Where this starts
ethnic food
once too.
American supermarkets built the "ethnic" aisle after the Second World War, for soldiers who came home with a taste for Italian, German, and Japanese food.1 Spaghetti sat in that aisle. So did soy sauce.
Every cuisine in this Horizon Scan is on the same track. It arrives as foreign, gets boxed into its own aisle (segregated), and then, once enough shoppers adopt it, moves into the regular aisles alongside everything else (integrated). Sriracha has already made that move; plenty of stores now shelve it beside the barbecue sauce.
The question for a brand, an investor, or a retailer is which cuisine is next, and how to be there before it arrives.
A checklist of early signals, sorted by how fast they move
A Horizon Scan for one product, like chili crisp or pasta sauce, points straight at a decision: this jar, this price, this shelf. Global flavors is a whole category of decisions. What a Horizon Scan offers here is a checklist of early signals, so a brand can be building, an investor backing, and a retailer stocking a cuisine ahead of demand instead of chasing it after the peak. The signals don't all move at the same speed, and each speed calls for a different kind of attention. When a signal turns into something you can buy or sign, such as a new product on a major retailer's shelf or an acquisition, we call it a signpost. Each direction opens with its move; Priorities, near the end, marks where a signpost has already landed.
Be patient and keep watching
Government money behind a cuisine shows up at retail years after it's spent. South Korea's 2009 food program peaked at a major trade show in 2024.
Plan for the next category review
A chain moving a cuisine's products out of the international aisle and onto the main shelf, next to everyday staples, as Kroger began doing in 2019.1 Or a flavor house naming a "flavor of the year." A competitor may be reading the same signal.
Be ready before it's obvious
A TikTok-driven trend can move through Inception in about four months and be well into Adoption by the end of its first year. Formulation and capacity have to be ready before it breaks.
Most readers here are really hunting for one direction: West, toward what's emerging next. West only makes sense once you know what South, East, and North are telling you about the ground you're standing on.
- South · Past Where did it come from? How cuisines left the “ethnic” aisle: Taco Bell, Chobani, Siete, Sriracha.
- East · Now What is happening right now? Which cuisines have a breakout brand, and who owns it.
- West · Emerging What is just emerging? Cuisines, formats, and sourcing claims nobody has built a brand around.
- North · Future Where is the market going? Government food programs and the gap between trends and retail reviews.
Three readers, three reasons to read it
The same signal means something different depending on what you run.
Owns the brand risk and the authenticity question directly. The cuisine it picks and the sourcing story it tells are what its identity rests on, and what a potential partner checks first.
Writes a check on early evidence: a cuisine early enough that the winner isn't priced in, demand that showed up before the round, and a buyer at the end. PepsiCo, Marzetti, and DayDayCook have each bought a founder-led global-flavor brand since 2024.12,13,35 Early movers in open cuisines are lightly funded: Fila Manila has raised about $351,000.37
Cares most about the shelf itself: whether the international aisle still makes sense, and which supplier can prove a claim the store will put its name behind. Any one brand's story matters less. Its category reviews run once or twice a year, against trends that reach Adoption status in a few months.
Pick a route, adapted or authentic, before you pick a cuisine, then find one with cooks and first customers here but no brand yet.
The origin story
The "ethnic" aisle has a birthdate, and the timeline shows who has moved cuisines out of it since. Kroger studied the question in 2019, found most shoppers preferred integration over a separate section, and began moving international products into category-based aisles.3 David Chang, the Momofuku founder, has been openly critical of what the aisle signals to the children of immigrants who grow up shopping in it.2 Whether a store keeps the aisle is a question of which cuisines have finished assimilating.
Most of the recent entries are Asian. That fits the history: European cuisines have had a foothold here for centuries, so the movement of the last 40 years has come from Asia and Latin America. Chobani is the clearest non-Asian case on the list.
The aisle era 1940s–1960s
Foreign food gets a shelf of its own.
The chain era 1980s–2000s
Chains and governments carry cuisines to a mass market.
The brand-and-TikTok era 2010s–now
Founders sell their own food direct, and large companies buy the winners.
Two routes have worked. They cost different things.
One route adapts the food for people who've never tried it. The other sells the real thing to people who already know it and lets everyone else follow.
Taco Bell, Panda Express
Glen Bell's hard-shell taco grew fastest in places with few Mexican residents. When Gustavo Arellano wrote Taco USA in 2012, Brookings, South Dakota, was 95 percent white and under 1 percent Latino, and it had four Mexican restaurants.8 The chain created that demand; the local population didn't.
Panda Express, the largest Asian-food chain in the country, built its menu for a non-Chinese palate. Its own executives call the food "American Chinese."9
Reaches people fastest and at the lowest price point. Carries a permanent argument about authenticity.
Fly By Jing, Siete, Omsom
Jing Gao bottled the Sichuan flavors of the supper club she ran in Shanghai. The Garza family sold their own grain-free versions of the food they ate at home. Omsom partners with chefs from each cuisine it sells and pays them a share of sales.
Each started with food its founders or partners knew first-hand and grew outward from there. Two of the three have since sold, Siete for $1.2 billion.13
Slower to scale and dependent on a founder or partner with real standing. The story holds up when a buyer or partner checks it.
Our read. A large diaspora supplies the cooks and the first customers. A chain or a brand does the mainstreaming, and outside money decides how fast. Kickstarter and TikTok have made the authentic route far cheaper than it was in Glen Bell's day, while the adapted route still reaches more people faster. Founders disagree about which is better, and both have produced big outcomes. Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA, argues the adapted route did more than sell food: Taco Bell became "a gateway for Americans to accept Mexicans."8
Two flavors assimilated so completely that nobody remembers where they came from
Ballpark mustard is colored with turmeric
French's introduced its bright yellow "cream salad mustard" at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair to go with hot dogs.10 The color comes from turmeric, the spice behind South Asian curries. Nobody buying hot dog mustard today reads it as a South Asian ingredient.
"Curry" was a colonial catch-all
The British East India Company flattened many distinct Tamil, Kannada, and other regional dishes into one seasoning, sold as "Madras Curry Powder."25 Diaspora Co. and a growing number of South Asian chefs now name specific regional spices and blends instead. Mustard lost its origin by accident; curry lost its regional detail on purpose.
Avocado toast forgot it was Mexican
Most avocados eaten in the U.S. come from Mexico, and the fruit is a staple of Mexican cooking well beyond guacamole. Order avocado toast at a downtown brunch spot and nobody clocks it as Mexican food; it reads as its own category now. Mustard and curry got there through a dedicated brand or a colonial rename. Avocado got there just by showing up on enough menus.
Build the sales record in DTC before you pitch retail, and bet long on cuisines that governments have already paid to make familiar.
Trends move in months. Retail reviews a category once or twice a year.
"TikTok Is the New Food R&D Lab."
— The Food Institute22Retailers batch their category reviews because a reset is expensive: renegotiated slotting, new planograms, and a shelf changeover across hundreds of stores at once. Most categories get reviewed once or twice a year, and vendors are told to start building the relationship three to four months ahead.32
One retail-consulting blog puts the full arc of a viral food trend at about 16 weeks.31 In our experience that's too fast. Sixteen weeks gets a strong trend through Inception. Adoption takes most of the first year, which is still quick and a real accomplishment for the brand that gets it there. Proliferation and ubiquity take years.
Inception
The ignition point: a handful of creators post. Engagement spikes. Product is barely available.
Adoption
Food media picks it up. DTC sales climb, and the first retailers start asking.
Proliferation
Broad retail distribution. Competitors arrive, and margins compress.
Ubiquity
Strong trends become permanent assortment. Weaker ones flatten out.
Phases adapted from VOVAN Global's four-phase model; the timings are our read, slower than VOVAN's.
Get the timing right
Retailers that list a trend early tend to sell through faster than latecomers. The opposite risk is just as real: brands that chase a listing before their supply, margins, and repeat-purchase data are ready often lose the slot at the next review. A strong DTC run gives a brand both the evidence a buyer wants and the time to build supply.
A live example: sweet-heat
Sweet-heat pairings are centuries old in Korean, Mexican, Thai, and Sichuan cooking: gochujang, mole, chamoy. TikTok gave the pairing an English name, "swicy" (also sold as "sweet hot"), around 2021, and it broke through by 2023. Anita Shirodkar of the Indian brand Hotchaa! put it simply: "What the West is calling 'swicy' isn't new to us."24
Governments have been paying to grow this category for two decades
Some of this growth doesn't happen on its own. Thailand's Global Thai program grew the country's restaurant count abroad from roughly 5,000 to more than 15,000 after 2002.5 South Korea began funding Korean restaurants, standardized recipes, and culinary scholarships abroad in 2009, and by 2012 put its own spending at about $77 million.4,40 Korean food's breakout moment at Expo West came in 2024, 15 years after the money went in.
A cuisine with a decade of government-funded restaurants behind it arrives at the grocery shelf with name recognition already built, at no cost to the brand that benefits. Thai has largely run that course. Several newer programs haven't reached U.S. retail yet (see West 03).
Four slow-moving facts to check before committing
- Authenticity is a go/no-go filterOmsom pays partner chefs a share of sales so its founders never speak for a cuisine alone. That's a contract term, not a tagline, and it's what lets a brand survive a partner's or buyer's scrutiny.
- Some place-names are locked"Blue Zones" is a trademark held by Adventist Health, with 46 active registrations. "Mediterranean" and "Nordic" are generic and open. Check trademark status before building a position around a place.
- The international aisle is dissolving, chain by chainKroger has been moving products out of a single aisle since 2019.3 Most chains haven't followed at the same pace, so shelf placement has to be planned retailer by retailer.
- Import risk sits with the ingredient and the supplierThe FDA's cinnamon lead alerts, running since 2023, trace to specific supply chains, not to a whole region's cuisine.19 The batch behind the 2023 recall held up to 5,110 parts per million of lead; the FDA's limit for bottled water is 5 parts per billion.20,21 A verifiable single-origin claim answers that risk directly (see West 01).
Borrow the mechanics of the four breakout brands below (the Kickstarter proof, the chef contract, the priced sourcing claim) and take them to a cuisine nobody has claimed yet.
A map of claimed and open cuisines
With no single product to price, the useful map is cuisine by cuisine: who already has a household-name brand, and who doesn't.
Four brands everyone knows, and what to take from each
None of these names will surprise anyone who follows the category. The useful part is the specific move each one made.
| Brand | What it did | What to copy | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fly By JingSichuan · independent | Launched on a $120,000 Kickstarter in 2018 after Jing Gao counted only five Asian food vendors among roughly 3,000 at Expo West. Now in 12,000+ stores; raised $12 million after the product had found its market.6 | Sell first, raise later. Use collaborations, such as its work with Burlap & Barrel, to reach a new audience for less than paid media. | Chili crisp is now a crowded shelf. A new entrant needs an angle Fly By Jing can't copy. |
| OmsomVietnamese, Thai, Chinese · acquired | Sisters Vanessa and Kim Pham built it nights and weekends while working corporate jobs, sold out in 72 hours at launch in 2020, and reached 2,000+ stores. DayDayCook bought it in 2024.12 | Put authenticity in the contract: partner chefs get a share of sales. | The independent window closed within five years. Plan for an exit, or plan to defend against a consolidator. |
| Burlap & BarrelSingle-origin spice · independent | Founded in 2016 by Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar as a public benefit corporation — legally distinct from B Corp certification, but built to weigh purpose alongside profit. Buys direct from named farmers in 25+ countries at two to ten times the commodity price.17,42 | A sourcing claim with a number behind it. Smaller jars that push repeat purchase. | The model is proven in spices only. Nobody has applied it to a sauce or paste yet (West 01). |
| SieteMexican · acquired | Founded in 2014 by the Garza family on their own grain-free recipes. PepsiCo agreed to buy it for $1.2 billion in 2024.13 | Build on food the founders eat at home, and say so. | Mexican looked fully claimed, and it still had room for a $1.2 billion brand. "Claimed" is never final. |
Format note: most of the category's independent winners stayed in dry spice, paste, or fermented condiments. That sidesteps retort processing, a large capital cost for anything dairy-based.
The consolidation pattern. DayDayCook now owns Omsom, Yai's Thai, and Nona Lim, and has said it wants to become "the General Mills for Asian food."12 PepsiCo's Siete deal follows the same logic: founder-led brands prove a cuisine, then a larger company buys the winners. In February 2026 Marzetti agreed to pay $400 million for Bachan's, a Japanese barbecue sauce built on the founder's family recipe, with about $87 million in 2025 net sales.35 For a CPG brand, the independent window in a newly popular cuisine is a few years wide. For an investor, that window is the holding period.
How claimed is each cuisine, right now
Where menus are ahead of shelves
Datassential names Thai, Filipino, and Vietnamese as the fastest-growing cuisines on U.S. menus.23 Thai and Vietnamese already have scaled retail brands, and they share an owner. Filipino has an early mover, Fila Manila, but no brand at Fly By Jing or Omsom scale.
FMI's shopper data shows the demand: more than seven in ten shoppers look for fresh prepared Mexican food, and more than four in ten already seek Caribbean, Thai, Cuban, Korean, or sushi products.23
Chart as text
- Scaled brand, slower growth: Mexican (Siete), Sichuan (Fly By Jing).
- Scaled brand, faster growth: Thai (Yai's Thai), Vietnamese (Omsom).
- No scaled brand, faster growth: Filipino (early mover Fila Manila).
Positions are a reading of this evidence, not measured values. West African and regional Levantine and South Asian cuisines are candidates for the open corner but unconfirmed.
Not one buyer: five, and they don't want the same thing
Four shoppers, two questions, one gatekeeper
How familiar is the cuisine, and does the shopper need proof before buying? Two of the four want proof before they trust a label. The Retailer's Buyer decides whether any of them see the product at all.
Chart as text
- Familiar, needs proof: Wary Buyer.
- Novel-leaning, needs proof: Provenance Buyer.
- Familiar, trusts the story: Diaspora Cook.
- Novel, trusts the story: Explorer.
- Outside the grid: the Retailer's Buyer, who decides which products reach the shelf.
Positions are a reading of the profiles below, not survey data.
Build on one of the openings below only if you can prove where its ingredients came from and how they were grown and picked.
Where the opportunities are
This section rests on less confirmed research than East. Module 02, further down, is scoped to firm it up.
The risk map, in one place
Three risks travel with any decision to build around an unfamiliar ingredient: contamination (the cinnamon recalls, in North), labor practices, and supply concentration. Ask all three before committing to a sourcing story, not just the one in the news.
Cocoa: an unmet promise from 2001
Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana supply roughly 70 percent of the world's cocoa. A U.S. Department of Labor-funded study estimated 1.56 million children doing hazardous work on cocoa farms in those two countries. The major chocolate makers pledged in 2001 to end the worst of it by 2005, and have pushed the deadline back four times since, most recently to 2025.26
Coconut: when the labor isn't human
PETA investigations in 2019 and 2020 documented monkeys chained and forced to pick coconuts on Thai farms supplying Chaokoh, a major coconut milk brand. PETA says more than 45,000 stores, including Walmart, Costco, Target, and Kroger, dropped the brand; the supplier disputes the allegations.27,28 Any coconut-based product inherits this question.
Supply concentration: the risk under the other two
Most commercial cacao, like most commercial spice, comes from a narrow set of high-yield hybrid varieties. That concentration leaves little margin for error, the same weakness that let lead into cinnamon. Genomic and isotopic testing that can verify where a bean came from is still emerging, but it's the eventual hard proof behind a single-origin claim.
What a different outcome looks like
ChocoSol Traders and the cacao nobody else wanted
ChocoSol, a Toronto chocolate maker, has spent two decades in a direct relationship with the Chinanteco community of San Felipe de León in Oaxaca. Its focus is cacao blanco (Theobroma bicolor), a traditional relative of ordinary cacao that industrial chocolate ignores because it doesn't fit a commodity supply chain. The community had depended on coffee, which left it exposed to price crashes and blight. Growing white cacao alongside red cacao in a forest garden gave it a second crop nobody else was buying, and ChocoSol's Jaguar bars have since won recognition at the International Chocolate Awards.29 The pattern repeats at scale: Fairtrade's household survey found cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire saw average household income grow 85 percent between 2016/17 and 2020/21, driven mostly by better yields and more varied income, by Fairtrade's own account.30
Sorting the signals: which ones to act on, which ones to watch
The four directions cast a wide net. This step narrows it. Every factor in the scan is plotted on two questions it has already raised: how fast is it moving (the long-lead versus short-fuse split from the opening), and has anyone already claimed it (East's ownership map)? Each quadrant calls for a different kind of attention.
Pick a reader to see where they should look first.
Read the grid as a list
How to use this grid
Treat placements as a starting point for discussion, not a verdict. Two axes can't hold everything, and a factor can move between quadrants as the research modules come back. Ube could be claimed within a year; Filipino could shift from long-lead to short-fuse with one breakout brand. The aim is a short list of two to five priorities. A list of fifteen is just the scan again.
You don't need the family recipe to have a role
A founder without roots in a cuisine can still build in it. Glen Bell wasn't Mexican. He sold an adapted taco to Americans who'd never had one. South shows that this adapted entry point, more than the size of a diaspora, is what moves a cuisine into the mainstream. That leaves room for a founder from outside the culture, as long as the product says plainly what it is. Four routes fit the open quadrants.
The risk doesn't go away. A brand that borrows a cuisine's name without its people is the first one a critic checks. Each route works only when the label is honest and someone from the cuisine is paid for what they bring.
Four questions to put to a founder in this category
The same evidence that tells a founder where to build tells an investor what to check. These four come straight from the scan.
The money is thin at this stage. U.S. food and beverage venture funding fell 43% year over year in the first quarter of 2025,38 and Omsom had raised only about $3.2 million before it sold.39 That's an opening for an early backer, and a reason the founder's plan has to work on a small round.
DayDayCook wants to be the General Mills of Asian food. That's not who a new entrant is competing with.
Pick a cuisine still on the way up
Sichuan, Vietnamese, and Thai each have a recognized brand, and two of the three now share one owner. The opening is one step earlier on the same track: a cuisine with cooks and customers here, growing on menus, without its Fly By Jing yet.
Make traceability the pitch
Burlap & Barrel showed that a named farm and a price paid directly make a stronger claim than most of this category is making. Shoppers primed by recall coverage are already asking where an unfamiliar ingredient came from.
Time the retail pitch to the evidence
DTC and TikTok Shop are the right channels through Adoption, when a trend builds fastest and margins are best. Pitch retail when supply and repeat-purchase data can hold the slot, not the moment a buyer shows interest.
Filipino, starting with the condiments
Filipino food is growing fast on U.S. menus, has an early mover, and has no scaled brand. It's also not an especially spicy cuisine overall, which matters more than it sounds: "spicy" is the most polarizing word in the food lexicon, and a lower floor on heat widens who'll try it. Its condiments, such as banana ketchup, atchara, and spiced vinegar, let a shopper try the cuisine without learning to cook it, and they suit the paste-and-concentrate format. That's where we'd start research module 01. A founder doesn't need Filipino heritage to make this bet; the four routes in Priorities show how to do it honestly.
Two research add-ons
Each one is scoped to a decision you'll need to make before launch.
This is step one of three.
This first Horizon Scan maps the category. A second pass goes deep on the angle that matters most to you: a specific cuisine, a sourcing claim, or a channel strategy. A third version follows, sized to your real constraints. Tell Rick which decision is most pressing and he'll scope the next step.
Reach Rick directly at rick@picklesandsoup.com.
Where these claims come from
Sources are public. Figures from market-research vendors are directional, and we've flagged anything we couldn't confirm firsthand. The small numbers in the text link to these sources. Market-size and forecast figures vary by research vendor; verify them against current sources before using them in investor or buyer materials.
- The New York Times. "Why Do American Grocery Stores Still Have an Ethnic Aisle?" (Aug. 10, 2021) — aisle's origin serving returning World War II soldiers; Kroger moving products out of the aisle from 2019. (opens in a new tab) nytimes.com
- RetailWire. "Should grocery stores retire the ethnic aisle?" — David Chang commentary. (opens in a new tab) retailwire.com
- Tasting Table. "7 Grocery Store Chains With The Best International Food Selections" — Kroger's 2019 integration decision. (opens in a new tab) tastingtable.com
- The Hustle. "The $40m bet that made South Korea a food and cultural power." (opens in a new tab) thehustle.co
- USC Center on Public Diplomacy. "Eight Great Gastrodiplomacy Nations." (opens in a new tab) uscpublicdiplomacy.org
- Shopify. "How Fly By Jing Turned Chili Crisp Into an Eight-Figure Brand." (opens in a new tab) shopify.com
- Boulder Weekly. "How Taco Bell put the Mexican in American" — Glen Bell's founding strategy. (opens in a new tab) archives.boulderweekly.com
- Round Top. "The Rambling Boy: Mexican Food History" — the Brookings, SD example, citing Gustavo Arellano's Taco USA. (opens in a new tab) roundtop.com
- Wikipedia. "Panda Express." (opens in a new tab) en.wikipedia.org
- Rochester Business Journal. "2005 Rochester Business Hall of Fame" — the French family's creamy mustard, introduced at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. (opens in a new tab) rbj.net
- Fast Company. "These sisters founded a 'loud and proud' Asian sauce company — and the results are delicious." (opens in a new tab) fastcompany.com
- AOL / Yahoo Finance. "Omsom is taking Asian food mainstream as demand grows for ethnic packaged food" — DayDayCook's "General Mills for Asian food" quote. (opens in a new tab) aol.com
- PepsiCo. "PepsiCo to Acquire Siete Foods for $1.2 Billion." (opens in a new tab) pepsico.com
- Nosh.com. "Fila Manila Expands National Distribution into Whole Foods, Target, Meijer, and Stop & Shop." (opens in a new tab) nosh.com
- New Hope Network. "Two-time NEXTY winner Fila Manila brings Filipino flavors to shelves nationwide" (Sept. 2022) — Sprouts and Target launches. (opens in a new tab) newhope.com
- Food Dive. "T. Hasegawa USA declares ube 2024's 'flavor of the year.'" (opens in a new tab) fooddive.com
- Burlap & Barrel. "Social Impact" report (2021) — public benefit corporation, launched October 2016, pays partner farmers 2–10x the commodity price. (opens in a new tab) burlapandbarrel.com
- FoodNavigator-USA. "Fila Manila taps into 'pent-up demand' for next generation of Filipino-American flavors" (July 2022) — coconut and ube jams. (opens in a new tab) foodnavigator-usa.com
- FDA. "Post-Incident Response Activities: Elevated Lead and Chromium Levels in Cinnamon Applesauce Pouches." (opens in a new tab) fda.gov
- NPR. "The FDA adds more brands to a new alert for lead-contaminated cinnamon" — original WanaBana ppm figures. (opens in a new tab) npr.org
- AARP. "Is the cinnamon on your shelf safe?" — FDA's bottled-water lead limit for comparison. (opens in a new tab) aarp.org
- The Food Institute. "TikTok Is the New Food R&D Lab — And It's Moving Lightning Fast." (opens in a new tab) foodinstitute.com
- A. Elizabeth Sloan, Institute of Food Technologists. "Top 10 Food Trends" — Datassential and FMI cuisine-demand data. (opens in a new tab) ift.org
- India Food Network. "India Invented Swicy — The West Just Gave It a Name" — Anita Shirodkar quote. (opens in a new tab) indiafoodnetwork.in
- Errol Schweizer, Grocery Nerd (Substack). "Grocery Update #64: The New Spice Traders" — Burlap & Barrel's "third wave" framing; Diaspora Co. interview and its editor's note on "curry." (opens in a new tab) grocerynerd.substack.com
- FairPlanet. "Inside the fight against child labour in the cocoa industry" — 1.56 million figure, Harkin-Engel Protocol timeline. (opens in a new tab) fairplanet.org
- KTVU / FOX. "Walmart drops Chaokoh coconut milk after PETA allegations of forced monkey labor" — 45,000+ stores per PETA; Kroger, Costco, Target also stopped selling it. (opens in a new tab) ktvu.com
- Fox Business. "Walmart drops Chaokoh coconut milk after PETA allegations about forced monkey labor" — store count, supplier response. (opens in a new tab) foxbusiness.com
- ChocoSol Traders. "Albino Cacao & The Regeneration of Oaxaca's Forest Gardens" and "What Is Jaguar Chocolate?" — San Felipe de León partnership, cacao blanco / Theobroma bicolor. (opens in a new tab) chocosoltraders.com
- Fairtrade International. "New study shows higher incomes for Fairtrade cocoa farmers" — Côte d'Ivoire household income survey. (opens in a new tab) fairtrade.net
- VOVAN Global (retail-consulting blog). "TikTok Food Trends 2026: 7 Viral Products for Retail Buyers" — four-phase trend lifecycle timeline. (opens in a new tab) vovanglobal.de
- RangeMe. "How Retailers Review Products." (opens in a new tab) help.rangeme.com
- Wikipedia. "Philippine condiments" — banana ketchup, atchara, and spiced vinegars. (opens in a new tab) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia. "Chobani" — founding, 2007 launch, Hamdi Ulukaya. (opens in a new tab) en.wikipedia.org
- The Marzetti Company. "The Marzetti Company Announces Agreement to Acquire Bachan's, Inc." (Feb. 3, 2026) — $400M; about $87M net sales in 2025. (opens in a new tab) s206.q4cdn.com
- Food Business News. "DayDayCook gets prouder, louder through Omsom acquisition" — cash and stock paid over four years. (opens in a new tab) foodbusinessnews.net
- PitchBook. "Fila Manila Overview" — about $351K raised. (opens in a new tab) pitchbook.com
- Nosh (BevNET). "Cash Crunch or Comeback? Q1 Food & Beverage Financing Trends" — FABID Q1 2025 report, $367M. (opens in a new tab) nosh.com
- CB Insights. "Omsom: Financials" — $3.16M raised before acquisition. (opens in a new tab) cbinsights.com
- The Korea Times. "'Hansik' globalization efforts in full swing," Aug. 2012 — more than 87 billion won (about $77 million) spent since 2009. (opens in a new tab) koreatimes.co.kr
- Fortune. "Early on, Fly by Jing founder was rejected by every investor she approached," March 2023. (opens in a new tab) fortune.com
- Burlap & Barrel press release via Nombase. "Single Origin Spice Company Burlap & Barrel Celebrates its 10th Anniversary" (Oct. 2026) — farmers in more than 25 countries. (opens in a new tab) nombase.com