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A chance discovery led NASA to seek out the award-winning soy sauce maker for its unique packaging that makes it perfect for zero gravity.

By James Cronin

The innovative design of Little Soya’s individual soy sauce packaging has landed the specialty product a place with NASA in outer space.

The Texas-based company’s small packages are perfect for the zero gravity environment because they must be squeezed to dispense soy sauce and don’t leak, helping solve a problem many astronauts encounter, says company founder Gary Murphy.

That problem will ostensibly be solved when Little Soya’s gluten-free product blasts off in an ATV-005 NASA rocket (pictured, right) planned for launch on Tues., July 29, set to travel to the International Space Station.

That’s a “stamp of approval” for the 3-year-old specialty soy sauce company, whose closest competitors “are hundreds of years old and multibillion dollar” operations, Murphy muses.

“For a small but strong company like we are, it means the world to us to have a globally recognized name like NASA choose us out of all the possibilities,” Murphy says. “That’s a major, major milestone for us. We have awesome clients, really powerful names. But who can say that their product is going to space? And it’s pretty cool to know that at this point Little Soya will be the first gluten-free soy sauce in space.”

Little Soya got its start when Murphy received a call from a president of a Japanese consulting firm working for a Las Vegas casino, where Murphy was also doing business at the time. The firm had a client looking for high-end soy sauce in a single packet. So he created his signature fish-shaped single soy sauce packets, and Little Soya launched in late 2010. Soon, buyers were asking for a gluten-free low-sodium soy sauce, so he developed the version of Little Soya currently available. The unique packaging—resealable and recyclable—gained further recognition as a finalist for Outstanding Innovation in Packaging Design or Function in the 2012 sofi Awards. Today the product is in more than 1,000 grocery stores.

Two years ago came another phone call: this time, from a senior research scientist at NASA expressing interest in the soy sauce. The researchers had been discussing issues with astronauts and one had complained “the soy sauce spewed everywhere when they opened it,” Murphy recalls. “So a wife of one of the astronauts saw our product at a local grocery store here and told NASA about it and they thought it might work.”

NASA loved the idea, but after Murphy dropped some samples at the local office, there was radio silence until earlier this year, when NASA reps called to say they’d take a few cases. Murphy turned them over to a special government food lab company that buys all of NASA’s food.

The last time he spoke with Lockheed Martin reps, which is working with NASA on the relationship, Murphy was told they’re making an entirely new condiment package kit for each astronaut with hot sauce, spices, salt, ketchup, and Little Soya.

With the impending late summer launch, Murphy’s team is waiting with bated breath. “We are definitely going to have a Little Soya ‘countdown to space’ party,” he says with a laugh.

Photos: Little Soya, European Space Agency