There are of course many Asian food brands that have managed to find their footing overseas, such as Kikkoman in the soy sauce category and Samyang in the ramyeon category.
But all too often, these have tended to be large companies with the capability to invest in local manufacturing capabilities or the scale to export in bulk to the United States or Europe, hence able to take better control of these western markets and ensure supermarket shelf space for visibility.
Putting this investment power aside, the only way for brands operating at a smaller scale is to ensure they make products that are unforgettable or even irreplaceable to the palate of the western consumer — and doing this well is no small feat.
According to export-focused brand Buono, based out of Thailand, there are several factors that are very much make or break when it comes to innovating with local cuisines, especially when targeting foreign markets.
1) Authenticity
The first mistake that many food brands make is to go too far with localisation, or taking attempts to cater for local palates to the extreme.
“We work a lot with Thai street food which is a culture in itself, and have discovered that all over the world and especially in the United States, authenticity is what most consumers are looking for and the more authentic the taste is, the higher the potential for growth,” Buono Assistant CEO Bee Supavarasuwat said at the ThaiFex-Anuga Asia 2026 show in Bangkok, Thailand.
“This is especially important when the product is made of ingredients that are not easy to find so the taste is not easily replicated, and authentic options are hard to access in that market.”
Street food in Thailand comprises numerous potential food options from sweet kanom krok (coconut cake) to pad thai (rice noodles).
With the rise of tourism and Thailand in particular as a popular holiday destination for travellers from all over the world, awareness is actually fairly high regarding what the authentic versions of various street food should taste like.
“We specialise in bringing these street foods to consumers in accessible formats, as many of these are not easy to make at home, but can also be very expensive to find in restaurants — many items are not even made or sold outside of Thailand,” she added.
“This is why we focus on making versions of these street foods that taste entirely the same as one might have in Thailand, but can easily be prepared at home with an air fryer or microwave.”
2) Novelty
While authenticity is generally very important to the modern consumer especially if they are well-travelled, Buono has also found a big change in terms of consumer attention span, making innovation even more important to keeping hold of their attention.
“The thing is that with so many food options available to them, consumers today anywhere in the world are even more easily bored than usual, meaning they need even more new things and experiences to stay focused on us,” Supavarasuwat said.
“This means constantly creating new things and new flavours, and now there is an increasing need to also play with new textures to round out the consumption experience.”
Buono’s answer to this intense demand for novelty has been to develop the Thai version of the ice cream cookie, bringing many different textures and flavours to a typical dessert.
“The ice cream is made using coconut milk and the ‘cookie’ is made from crispy rice crackers dipped in chocolate, a very distinctly Thai snack that brings a very different multi-textured experience of creaminess and crunch to the consumer,” she said.
“We’ve also seen much higher interest in exotic Asian flavours such as black sesame and pandan when it comes to innovations — Australia for example is really seeing a boom in pandan and using this in all sorts of desserts, showing that this traditionally Asian flavour is growing its hold on western markets too.”
3) Messaging by market
In the past, western food brands often got flack for attempting to commercialise products in Asia by wholesale using the same strategy that worked in their home markets.
This situation has changed a great deal as more and more brands become aware of the need for localisation, but Supavarasuwat stressed that there is a need for Asian brands to be careful not to fall into this same trap as well.
“Buono is at our heart a plant-based brand and we are creating all of these Thai street foods and desserts using plant-based ingredients, but we were never part of the meat alternatives hype a few years ago and just focused on innovation in our own way,” she said.
“However, we did have an idea that plant-based is generally just a very welcome concept in the west, and have since learned that this is not always so — for things like our coconut milk ice creams for example, Australia viewed the ‘plant-based’ messaging very positively and as a healthy product; but in the US, mentioning ‘plant-based’ or ‘dairy-free’ was found to be less attractive.”
The key lesson for food firms to learn here is that no matter the market, wording matters and there is a need to not take things for granted, and be exceptionally careful in each market.
Given the response in a market like the US, the homeground of the best-known plant-based brands like Beyond and Impossible, it is eminently clear that no pre-assumptions should be made about any sort of acceptance.
