Mutually Beneficial Migrations

Anyone who has been paying attention to international development knows the emerging middle class in select countries around the world is growing into an economic force to be reckoned with—and one that’s increasingly hungry for American foods and beverages (and other products…). One such country is Hong Kong, as noted in a news item we posted at the very end of 2009, and another is India, as mentioned yesterday morning by my brother, a certified financial analyst, during a breakfast economic forum at his firm that I sat in on (my father, also a CFA, is also in the same company’s ranks).

His point (one of many made during the morning … it’s a wild ride these days for financial analysts…) was to highlight the potential opportunity of investing in generally stable, developing economies around the world—such as in a company that has significant investment, and perhaps manufacturing, in that company (but is also leveraged in markets around the world to reduce the risk of putting all your eggs in one basket).

Of course, all the while I’m contextualizing this in terms of the food industry, knowing that the aforementioned mounting middle class is poised to spend their food dollars on American products—perhaps spun a bit into their respective ethnic directions to ease the transition.

I also know from my friends who work in international R&D that ideas that begin overseas sometimes follow a pattern of reverse migration back to America where they find a home with newly transplanted immigrants from those countries, those who have made America their home for quite a while and even everyday Americans looking for a twist on an old favorite. This happens in both foodservice and retail, but I bet it could happen a lot more often if manufacturers were willing to take a risk now and again, perhaps with regional, or even localized, offerings of the products to test the waters. (But major manufacturers are a bit like Steve Miller, who’s sitting on a bunch of blues covers he recorded for fear that they won’t sell as well as he would like. “I’m used to releasing a record and selling 2 or 3 million,” he said. “I don’t want to sell 22,000 copies.”)

As Wylie Dufresne, chef-owner of New York’s wd~50 poignantly noted in an article I recently edited for the next issue of CULINOLOGY® magazine: “All of our food comes from everywhere. It’s the immigrants who brought that food here who make it what it is.” Apple pie, New England clam chowder, Cajun and Creole … all of it is a transplant from another country—just like us. Sometimes we forget that all of us were immigrants at one point or another...

The article focuses on regional American foods, and the initial focus was all about those cool foods you can only find in Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Hawaii, Memphis, etc., perhaps citing original ethnic influences on those items and a bit on how they might fit into our larger, national foodscape. But we inevitably dug into how a new wave of regional cuisine is taking hold in America—again, growing directly out of our wonderful ethnic neighborhoods, typically in major cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. One prime example is the Korean barbecue meets Mexican cuisine of Chef Roi Choi, an immigrant from Korea who grew up in a Mexican neighborhood in LA who now runs the supercool—and Twitter-followed hot—Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck. Folks like Choi are key trendsetters of the new millennium.

Some of the best ideas travel the world over, morphing a bit here, skewing a bit there, and right back home again. Innovation has never tasted so sweet.