From sugar-coated schoolyard supplements to precision fermentation and biodiversity research, Taiwan’s unlikely yeast story reveals how a once-marginal microbe is quietly shaping the island’s next phase of food, biotech, and scientific innovation.
When Marmite first began appearing on the shelves of a select few branches of Carrefour (and occasionally c!ty’super) in Taiwan more than a decade ago, cravers of the love-it-or-hate-it British breakfast spread were delighted. While pots of the tarry paste appeared on shelves only intermittently over the years, inexplicably vanishing for months at a time, even this fleeting availability was not to be scoffed at.
Alas, the writing may be on the wall for such niche foreign imports, with the announcement by Taiwan-based food conglomerate Uni-President that it will rebrand Carrefour, which it acquired in 2023, based on “changes in Taiwan’s retail market” and “local consumer demand.” Following Uni-President’s acquisition of Jason’s Market Place (now Mia C’bon), which Carrefour had taken over just the year before, international residents noted a marked decline in the range of hard-to-come-by foreign produce.
There are already concerns of a similar occurrence with the rebranded Carrefour. Will the salty, yeast-based spread get the chop, leaving Marmite maniacs relying once more on trips to the UK to get their fix?
If the French role in the availability of a quintessentially British brand in Taiwan seems peculiar, more remarkable is the revelation that Marmite first made an appearance in Taiwan almost seventy years ago.
Unlikely beginnings
As revealed by James Lin in his 2025 book on Taiwan’s agrarian development, In the Global Vanguard, this happened when a manager at the Xingying Byproduct Processing Plant in Tainan (now part of the Xinying Railway Cultural Park) left a two-ounce pot of the spread with John Godston, an American food-processing consultant to Taiwan’s Chinese Nationalist government.
In 1959, as part of an effort to improve nutrition, the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (Taisugar) was contracted with U.S. funding to produce torula yeast from blackstrap molasses. The molasses, a mineral-rich byproduct of the final boiling stage of alcohol production, came from the Xingying plant, which was adapted for the purpose.
“Taiwanese planners and engineers looked for cheap and nutritious ways to supplement human diets in rural Taiwan, where many children were often undernourished,” Lin says.
A second, related motivation was for use in hog feed to boost the growing livestock industry, “where animal feed competed with food grown for human consumption,” says Lin, an associate professor at international studies at the University of Washington.
There was an additional win-win in putting to use byproducts that had previously been discarded. “It was a convenient kill-two-birds-with-one-stone solution that was typical of bootstrapping development projects of the time — combining modern techniques in food and chemical engineering with modern public health initiatives to improve rural diets,” he says.
Yet the fact that these byproducts had long gone to waste suggested there was little demand for products derived from them. The challenge, instead, was to develop a product that aligned with local tastes and cultural preferences and that could be easily incorporated into everyday diets. Yeast autolysates such as Marmite and its Australian counterpart, Vegemite, both known for their pronounced umami flavor, were considered unlikely to appeal to Taiwanese schoolchildren, the group selected for early field testing.
Also, where it was consumed, yeast was thought of as a medicine, most notably through Wakomoto supplements — a digestive pill introduced under Japanese colonial rule and still widely available in Taiwan. Early experiments provided the yeast as a direct supplement which did not prove a hit.
“Officials testing yeast fed to elementary school children discovered they didn’t like that yeast stuck to their teeth, and it didn’t taste great,” says Lin. “So, Taiwanese planners made another pragmatic change, by literally sugar coating it into a candy. Thus, jiansutang was born.”
In their original form, the brightly colored sweets resembled Skittles. The idea was to disguise the yeast as candy, making it more palatable for children. The approach proved more successful than earlier attempts to administer yeast directly, but negative memories linger: Some older Taiwanese still recall being made to eat them as an unpleasant childhood ritual.
Once the outer coating had been bitten through, the incongruously savory or slightly bitter flavor of the yeast inside was still enough to put some off. Others recall the “yeast candy” with nostalgia; either way, generations of Taiwanese were weaned on them before, on the back of Taiwan’s economic boom, meat became more widely and demand for such supplements dropped.
By the 1990s, Taisugar had stopped producing jiansutang, citing a lack of raw materials. A greater focus on oral hygiene may have also played a role.
“By sugarcoating yeast, you’re introducing new kinds of problems,” says Lin. “But 1950s and ‘60s planners weren’t too concerned about dental cavities or sugar intake.”
Finally, a 2006 scandal known as “the Jiansutang Affair” did not help the flagging brand’s reputation. This involved the prosecution of a former food production manager at the Xinying plant and the head of an import firm for repackaging protein powder intended for hog feed and using it in jiansutang and other supplements.
Eventually, production of jiansutang was taken over in the 1990s by a brand called Black Gold Brick, which is owned by the Taichung-based Shou Sheng Agricultural Co. It is now sold in pellet form, mainly online.
Speaking of “yeast-related” scandals, in 2024 a spate of illnesses in Taiwan and Japan was traced to red yeast rice supplements produced by Kobayashi Pharmaceutical. The supplements, marketed to lower cholesterol, were linked to kidney damage and dozens of deaths in Japan, prompting Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration to issue an emergency recall of Kobayashi products.
Concerns about the “yeast” content of such foods, however, should be allayed. First, red yeast rice is not technically a yeast at all but a type of mold. Second, the mold, long used as a fermentation starter in rice wine and kaoliang production, is no longer active by the time it appears in familiar foods in Taiwan, including bawan, some varieties of fermented tofu, red-yeast pork, and its Cantonese cousin, char siu.
Michelin chefs of microbes
Despite the apparent long-term failure of yeast-based products to take hold in Taiwan, some companies have taken up the mantle of the early trailblazers in using yeast for food products.
Starting off in the seasoning industry in the early 2000s, Shen quickly found the market too competitive. “But microbial fermentation for the food industry was just getting started, with a lot of new factories putting more money into R&D, especially in developing lactic acid bacteria and probiotics,” he says.
The shift led Shen to focus on producing yeast peptones and agars, key components of culture media. In 2014, STBIO became the first company in Taiwan to secure a manufacturing license for food-based microbiological fermentation media from the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Its products include dehydrated culture media (DCM) such as Yeast Nitrogen Base Broth and Potato Dextrose Broth, used to grow yeasts and molds, as well as MRS Broth, a standard medium for cultivating probiotics, including lactic acid bacteria.
In its early years, STBIO supplied peptones to companies engaged in large-scale fermentation and OEM and ODM production. One such customer was Grape King, which accounts for about 40% of Taiwan’s total fermentation capacity, according to the company.
As the research use of DCM spread across university laboratories and institutions such as the Food Industry Research and Development Institute in Hsinchu, many of which began contracting directly with manufacturers, new opportunities emerged, Shen says.
“Because the same culture media can be used continuously from the research and development stage through to mass production, formulations do not need to be modified once a technology is transferred to large-scale manufacturing,” he says. “This end-to-end consistency has become a critical advantage.”
It has enabled the company to customize products to meet specific requirements. “We’re the Michelin chefs of microbes!” Shen quips.
While large international producers of DCM typically supply laboratory-grade reagents, all of STBIO’s products are food grade. Because many of its customers contract with companies in majority-Muslim markets, the products are also certified halal.
With an increased emphasis on and incentives for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries from Taiwan’s government, Shen says the potential applications for yeast fermentation are expanding beyond nutraceuticals to fields such as cell culture.
Above all, he emphasizes the range of products that can be derived from yeast, depending on variables such as the type and concentration of enzymes, the inducers that activate them, and the duration of the reactions.
“All of this will change the function [of the yeast],” he says. “People might think of yeast extract as one [thing]. But for us, it could be thousands of products.”
Evolutionary growth
Few people in Taiwan understand yeast diversity better than Isheng Jason Tsai, an evolutionary biologist and research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center. As he noted in an interview with TaiwanPlus last year, Taiwan ranks among the most biodiverse regions in the world when it comes to wild yeast species.
Studies suggest that this is because the island’s broadleaf forests were protected from the worst effects of the last Ice Age, meaning strains that died out elsewhere remained preserved in Taiwan.
“There’s a consensus that after Taiwan was formed as an island four or five million years ago, the Taiwan Strait became land during the Ice Age, and species from continental Asia migrated here,” Tsai says. “You just happened to have a space where the forest was not covered, and it retained a lot of the ancient species’ diversity.”
Taiwan — and East Asia in general — is also considered the likely “birthplace” of the most important of yeasts in human evolution: saccharomyces cerevisiae, better known as brewer’s yeast, and the catalyst for bread baking and beer brewing. Yet Tsai notes that wild yeast does not naturally lend itself to production of potent alcohol. “The ability to ferment high alcohol is a trait that humans have artificially domesticated in these microorganisms over thousands of years.”
While his research focuses on “the actual role of these microorganisms in the natural environment, before we [humans] get to know them,” he admits to dabbling in homemade brewing using wild strains with lab colleagues as a side project.
“They taste very different to commercial beers, which come from just a few choices of strains,” he says. “We’re also experimenting and working with local distilleries on a whiskey, but you have to wait for two years for that to mature.”
Holding up a copy of In the Land of Ninkasi, which is described in the blurb as a “feast for beer geeks,” and traces brewing to ancient Mesopotamia, Tsai notes that cultures worldwide have long claimed bragging rights over the invention of beer. At the very least, Taiwan can claim to have spawned the basic necessities for this innovation.
“This is not just some geopolitical status thing,” Tsai says. “We’ve found that this coincides with Taiwan’s natural history.”
