Starting a business in traditional fish sauce

Mr. Lê Anh shares how to make fish sauce

Mr. Lê Anh, owner of the Lê Gia fish sauce brand in Hoằng Phụ Commune, Hoằng Hóa, Thanh Hóa, confided: “I was born and raised in a rural area with a longstanding fish-sauce tradition. Its smell has been part of my childhood memories since I was little, so I have always wanted to preserve my ancestors' craft and contribute clean, high-quality, safe products to the community.”

Reflecting on his journey, he said it was an unexpected fortunate connection. In 2008, after graduating from university, Lê Anh worked for a Korean company on the Nghi Sơn refinery and petrochemical project in Thanh Hóa, earning more than a thousand USD a month. Throughout that time, however, he kept thinking about developing his hometown's traditional fish sauce trade.

In 2012, Lê Anh decided to return to his hometown and begin making his dream a reality. At the time, traditional fish sauce accounted for only a quarter of the condiment market, with around 2,800 businesses. With a ‘differentiate or die’ mindset, he pushed himself to find a distinctive path for developing his hometown’s traditional fish-sauce craft.

After visiting many craft villages and testing different methods, Lê Anh chose to make fish sauce from anchovies fermented with salt in wooden barrels using the compressed-layer method. After 18–24 months of fermentation, the finished fish sauce emerges. He also stores the salt for a year beforehand to reduce bitterness and harshness when it is mixed with fish. In total, his first batch took 3 years.

He says good fish sauce requires fresh fish. Shrinking fishing grounds, lower catches, climate change and marine pollution force fish-sauce producers to compete with other buyers, often driving prices up. Throughout the raw-material season from lunar month 8 to month 11, whenever boats return, Lê Anh personally goes to shore to inspect and buy fish directly.

The salt used for fish sauce is clean, coarse-grained salt brought from Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu. Fish and salt are thoroughly mixed at a 3:1 ratio and placed in barrels assembled from bời lời wood, a durable, salt-resistant wood that does not leak.

According to him, the fish sauce business is difficult both in making the product and getting it sold. Looking back, he sometimes feels that the more he works, the more he is “banging his head against a rock.” In the early days, Lê Anh personally walked through residential areas in Hải Tiến and invited people to try his product. Of every 10 people he approached, as many as 7 – 8 were using industrially produced dipping sauce. Persuading them to switch to traditional fish sauce was therefore extremely challenging.

Recognizing packaging as a weakness of traditional fish sauce, Mr. Lê Anh also decided to give his product a ‘new outfit.’ Specifically, he imported bottles from Thailand, refreshed the logo, and redesigned the cap to make opening, pouring, and storing the fish sauce easier.

After more than 3 years, with products such as fish sauce for children, underground-aged fish sauce, and sauce extracted from tiny shrimp, the Lê Gia brand appears increasingly often on the market. The facility currently supplies around 15,000 liters of fish sauce annually to Hà Nội and Ho Chi Minh City.

“I believe that consuming organic and safe products is the trend of the future and that, over time, consumers will return to traditional fish sauce. This is an opportunity for makers of clean fish sauce to earn a living from their craft while preserving the values and cultural essence handed down by their ancestors,” the owner of Lê Gia fish sauce shared.

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