Ethnic Food Trends Spice Up Restaurant Sales

By Rieva Lesonsky

What’s the hot new food trend these days? According to Mintel’s Global New Products Database (GNPD), lesser-known ethnic fare—specificially, Thai, Japanese and Caribbean food–has experienced rapid growth.

In 2010 alone, Mintel’s GNPD tracked a 150 percent increase from 2009 in new food items containing “Caribbean” in the product description. “Japanese” product launches increased more than 230 percent from 2009-2010, and “Thai” product launches rose by 68 percent  from 2009-2010.

“Italian, Mexican and Asian cuisine are the more mainstream, popular ethnic cuisines,” said David Lockwood, senior analyst at Mintel. “But Thai, Caribbean and Japanese foods are seeing healthy growth, and consumers seem to be getting more comfortable with a wider variety of ethnic flavors.”

One reason ethnic product launches are increasing, according to Mintel, may be the wide variety of outlets consumers can use to learn more about foods that aren’t common to their ethnic background. Some 26 percent of ethnic food-lovers say they were introduced to the cuisine by TV programs, newspapers or magazines featuring cuisine from other countries.

• Twenty-three percent of ethnic food users said they tried the items after reading cookbook recipes that included ethnic dishes;
• 18 percent said they grew to like ethnic fare after travelling abroad;
• 25 percent said they were introduced to a new ethnic cuisine because of living in a culturally diverse neighborhood.

Mintel said these outlets are contributing to a trend called “professionalization of the amateur,” in which consumers are more interested in doing things at home that would normally be done by an expert, such as preparing a complex ethnic dish.  Says Lockwood, “Cooking programs, culinary magazines and recipe websites are an easy way to get more comfortable with ethnic food preparation.”

Image by Flickr user Bangkok_Diary (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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