermentation-focused market and café with shelves of premium soy sauces, gochujang, vinegars, chili crisps, and other hard-to-find pantry goods.

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In upstate New York, Mornings Cafe in Arkville is another good hunting ground for design-forward pantry staples, including Bowlcut Chili Crisp, which starts with bright peppery heat before giving way to a nutty sweetness.

Mixed Pantry in Seattle is especially on point: Its MXP Pantry Bundle brings together six premium sauces, oils and vinegars from across Asia, including Sooki Premium Toasted Sesame Oil and Heydoh Classic Taiwanese Soy Sauce—as well as Dear Mắm Fish Sauce from Vietnam; Shimanto Domeki Dashi-Infused Rice Vinegar from Japan; Wu Yin Taiwanese Black Vinegar; and Megachef Premium Oyster Sauce from Thailand.

MXP Pantry Bundle from Mixed Pantry in Seattle

For the brands in this story, availability remains a little more boutique than big-box.

• Heydoh has a retail store locator.
• Sooki has a Where to Find Us page for brick-and-mortar locations and is also available online from Amazon and Misfits Market.
• Sessy and JANGIN are currently easiest to buy directly from their websites—although a rep for JANGIN teased that “some exciting national retail is coming.”

Inventory at independent shops changes often, so it’s worth calling ahead—or treating the hunt as part of the fun.

The best part of this shift is that it asks us to see the pantry differently. That is ultimately what the Grazafication of the Asian pantry is about. It is not just a pastel label or a clever bottle. It is the idea that these ingredients can be specific, expertly made, and culturally rooted—and that they can still feel at home in a modern American kitchen.

So give it a shot: The next time you’re invited to a dinner party, skip the olive oil and bring the good soy sauce instead.