Hi, I'm Brian Choi-Dea, the founder of Yumamay!

I'm a third-generation Asian-American who got on the fish sauce game late but fell in love! It wasn't on my grandmother's table or in my family's kitchen growing up; fish sauce didn't even go mainstream until I was a teenager in the 90s. But the first time I tasted that deep, salty punch of umami, I understood immediately why it had been a cornerstone of Asian cooking for centuries. From that point on, I never cooked without it.

A few years ago, I went vegetarian. And almost everything translated, except that one bottle in my sauce cabinet. Every plant-based "fish sauce" I tried tasted like a compromise: thin, salty, missing the deep umami that makes the real thing irreplaceable. I didn't want a substitute. I wanted the flavor we all grew to love, just without the catch, quite literally. Traditional fish sauce relies on a staggering number of anchovies per bottle, and that's a cost our oceans have been quietly absorbing for centuries.

So I set out to build the version I couldn't find.

It took almost three years of testing; working with plant-based food scientists, going through batch after batch of fermented sauces, trying to recreate that exact savory, oceanic depth without a single seafood ingredient and we finally landed on a version that celebrates the traditional flavor that can stand up to the best fish sauces on the market today.

This isn't just a product to me, it's a sauce made in a way that shapes how we think about our food today. Yumamay is my answer to a ten-year question: how do you protect traditional flavors and the ocean at the same time?

Turns out, you don't have to choose.

— Brian Choi-Dea, Founder