Our visit to a soybean paste factory was a first for me. It turned out to be a very interesting tour. The factory employs 65 – 70 people and most people earn US $5 a day for eight hours of work. They make miso paste and black curry powder. They start with a variety of soybeans that has a very small seed. They had bags of seeds stacked most of the way to the ceiling with cats sleeping about the area. Nothing is wasted and the workers seem to be very efficient. I’ll tell more by going through the photos.

1. I knew we were going to a soybean paste factory, so I was surprised that our bus was driving through what seemed to me to be a normal housing neighborhood. I was also surprised to stop in front of this house, which turned out to be the factory. Just inside the door was where the sacks of soybeans were stored.

2. Moving on to the back of the operation they had a stack of firewood that was very impressive. It was half the size of the house. Most of the wood was Eucalyptus. They use that wood mostly to boil the soybeans for two hours. You can see the boiling in this photo.

3. To the right of the boiling pots, they have the cooking pots. After boiling the soybeans for two hours, they then cook the soybeans for three hours. For the cooking pots, they used mostly peanut shells for the fire's fuel. You can see Vicky pulling off some cooked soybeans in the third photo. If Vicky had just been able to make a couple of more scoops, she would have earned a penny at the going rate of pay.

4. When the soybean liquid gets boiled down sufficiently, it becomes a paste which then takes two weeks or more to cool down. The paste sits in big pots cooling and then gets processed right out of the same big pots. You can see one of the bean paste pots and some women processing the paste into the packets to be sold. The women worked in teams, seemed to be extremely efficient, and managed to chat while they worked.

5. The paste packets then went to the teams in the last photo for packaging. This final product was then boxed to be sold.