Food Companies that Seek to Expand Abroad Should Target the Cool and the Cosmopolitan
To ask people about their favorite foods can often be a very personal experience. One would find many people from around the world to be very particular about what they find to be delicious (perhaps with the exception of rural Africans), based a set of ingredients and cooking methods that are peculiar to certain cultures. But more than the sum of ingredients and cooking methods, people define a delicacy based their personal encounters with the foods in question, often laced in memories that are not easily replicable. Stories of mom's cooking and hidden restaurants in unknown destinations do not converge among different people.
That is, defining what is delicious is a very subjective matter. Unfortunately, that makes introducing foods particular to one culture to other cultures quite difficult. For people who are used to certain tastes from when they were younger, being told to like another completely new style of food can be rather disorienting. The chances are that, while excited to try out foods from other parts of the world as a deliberate adventure for the palate, eating "exotic cuisines" would be confined to not-so-often outings to nice restaurants for special occasions, daily cooking at home remains mostly based on traditional recipes from that cultural locale.
Of course, food cultures evolve based on the borrowing of ideas from other parts of the world. There is no doubt that European cuisines changed much through the import of ingredients from the Spice Islands and the Western Hemisphere, such changes occurred over decades, if not centuries, in a very slow and piecemeal fashion. When whole cuisines, like the Chinese and Indian, did arrive, they rapidly evolved to conform to local preferences, losing their most exotic elements while creating new dishes that locals in the destination culture, not the origin, would find delicious.
Such particularity of regional foods presents a problem for companies that seek to introduce new foods at industrial quantities to a new place. As people seeking to make a living off selling foods in massive quantities, that do not have the time to wait for decades before locals get accustomed to the new imports. And because they are looking at multiple destinations at the same time and thrive on the economy of scale, they often do not have the resources or the incentives to tweak the taste of their products for each and every destination that they seek to serve.
So, as food companies go global, how do they overcome the inherent difficulties of getting people in other cultures to take up new foodstuffs? A couple of strategies come to mind. First is to establish the idea that some foods are "cool" and eating those foods can make a person cool. When the "coolness" is established, people in other markets are likely to buy the foods and eat them even if they are not particularly fond of the foods' tastes. Such use of cultural power explains how young trend-setting crowds in Japan, not traditionally a country known for spicy foods, is quickly taking up Korean foods.
But not every company has the luxury of having a "cool culture" in the land of its origin. For companies based in more obscure countries, it might be wise to piggyback off the coolness of other countries and focus on developing foods that do not actually originate in their home countries but do it better and cheaper. An interesting example is the massive influx of Turkish-made pasta products across the world. As pasta gradually became more widely accepted, from regional Italian cuisine to a national dish, to a Western one, and then a global favorite, it made sense for people of other countries, like the Turks, to supersede the Italians in selling them.
Indeed, with a much faster spread of information and greater people-to-people exchanges, there is a greater chance of more regional and national foods becoming globally well-known and available at ever-faster rates. While people's conservatism when it comes to foods means that as a percentage of the overall population, the people who regularly indulge in exotic cuisines will remain small for years and decades to come, the emergence of globally available dishes, like the humble pasta, means that companies can sell the same certain products across the world with little modification and bring in healthy amount of sales.
Without a doubt, getting people not used to it to start eating a new food will always be difficult. People like what they ate growing up and are likely to stick to them as they grow older. But the modern world, with the rapid spread of globalized cultural phenomena, is really as good as it gets for food producers that seek to make their marks not only within a single culture. But tapping the "coolness" of certain cultures and ubiquity of certain dishes, they can at least corner the market for a cosmopolitan elite that might be small in number within every market, but add up to decent numbers when looked at from a global perspective.
That is, defining what is delicious is a very subjective matter. Unfortunately, that makes introducing foods particular to one culture to other cultures quite difficult. For people who are used to certain tastes from when they were younger, being told to like another completely new style of food can be rather disorienting. The chances are that, while excited to try out foods from other parts of the world as a deliberate adventure for the palate, eating "exotic cuisines" would be confined to not-so-often outings to nice restaurants for special occasions, daily cooking at home remains mostly based on traditional recipes from that cultural locale.
Of course, food cultures evolve based on the borrowing of ideas from other parts of the world. There is no doubt that European cuisines changed much through the import of ingredients from the Spice Islands and the Western Hemisphere, such changes occurred over decades, if not centuries, in a very slow and piecemeal fashion. When whole cuisines, like the Chinese and Indian, did arrive, they rapidly evolved to conform to local preferences, losing their most exotic elements while creating new dishes that locals in the destination culture, not the origin, would find delicious.
Such particularity of regional foods presents a problem for companies that seek to introduce new foods at industrial quantities to a new place. As people seeking to make a living off selling foods in massive quantities, that do not have the time to wait for decades before locals get accustomed to the new imports. And because they are looking at multiple destinations at the same time and thrive on the economy of scale, they often do not have the resources or the incentives to tweak the taste of their products for each and every destination that they seek to serve.
So, as food companies go global, how do they overcome the inherent difficulties of getting people in other cultures to take up new foodstuffs? A couple of strategies come to mind. First is to establish the idea that some foods are "cool" and eating those foods can make a person cool. When the "coolness" is established, people in other markets are likely to buy the foods and eat them even if they are not particularly fond of the foods' tastes. Such use of cultural power explains how young trend-setting crowds in Japan, not traditionally a country known for spicy foods, is quickly taking up Korean foods.
But not every company has the luxury of having a "cool culture" in the land of its origin. For companies based in more obscure countries, it might be wise to piggyback off the coolness of other countries and focus on developing foods that do not actually originate in their home countries but do it better and cheaper. An interesting example is the massive influx of Turkish-made pasta products across the world. As pasta gradually became more widely accepted, from regional Italian cuisine to a national dish, to a Western one, and then a global favorite, it made sense for people of other countries, like the Turks, to supersede the Italians in selling them.
Indeed, with a much faster spread of information and greater people-to-people exchanges, there is a greater chance of more regional and national foods becoming globally well-known and available at ever-faster rates. While people's conservatism when it comes to foods means that as a percentage of the overall population, the people who regularly indulge in exotic cuisines will remain small for years and decades to come, the emergence of globally available dishes, like the humble pasta, means that companies can sell the same certain products across the world with little modification and bring in healthy amount of sales.
Without a doubt, getting people not used to it to start eating a new food will always be difficult. People like what they ate growing up and are likely to stick to them as they grow older. But the modern world, with the rapid spread of globalized cultural phenomena, is really as good as it gets for food producers that seek to make their marks not only within a single culture. But tapping the "coolness" of certain cultures and ubiquity of certain dishes, they can at least corner the market for a cosmopolitan elite that might be small in number within every market, but add up to decent numbers when looked at from a global perspective.
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