Start with how fast the sauce moves, not how big the bottle is
The most common mistake is buying the largest bottle on the shelf. A squeeze bottle that takes three weeks to empty is a bottle that spends three weeks going stale at the tip, and a thick sauce left in a narrow bore will eventually need a soak. Size the bottle to a week of normal use and you will never think about it again.
As a rough rule: a table gets 8 oz, a home fridge door gets 12 oz, a griddle or a sandwich station gets 16 oz, and a busy service gets 24 or 36 oz. If two sizes look equally plausible, take the smaller one and buy a second bottle.
Match the tip to the thickness of what you are dispensing
A narrow tip gives you a line. It suits oil, vinaigrette, a thin hot sauce, a chocolate drizzle and anything where placement matters more than volume. Push a thick barbecue sauce through the same tip and you will be squeezing hard enough to deform the bottle.
A wider bore moves a heavy sauce without effort but it will not give you a fine line, so a kitchen that plates and sauces usually ends up with both. Every bottle we make has a wide mouth for filling regardless of the tip, because a bottle you cannot get a brush into is a bottle you will throw away.
Decide on inverted before you decide on colour
An inverted bottle stands on its cap with a self-closing silicone valve, so the sauce is always ready and the tip never crusts. For a mayonnaise, an aioli or a thick BBQ sauce used all day, it is genuinely better.
It is the wrong bottle for anything with pulp, seeds or herbs. Solids sit in the valve, the valve stops closing, and you now own a bottle that drips. If what you dispense has texture, take a standard bottle with a tethered cap.
Buy the pack size the station needs, not a mixed set
Standardising a station on one capacity means caps interchange, racks fit and nobody picks up the wrong bottle mid-service. That is why our packs run in threes, sixes and tens of a single size rather than as assortments.
If you are stocking from scratch, six 16 oz bottles and three 8 oz bottles covers almost any kitchen. Add a 36 oz only when you are refilling the 16s more than once a day.