Sodium acetate is a multifunctional ingredient that can be used in food, medicine, DNA isolation, printing and dyeing, photography, electroplating, tanning, rubber, and etc.

Let’s see some of its applications:

Food
This ingredient can be found in salad dressing, sauce, dumpling, sausage, steamed fish paste, bread and rice cake.

There are general three purposes of sodium acetate in food:

PH regulator or a buffer: maintain a specific pH content in food when used together with acetic acid and sometimes in the form of sodium diacetate, which is a molar ratio of 1:1 sodium acetate and acetic acid.
Preservative: prevent microorganism cultivation.
Taste improver: the combination of acetic acid to make the sour (vinegar) taste of acetic acid mild.
Medical use
It can be used as an electrolyte replenisher to prevent low levels of sodium in blood.

Meanwhile, sodium acetate trihydrate can be used in reusable heating pads and hand warmers as it contains three waters of crystallization, which will be released from the crystal if heated to its melting temperature – 58°C.

And then sodium acetate dissolves in three waters of crystallization and forms a supersaturated solution. Such solution (not stable) will not form crystals when cooled to room temperature, but can be crystallized again if with some method.

The process of crystallization is exothermic (emit heat) and this property can be utilized in hot packs and hand warmers.

DNA extraction/precipitation
Sodium acetate and ethanol are commonly added to extract nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) from aqueous solution.

Nucleic acids are polar and soluble in water. Sodium acetate is used to make the nucleic acids molecule insoluble in water by neutralizing the negative charges (PO3- groups) on the sugar phosphate backbone of nucleic acids with the dissociated sodium ions.

Compared with water, ethanol enables the interaction between Na+ and PO3- much easier, making nucleic acids precipitate out of solution.