Household Ingredients Compared  ›  Curry Paste and Sauce (Singapore)

Curry paste and sauce: what's actually in it?

Three different products share the curry shelf. A curry paste is a concentrated blend of spices, herbs, oil and salt that you fry and then add coconut milk, stock or water to. A ready curry sauce / simmer sauce is a finished sauce — you heat it and add meat or vegetables, with no coconut milk or stock to add. And a Japanese curry roux block is a solid block of fat, flour, curry powder and seasoning that melts into hot water to make the sauce. The front of the jar rarely makes the distinction clear; the ingredient list does.

This page covers curry paste and ready curry sauce sold in Singapore: Thai (green, red, yellow, Massaman, Panang), Indian (butter chicken, tikka masala, vindaloo, Madras), Japanese curry (roux blocks and retort sauce pouches), Malaysian/Singaporean (laksa paste, rendang paste, chicken curry paste, kurma paste), plus simmer sauces. It does not cover stock cubes/paste (own page, category 82), chilli sauce (own page, category 84), sambal (queued for the 200-category wave), or instant-noodle curry seasoning sachets. This page does not give a health score or a "best" pick, and it shows no prices.

The headline, in 30 seconds

• 31 products are panelled, but only one from a Singapore-named source. S&B Golden Curry Mix Mild 220g is panelled from the Singapore Open Food Facts entry, which lists Singapore under countries where sold. Every other panel is a flagged overseas list (Thai, UK, US, Australian or manufacturer-global), and most of them carry an explicit "Singapore sale not verified in this pass" flag — see each card. No FairPrice ingredient section for any curry paste or sauce was retrievable in this pass, and Cold Storage publishes no ingredient lists at all.
• Singapore sale is confirmed for only a handful of names. FairPrice's own similar-products listing names Mekhala Organic Thai Green, Red and Yellow Curry Paste, Nittaya Thai Green Curry Paste, S&B Golden Curry Sauce bundles (Mild, Medium Hot, Hot, and With Vegetables) and FairPrice Chicken Curry Paste; a Singapore laksa-paste round-up names Prima Taste, Dancing Chef, Asian Home Gourmet, Singlong, Heavenly Wang and others as sold in Singapore. The Thai import brands Mae Ploy, Aroy-D and Maesri are panelled on their Thai/UK/US lists only — their Singapore sale was not verified in this pass and must not be assumed from the panel.
• The Thai pastes split cleanly on shrimp paste and sugar. Mae Ploy green, red, Panang, yellow and Massaman all list shrimp paste; Aroy-D's green, red, Panang, Massaman and yellow lists (ImportFood, Thai source) list no shrimp paste and no sugar; Maesri red lists sugar but no shrimp paste. Do not copy one brand's list onto another, and do not assume a variant shares another variant's list — Aroy-D itself has been reported in more than one formula, with and without shrimp powder.
• Japanese roux is a different product from Thai paste. Every S&B Golden Curry roux and every House Vermont Curry roux panelled here starts with wheat flour and vegetable oil, lists sugar and salt high up, and lists flavour enhancers (monosodium glutamate, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate). None of them is gluten-free. The retort sauce pouches (S&B Golden Curry Sauce with Vegetables) start with water and vegetables instead.
• Salt figures conflict between sources for the same product. Open Food Facts gives Mae Ploy Green Curry Paste 2.54g salt per 100g, while the UK percentage list for the same paste gives salt as 12.5% of the paste. Both figures are quoted on the page and the conflict is stated, not resolved — the Singapore pack still needs a photo.
• Prima Taste's laksa kit is three products in one box. The Laksa Meal Sauce Kit is a laksa paste, a coconut premix and a sambal chilli, each with its own list. The paste itself is palm olein-led; the premix is coconut milk powder-led; the sambal lists flavour enhancer E621.

At a glance

Panelled with verbatim lists: 31 products — 1 from a Singapore-named Open Food Facts entry (S&B Golden Curry Mix Mild 220g), 4 with Singapore sale confirmed by a FairPrice listing or a Singapore round-up and a flagged overseas list (Mekhala Green/Red/Yellow, Asian Home Gourmet Laksa), and 26 flagged overseas-list panels whose Singapore sale was not verified in this pass. Seen-but-not-verified: see the list below.

Prices are deliberately not shown here: they change weekly and would go stale. This site compares ingredients only.

Thai curry paste — Mae Ploy

Thai curry paste — Aroy-D

Aroy-D is the vegan-leaning counterpart to Mae Ploy in this set: none of the five Aroy-D lists below contains shrimp paste or sugar. But the formulas are not settled — one Thai-chef review notes a viewer reporting a version listing shrimp powder, and advises checking the pack. The lists below are the ImportFood Thai-source versions; a different pack may differ.

Thai curry paste — Maesri and Mekhala

Japanese curry — S&B Golden Curry roux and sauce

Japanese curry — House Foods Vermont Curry

Indian curry paste and simmer sauce — Patak's and Sharwood's

Malaysian / Singaporean paste — Prima Taste, Ayam Brand, Asian Home Gourmet, Mekhala

Seen but not verified — do not panel until checked

• FairPrice Chicken Curry Paste (FairPrice house brand) — named in FairPrice-related posts as sold at FairPrice; no verbatim ingredient list retrieved in this pass. Needs a FairPrice ingredient section or a pack photo.
• Golden Chef Singapore Laksa Paste, Singapore Chicken Curry Paste and Singapore Rendang Paste (FairPrice house brand) — confirmed as a FairPrice Group brand sold in Singapore, with laksa, chicken curry and rendang pastes named in FairPrice Group releases; no verbatim list retrieved for any of them in this pass.
• Dancing Chef Singapore Laksa Paste and Padang Rendang Paste — named in a Singapore laksa-paste round-up and a Singapore rendang-paste comparison as sold at FairPrice, Sheng Siong, Meidi-Ya and RedMart; no verbatim list retrieved in this pass.
• Woh Hup Laksa Paste and Rendang Paste; Singlong Laksa Paste and Rendang Paste; Yeo's curry pastes/sauces; Knorr and Maggi curry pastes/sauces — named in the brief or in Singapore round-ups; no verbatim list retrieved for any of them in this pass. Do not copy another brand's laksa or rendang list onto them.
• Nittaya Thai Green Curry Paste — named in FairPrice's similar-products listing, so Singapore sale is confirmed; no verbatim list retrieved in this pass.
• Tungsan Vegetarian Laksa Paste and Vegetarian Curry Paste — named in FairPrice's similar-products listing; no verbatim list retrieved in this pass.
• House Foods Java Curry (Medium Hot and other heat levels) — sold as a roux block; the Open Food Facts entry for the 220g Medium Hot is a garbled OCR transcription (words run together and misspelled) and cannot be panelled as a verbatim list. Needs a clean brand-site or pack list.
• House Foods Vermont Curry — Mild and Hot — only the Medium 115g list was retrieved; do not copy the Medium list onto Mild or Hot, which are different formulations.
• S&B Golden Curry Sauce with Vegetables — Mild, Hot and Extra Hot 230g — the Medium Hot pouch is panelled; the other three heat levels have different spice lists on the S&B site and were not panelled as separate rows in this pass. Do not copy the Medium Hot list onto them.
• Blue Elephant Thai Green Curry Sauce and Thai Panang Curry Premium Sauce — these are finished sauces, not pastes: the green sauce is 60.8% coconut milk with 10.1% green curry paste, and the Panang sauce is 58% coconut milk with 18% Panang curry paste. Their full sauce lists were retrieved (Open Food Facts / EWG) but they are not panelled here as paste rows; they belong as sauce rows in a future pass with their Singapore sale verified.
• Patak's Vindaloo and Madras Curry Paste; Patak's Korma Simmer Sauce — named in the brief; no verbatim list retrieved in this pass. Do not copy the butter chicken or tikka masala lists onto them.
• Sharwood's Tikka Masala and other Sharwood's cooking sauces — only the Butter Chicken sauce was retrieved; no verbatim list for the others in this pass.
• Maesri Green, Yellow, Panang and Massaman Curry Pastes; Maesri Red/Green/Panang/Massaman/Karee Simmer Sauces — only the Maesri Red paste was panelled; the simmer sauces are finished sauces (heat and serve, coconut milk included) and need separate rows with their own lists.
• Mekhala Massaman Curry Paste 100g — list retrieved (shallots, garlic, lime juice, galangal, Himalayan pink salt, dried red chillies, turmeric, coriander, fennel, cumin, cinnamon, cloves) but Singapore sale was not confirmed in this pass, and the other Mekhala pastes were confirmed via FairPrice while this one was not; held in seen-but-not-verified rather than panelled on an unconfirmed variant.
• Heavenly Wang Laksa Sayang Paste; Happy Belly Laksa Paste; Pong's laksa paste; Mak Nyonya Rendang Paste — named in Singapore laksa/rendang round-ups; no verbatim list retrieved in this pass.
• Giant, Sheng Siong, Mustafa, Don Don Donki, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart, Lazada Singapore and Shopee Singapore curry-paste and sauce ranges — no product-level inventory with retrievable verbatim lists was retrieved for any of these channels in this web pass. That is a gap in this page, not evidence that nothing is sold there: Donki and Meidi-Ya in particular sell Japanese roux and Thai pastes that need an in-store shelf check and pack photos. See research notes.
• Curry powder (dry) on its own — dry curry powder is a different product from curry paste and is out of the paste/sauce scope of this page unless a paste is made from it; do not merge dry-powder rows into paste rows.
• Fresh / chilled curry paste from wet-market or hawker stalls, and foodservice-only paste — out of scope for this retail page unless sold as a packaged retail product with a printed ingredient list; note separately if found.

Nutrition — what the numbers say

All figures in the table are as sold, per 100 g, except the Mae Ploy Red row, which is per serving (10 g) as printed by the USDA source and is not converted to per 100 g. Curry paste is used by the spoonful, not eaten by the 100 g, so per-100 g figures describe the paste in the jar, not a serving of finished curry — and a roux block's per-100 g figures describe the dry block before it is melted into water, so do not compare a roux row directly with a paste row. No official Singapore Nutri-Grade (A–D) was found printed on any curry paste or sauce listing in this pass, so none is quoted here; no grade has been assigned.

Salt and sodium: salt = sodium × 2.5. The table shows sodium as printed (in mg) with the salt equivalent in brackets. Where a source printed salt rather than sodium, sodium is derived as salt ÷ 2.5 and flagged as derived. Sodium is not presented as salt, and salt is not presented as sodium.

Total vs added sugars: most Singapore packs list total sugars, not added sugars. A total-sugars figure is never labelled here as "added sugar". Where a source states an added-sugars figure separately, it is noted in the research notes. The ingredient list remains the evidence for added sugar (sugar, palm sugar, glucose syrup) versus naturally occurring sugars.

Open Food Facts is a community database and is flagged as secondary where used: the pack and the retailer nutrition section take precedence if they disagree. Figures marked "not stated" were not in the source retrieved; they are not estimated, borrowed from another variant, or copied across flavours. Conflict, stated not resolved: Open Food Facts gives Mae Ploy Green Curry Paste 2.54 g salt per 100 g, while the UK percentage list for the same paste gives salt as 12.5% of the paste — the two cannot both describe the same pack, and the table uses the Open Food Facts per-100 g figure because that is the figure the nutrition source prints. Mae Ploy Panang's Open Food Facts salt figure (14.4 g per 100 g) is consistent with its percentage list (salt 13.5%), which makes the green-paste discrepancy a data-quality flag on that one entry rather than a general rule.

Observed numbers, no verdict: the S&B Mild roux block lists 500 kcal and 27.8 g fat per 100 g as sold — the highest energy and fat figures tabled here — but it is a dry block melted into water, so a serving of finished curry is far more dilute. Among the Thai pastes, Maesri Red lists 8.74 g sugars per 100 g (it is the only Thai paste here with sugar in the list), against 0 g for Mae Ploy Green and 4.4 g for Mae Ploy Panang. Mae Ploy Panang lists 5,760 mg sodium per 100 g (derived from 14.4 g salt), the highest sodium figure tabled here; the Prima Taste kit lists 566 mg sodium per 100 g, the lowest — but the kit figure covers paste plus coconut premix together, not paste alone.

Seen but not verified (nutrition): no per-100 g nutrition panel was verified in this pass for Mae Ploy Yellow or Massaman, any Aroy-D paste, any Mekhala paste, S&B Golden Curry Mix Medium Hot / Hot / Extra Hot, S&B Golden Curry Sauce with Vegetables, House Foods Vermont Curry, Patak's Butter Chicken Spice Paste, Patak's Tikka Masala Paste or Simmer Sauce, Sharwood's Butter Chicken Sauce, Prima Taste Laksa Meal Sauce Kit, any Ayam Brand paste, Asian Home Gourmet Singapore Laksa, or Mekhala Vegan Laksa Paste. Their ingredient panels are unchanged; their nutrition figures are not estimated here.

How to read a curry paste label — the jargon, in plain English

Curry paste

A concentrated blend of ground spices, herbs, oil and salt. You fry it, then add coconut milk, stock or water. The ingredient list is long because the spices are listed — that is normal, not a warning sign.

Simmer sauce / ready sauce / cooking sauce

A finished sauce. You heat it and add meat or vegetables; nothing else to add. Its list usually starts with water, tomato or coconut milk, not with spices alone.

Roux block (Japanese curry)

A solid block of curry roux — fat, flour, curry powder and seasoning — that melts into hot water to make the sauce. Different format from a paste; compare roux with roux, paste with paste.

Retort pouch

A sealed, shelf-stable pouch of finished sauce (here, S&B Golden Curry Sauce with Vegetables), heated in the pouch or pan. It already contains vegetables; a roux block does not.

Green / red / yellow curry (Thai)

Named for the chillies and herbs that colour them: green chillies and herbs for green, red chillies for red, turmeric for yellow. The colour is not a heat rating on its own — check the pack.

Massaman / Panang

Thai curries with their own spice blends. Massaman is usually milder and peanut/cinnamon-led; Panang is usually thicker, peanut-led and less soupy than green or red, and Mae Ploy's Panang is marked by mungbean. The ingredient list, not the name, shows which is which.

Butter chicken / tikka masala / vindaloo / Madras (Indian)

Different Indian curry styles. Butter chicken and tikka masala are usually tomato-and-cream-led; vindaloo is usually vinegar-and-chilli-led; Madras is usually chilli-led and hotter. Again, the list is the evidence.

Laksa paste / rendang paste

Malaysian/Singaporean pastes. Laksa paste is the base for laksa soup; rendang paste is the base for rendang. They are not interchangeable, and neither is a generic "curry paste".

Palm sugar / sugar

Sweeteners that appear in many Thai and Malaysian pastes. Their presence in the list is the evidence for added sugar; a total-sugars figure on the nutrition panel alone does not say whether sugar was added.

Shrimp paste / fish sauce

Common in Thai and Malaysian pastes. They are allergen-relevant (crustacean / fish) and matter for anyone avoiding seafood — check the allergen statement on the pack, not just the ingredient list.

Monosodium glutamate (MSG, E621) / disodium inosinate (E631) / disodium guanylate (E627) / yeast extract

Flavour enhancers that add savoury (umami) taste. Japanese roux blocks list all three enhancers; Thai pastes on this page list none; the Prima Taste sambal lists E621 and the Ayam Kurma paste lists yeast extract.

What this page is not

• Not a health score, and not a "best" pick. Paste, roux and simmer sauce are different products, and this page does not rank them.
• Not a taste test, and not a price comparison. Prices change weekly; ingredients change less often, but still change.
• Not complete. Only one panel rests on a Singapore-named source, no FairPrice ingredient section was retrievable for any curry paste or sauce, and the Giant, Sheng Siong, Mustafa, Don Don Donki, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart, Lazada and Shopee shelves were not inventoried with verified lists in this pass. The gaps are listed above, not hidden.

Sources and method

Checked 5–6 November 2026 from: Singapore Open Food Facts (S&B Golden Curry Mix Mild 220g, barcode 0074880030709, countries where sold Germany and Singapore); Open Food Facts world entries (Mae Ploy Green 8850367300020, Mae Ploy Panang 0044738102360, Prima Taste Singapore Curry 8886350061203, Patak's Tikka Masala Simmer Sauce US); S&B Foods global site (Golden Curry Mix Mild/Medium Hot/Hot/Extra Hot and Sauce with Vegetables); Yare Food Services / Thompsons manufacturer-supplied lists (Mae Ploy Green, Red, Panang percentages); Amazon UK/CA/US listings (Mae Ploy Green/Red percentages, Patak's Butter Chicken Paste); ImportFood Thai-source lists (Mae Ploy Yellow/Massaman, all five Aroy-D pastes); Moco Food Services specification (Maesri Red, per-100g nutrition); GloHealth / Amazon US / Santos Organics (Mekhala Green/Red/Yellow/Massaman/Laksa); Tops Thailand (House Vermont Curry Medium); ASDA/Tesco UK (Patak's Tikka Masala Paste, Sharwood's Butter Chicken Sauce); Wai Yee Hong (Prima Taste Laksa Kit); Ayam Brand Malaysia brand site (Chicken Curry, Rendang, Kurma pastes); Prospre/USDA (Asian Home Gourmet Laksa, Mae Ploy Red per-serving nutrition); FairPrice similar-products listings (Mekhala Green/Red/Yellow, Nittaya Green, S&B bundles, FairPrice Chicken Curry Paste, Tungsan pastes); Kaizenaire Singapore laksa-paste round-up (Prima Taste, Dancing Chef, Asian Home Gourmet, Singlong, Heavenly Wang); Seth Lui Singapore rendang-paste comparison (Prima Taste, Golden Chef, Mak Nyonya, Dancing Chef); FairPrice Group / Central Retail releases (Golden Chef range). Web search only — no in-store shelf check and no pack photos in this pass. Cold Storage publishes no ingredient list on any product page, so its shelf is inventoried from listings only. Full per-fact source list is in the accompanying research notes. Nutrition section added 5–6 November 2026: figures are standardised to per 100 g where the source gives per-100 figures; per-serving-only figures are labelled as such and are not converted; sugars are total sugars as printed, not added sugars, unless the source states added sugars; salt = sodium × 2.5. Where a full pack list could not be verified, the product is in seen-but-not-verified instead of being panelled.