That's the story. It's true, and it's incomplete.

If the answer is great product plus great timing, then every brand with both should have won. Most didn't.

The Comparison

Soy Vay has sold a sauce made from soy, ginger, garlic, and sesame since 1982. Mr. Yoshida's has had a nearly identical product on shelves even longer. Real ingredients, cross-cultural origin stories, flavor profiles that could pass for Bachan's in a blind test. Both brands achieved national distribution. Both were acquired by major corporations. Both hit eight-figure revenue. And both stayed in the Asian foods aisle.

One product category. Three decades. Three wildly different outcomes.

Same product category. Same decades. The difference was where each one sat in the store.

To understand how, start with the grocery store itself.

The Problem

This is tare. You've seen the brands that sold it. People who try it tend to like it. Yet it sat in a low-traffic aisle under a name most shoppers couldn't parse, in a format that coded as specialty.

Gill took an existing product and moved it to where it could actually be found. Three moves, in sequence.

Arbitrage #1: Rename

"Tare" means nothing to a grocery shopper scanning the condiment aisle. "Japanese Barbecue Sauce" means everything. "Barbecue" told the category manager where to shelve it. "Japanese" told the shopper why it was different from what was already there.

The name needed a bridge. Tare is sweeter than barbecue, more umami, with no smoke. So Gill added one ingredient to the traditional recipe: tomato paste. Just enough to connect Japanese savory to the acidity that barbecue implies, making the label feel true on the tongue.

What Consumers Actually Use It For

Consumers don't actually use it as barbecue sauce. Look at the reviews: "turbo soy sauce," "one-bottle shortcut for rice bowls," "better teriyaki." Some explicitly warn against grilling with it, the sugar content chars and burns.

The name was a shelf strategy. "Barbecue" got the product in front of high-traffic shoppers. The flavor (sweet, umami-forward, endlessly versatile) is what made them come back.

Arbitrage #2: Relocate

Sweet Baby Ray's dominates the BBQ sauce shelf, roughly half of American consumers name it their favorite. A new entrant asking a category manager for space in that set gets laughed out of the meeting.

Bachan's showed up with data instead. The brand had already become the top-selling BBQ sauce on Amazon, outperforming every legacy competitor by dollars per store per week in the natural channel. That velocity data became the permission slip. It told category managers: "The demand already exists. You're just not capturing it yet."

Arbitrage #3: Repeat

A glass jar lives in the pantry. You take it out when a recipe calls for it. A squeeze bottle sits on the table, you grab it, drizzle, done. The format change turned a "recipe ingredient" into an "everyday condiment" and made the consumer a heavier user.

The Three Arbitrages

"Soy-based Japanese sauces are ethnic specialty products."

That was the quiet assumption (a retailer convention, invisible to shoppers) that had determined where these products lived for decades. Bachan's bypassed it so cleanly that the consumer never noticed a category switch had happened. They just thought: "Huh, interesting BBQ sauce."

The Contradiction

What happened in those eight months?

Four Structural Walls

The flywheel that built the brand couldn't solve what came next. Each wall alone is manageable. Stacked together, they changed the math entirely.

Why Marzetti

Marzetti is a foodservice machine, the invisible operator behind the sauce packets at fast-food chains, the dressings at casual dining restaurants, the dips in convenience stores. It has manufacturing scale, cold-chain logistics, and tens of thousands of restaurant relationships where Bachan's could appear without a single new distribution deal. Every structural wall Bachan's was facing, Marzetti had already built roads through.

The Fork

Gill had won the shelf war. But the next phase (foodservice, industrial-scale manufacturing, defending against copycats with deeper pockets) required assets he'd never built and couldn't build fast enough. The longer he waited, the more the position eroded. So he sold at the peak of the position's value, to a buyer that already had the factories, the cold chain, and the restaurant relationships.

The job was misplaced.

People had liked this flavor for decades. They just couldn't find it: wrong name, wrong aisle, wrong bottle. One brand fixed all three.

None of this was inevitable. A different name and it stays in the International aisle. A different format and trial stalls after one purchase. A different read on the market and the founder holds on too long, watching copycats erode the position month by month. What makes the Bachan's story unusual is the sequencing, each move made at the right time, in the right order, by a founder who sold at peak leverage instead of waiting for the next phase to eat it.