Polymer chemist turned soy sauce maker

From Google News searches for the keyword "chemist":

NORTH STONINGTON, Conn. — North Stonington could stake the claim that they are “Flavortown”. Bob Florence thinks so.

Florence is a trained polymer chemist who has worked for companies like Apple and GE all over the world. But four years ago, Florence started Moromi Artisanal Shoyu, “Moromi” for short– a high end soy sauce that is now finding its way into store shelves and restaurants. 

“I started making soy sauce out of curiosity,” Florence said. He even ventured to Japan to learn from some of the master soy sauce makers and decided to take the leap and bottle his own product back home.

Moromi, which translates to “mash” in English, is a combination of Florence’s passion and professional knowledge as a chemist. The small batch artisanal soy sauce is made inside an industrial building where Bob has all the high-tech machinery and barrels needed to produce Moromi, which now comes in seven varieties.

“This is an art,” he added, “It’s very similar to beer making -- in beer what you’re doing is using yeast to drive the reaction and what you’re doing with Koji, (the mold responsible for creating soy sauce) is that Koji is just a different mold, a different organism to make good stuff.”

Food manufacturing seems to be one of those classic backup careers for chemists later in life...