SPEAKER_05: With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions, even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One NA, member FDIC. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather. From soft, breezy layers that you can move in with ease, to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear, and t-shirts are the number one, two, and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless, and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99-P-I and use code 99-P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas, B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99-P-I, code 99-P-I. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the mid 1950s, Stephen Chen attended a primary school called Buckingham in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right by the Charles River.
SPEAKER_07: At that time, there were no Asians in the whole school, so they were trying to diversify a little bit.
SPEAKER_05: Actually, there were exactly two Asians, Stephen and his sister. Every spring, their school had a fair called Buckingham Circus with games and activities for the students. Parents would put on a bake sale showing off their dishes. One year, Joyce Chen decided to bring in egg rolls.
SPEAKER_07: My mom did egg rolls, which were more kind of Americanized egg rolls, not traditional Chinese egg rolls.
SPEAKER_11: As in, the egg rolls weren't like the ones Chinese families would typically eat.
SPEAKER_05: That's producer Shirley Wong.
SPEAKER_11: Her recipe for egg rolls back then used thicker shells and half a pound of hamburger.
SPEAKER_07: She thought that maybe it'll be more recognizable for the American public.
SPEAKER_11: Just in case the egg rolls weren't well received, Joyce came with a backup, a plate of pumpkin cookies. She dropped off her dishes and went home to clean. When she came back, the egg rolls were missing.
SPEAKER_07: And the first thing in her mind was, well, maybe they didn't sell, they didn't know what it was. But as she got to the table, the parents reminding the food table said, you know, Mrs. Chen, those egg rolls that you made, they sold out completely. Can you do and make more?
SPEAKER_05: Joyce was thrilled. She made them every year, even after her kids graduated from the school.
SPEAKER_07: At the school fair, they would announce through the public, the PA system, that the Joyce and egg rolls have arrived and people would be rushing over to get them.
SPEAKER_11: Joyce and her family immigrated from Shanghai, pushed out of the country during the Chinese Communist Revolution. Her father had been a city official and she grew up with a family chef. When she first moved to the U.S., Joyce had been a housewife.
SPEAKER_05: But that experience with the egg rolls changed Joyce's life after seeing how much people in the U.S. really liked Chinese food. She decided to tap into that market. She wrote a popular Chinese cookbook. She opened one high-end restaurant and then three more. Joyce eventually became a single mom. And while raising three kids on her own, she also hosted a nationally syndicated show called Joyce Chen Cooks.
SPEAKER_09: As I said, chicken feet, all Chinese like it. Chicken feet is really a delicacy in Chinese cooking. So we have to chop them off by a heavy knife.
SPEAKER_11: By the early 70s, Joyce Chen was flourishing as an entrepreneur and a celebrity in the cooking world. James Beard recognized her as one of the best when it came to Chinese cuisine. She was even put on a U.S. postage stamp. In 1982, she launched Joyce Chen Specialty Foods, a line of Chinese cooking sauces made with high-quality ingredients. Products like duck sauce, soy sauce, hoisin, and sesame oil, all bottled and labeled with Joyce's name, and shipped to the grocery stores across the country.
SPEAKER_05: The supermarket was a different arena for Joyce. She didn't have much say over how or where their products were displayed. She put her precious namesake into the store's hands.
SPEAKER_05: These were gourmet products made with the same ingredients she used in her upscale restaurants. But even so, when she and Steven ventured into supermarkets, they would find her sauces lumped together with all the other Asian items.
SPEAKER_11: Joyce Chen's sauces were placed onto a section that's come to be known as the ethnic food aisle.
SPEAKER_05: If you've ever been to a supermarket in the U.S., you've probably seen an ethnic food aisle. Or maybe it was called International Foods or World Foods, the same idea. This is the it's a small world after all part of the shopping experience. It's where you'll find ramen next to coconut milk next to plantain chips next to harissa. Although ethnic aisles look different in every supermarket, they're often variations on the same theme.
SPEAKER_11: There's the yogurt section, bread, produce, and ethnic. If you think about it, it doesn't really make sense. It's like food category, food category, and then racial category. This is a very strange way to organize a store. And while so-called ethnic food brands get a chance to feed the American masses, they're still confined to the ethnic aisle, and they may never leave.
SPEAKER_05: It wasn't always like this. The ethnic aisle has been evolving quietly over the past 100 years. When nationally owned grocery store chains sprang up in the 1920s and 30s, they were the first to offer customers self-service grocery shopping with produce, fresh meat, and dry goods all under one roof. But most of these stores operated with one specific clientele in mind, white, middle, and upper class housewives.
SPEAKER_11: Supermarkets rapidly spread across the country, but there was a clear divide. European immigrants in cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York shopped elsewhere.
SPEAKER_03: There's almost two kinds of stores. They're the standard grocery store where mostly Anglo-American, Germanic groceries dominate. And you have stores which are Italian, which are Jews, and Greek tastes.
SPEAKER_11: Krishnendu Ray teaches nutrition and food studies at New York University. He says these stores, run by immigrant entrepreneurs, sold the products that their communities like to eat.
SPEAKER_03: Which include various salad greens, olive oils, and Italian cheeses. To find a hunk of, say, Parmigiano Reggiano. Not very common in a standard American grocery store.
SPEAKER_11: The truth was that most of the Anglo-American population didn't care for Italian food. For example, olive oil. Nowadays, people host olive oil tastings. But back in the 1920s, Italian olive oil was described as greasy, smelly, and bitter.
SPEAKER_05: But over the decades, that perception began to change ever so slightly. Americans started to eat more and more Italian dishes.
SPEAKER_03: And then if the demand becomes high enough, then you will begin to see some of these elements in a grocery store.
SPEAKER_11: The housewives were getting excited about Italian foods, and mainstream supermarkets obliged. Customers began to stock a small amount of imported Italian products, like canned tomatoes or ingredients for spaghetti and meatballs.
SPEAKER_05: But products like olive oil didn't just get added to the section where the other oils live. Krishnendu says that Italian products were considered ethnic. That is, not white, but more foreign and unfamiliar to Americans. Yes, even things like pizza.
SPEAKER_11: So around the 1950s, Italian products were given their own little corner of the store, intended for unconventional cuisines at the time.
SPEAKER_07: It was more called specialty foods.
SPEAKER_11: Here's Stephen Chen again.
SPEAKER_07: Everything that was imported, you know, like the olive oils, was put in the specialty food section.
SPEAKER_11: But because the taste for Italian food was still new to most folks, the specialty section didn't get a lot of attention. It was just kind of there.
SPEAKER_05: And then around the late 1960s, the specialty section really started expanding. That's when foreign foods from outside of Europe became very, very popular. Those small specialty sections got bigger and became more of a fixture in supermarkets. And that's because American tastes were changing fast. For one thing, U.S. soldiers were returning from the Vietnam War, where they had eaten Southeast Asian food.
SPEAKER_03: It is almost like if you have the military presence there and if you are exposed to the local food, you will develop a taste for it. And when they return home, they expect this kind of food.
SPEAKER_05: Veterans like Principal Skinner from The Simpsons.
SPEAKER_01: I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right.
SPEAKER_11: At the same time, international tourism increased significantly and more Americans were enticed to traveling abroad.
SPEAKER_03: A new kind of a palette becomes what sociologists call omnivorousness, where instead of disdain and debunking other people's tastes, there is a kind of open-mindedness that Americans begin to consume omnivorously everyone else's food.
SPEAKER_05: The biggest game changer was that the US had recently eased immigration restrictions for the first time in more than four decades. Millions arrived every year. Most were from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, with only a small chunk from Europe.
SPEAKER_03: Immigrants are coming from these other parts of the world and teaching and training Americans how to eat different kinds of food.
SPEAKER_11: Meanwhile, supermarkets were like, okay, here is a new way for us to make money.
SPEAKER_03: In most cases, grocery stores, because they were relatively large grocery stores, they had to have a wider market. They're going for what they think is American or is being Americanized.
SPEAKER_05: Through the 1970s, supermarkets were in a frenzy trying to introduce foreign products into their stores. Some American entrepreneurs wanted in. They launched domestically produced versions of these international foods, salted and corn syruped just right for the American palette.
SPEAKER_11: As these brands were added to the specialty aisles, that section morphed into something new, the ethnic aisle.
SPEAKER_05: To promote their products, companies began to use these ethnic aisles in ways that were quite different from other parts of the store. In this section, global flavors were showcased as exotic.
SPEAKER_11: One of the biggest producers to do this was an American brand named After a City in Southwest China.
SPEAKER_09: Try Chungking for your beautiful body, try Chungking for the beautiful taste.
SPEAKER_08: Exercising regularly and eating sensibly are part of our life. So is Chungking.
SPEAKER_11: Chungking was a Chinese food company founded by businessman Gino Palucci. Gino was not Chinese, but an Italian American from Minnesota. He started a line of canned Chinese ingredients a few decades earlier. And by the 60s, he'd perfected a marketing strategy.
SPEAKER_05: Chungking products were based on dishes that non-Chinese people loved to order at Chinese restaurants. Except with these, all you needed was a can opener.
SPEAKER_00: A little variety once a week, some light oriental dish like like chow mein. Delicious filling, but not too heavy. Probably some tasty canned chow mein you could pick up at your grocers.
SPEAKER_11: Chungking swept the nation. It was a staple of American supermarkets. But Gino was a white man profiting off of Chinese food, and he got there by using gross stereotypes and orientalist ideas of the Far East. Chungking created displays where shoppers had to squat under bamboo awnings to get to their canned chow mein. He asked employees to wear rice paddy hats while handing out samples. Gino made shopping for Chungking into an immersive, exotic experience.
SPEAKER_13: These are Chungking egg rolls. Observe wise man enjoying one. Very tasty, delicious, stuffed full of oriental filling. Mmm, scrumptious. Chungking is expert at making…
SPEAKER_11: All these things made Chungking intriguing to the white imagination. To survive on the ethnic aisle meant it wasn't enough to just sell the food, you had to sell the experience of eating something foreign, so that it felt like flying to the faraway lands of East Asia, or visiting Chinatown, or at least like getting a table for two at a Chinese restaurant. Chungking seized on the idea that shopping on the ethnic aisle could be like eating out, a special occasion.
SPEAKER_05: But for actual Chinese chefs, like our favorite Chinese mom Joyce Chen, brands like Chungking and its competitor La Choy just dragged the whole cuisine down.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, well, there were some people I spoke to and they said they didn't like Chinese food, and I said, is it because you've eat Chungking and La Choy? And they said, yeah, I said, no wonder.
SPEAKER_05: Joyce was a world-class chef whose gourmet ingredients were put on ethnic aisles right beside canned chow mein. But Stephen says his mom didn't actually mind having her product shelf next to Chungking because it made her brand look way more classy.
SPEAKER_11: It wasn't the best tasting food by the Chen standards, but Chungking helped make Geno a multi-millionaire. For lots of American consumers, Chungking struck the right balance between the foreign and the familiar. Its success proved that this type of marketing is what brings people to the ethnic aisle and gets these products off the shelves.
SPEAKER_05: More and more nationalities found their food squeezed side by side onto the ethnic food aisle. There'd be Cinco de Mayo displays next to promotions for Eid or the Lunar New Year. With that, it became standard for supermarkets to organize the food of the world in this way. Epcot style.
SPEAKER_11: However, not all food nationalities are treated equally. One cuisine in particular was able to wiggle loose of its reputation.
SPEAKER_05: The major foods of the aisle were Chinese, Mexican and Italian. But this changed in the 1980s because Italian food got reinvented. Krishna Nure links this change to how Italians were perceived in the U.S. as they went from mostly a poor population to an upwardly mobile one.
SPEAKER_03: As poor Italians stop coming in and Italians climb in terms of political office, in terms of filmmakers, in terms of winemakers, in Napa Valley, the prestige of Italian culture goes up and Italy emerges as a major economic power and a center for design culture.
SPEAKER_11: And of course, Krishnandu says, the key change for Italian immigrants and their food has to do with race.
SPEAKER_03: So Italians today would be considered white.
SPEAKER_05: And as Italians became part of mainstream white society, so did their food.
SPEAKER_03: From the 1980s onwards, Italian food itself becomes fancy.
SPEAKER_05: So where Asian, Latin American and other immigrant food stayed ethnic, Italian ingredients weren't treated as foreign anymore.
SPEAKER_11: Olive oil in particular reflects this major change in the grocery stores. Instead of being on the ethnic aisle, it is now usually found with all the other cooking oils and people like to swish it around their teeth and film themselves literally doing shots of the stuff on YouTube. I'm going to take you through the four S's, swirling the oil, snipping the oil, slurping
SPEAKER_05: and then swallowing. The story of olive oil and Italian food in general shows that it is possible to leave the ethnic aisle. All it has to do is to be no longer considered ethnic, which rarely happens. But there actually is another way for food to escape the ethnic aisle. An item can get so popular that grocery stores want to make it as easy to find as possible. We've seen this happen fairly recently.
SPEAKER_11: It's you know, that one red sauce with the white rooster in the bottle and the green cap.
SPEAKER_15: Not everyone speaks sriracha. Sriracha. But Wendy's is fluent. They know when a true fan- Hoi Phong Sriracha sauce.
SPEAKER_05: This Thai sauce, sold by a Vietnamese immigrant, went mainstream after blowing up amongst the hipster food truck crowd in 2009. Foodies loved it. It's slightly sweet and spicy, but not too spicy. And its iconic, crowing rooster logo graces countless things, from baby onesies to throw pillows. Everyone from Apple Weez to Starbucks has mixed it into their menu. Folks wanted it on absolutely everything. I do not want to alarm you, but peanut butter and jelly and sriracha chocolate chip cookies is a recipe that exists.
SPEAKER_02: It just grew almost like a cult. You know, you go to restaurants and it's on tabletops like Heinz ketchup is. And I'm telling you, the most Anglo of Anglo people use a ton of it.
SPEAKER_11: Our Papasian consults for specialty and natural food companies. He says sriracha was so in demand, it couldn't just be placed in the ethnic aisle. It had to be double stocked in the ethnic aisle and next to other hot sauces.
SPEAKER_05: Nothing moves something off the ethnic aisle faster than a bout of extreme popularity. Art says that's another way for the quote unquote ethnic products to make the leap.
SPEAKER_02: It's really about am I satisfied with the majority of my consumers' needs? And will I sell enough of it to justify me carrying it for a long period of time?
SPEAKER_05: He says producers need to generate name recognition around their product, just like sriracha.
SPEAKER_02: Whatever it is, it's up to you to create that interest so that people go running into the stores and it's compelling enough to say, dear store manager, how come you don't carry, you know, watcheries Thai sauce?
SPEAKER_05: The wild success of sriracha sauce was even more extraordinary considering that Huy Fong has spent nothing on its marketing budget. So basically it takes a miracle for a product to get so popular. Most products never get that big.
SPEAKER_11: Some food producers think it shouldn't be that difficult to leave the ethnic aisle. Aruna Lee is the founder of the brand Volcano Kimchi in San Francisco. The question of categorization has been on her mind as she looks for ways to promote her products. She recalled her last field trip to a supermarket chain. I saw, you know, Korean cup noodle and my impression was why don't they put right next
SPEAKER_14: to pasta there's, you know, Asian soba noodle or udon.
SPEAKER_11: In the next year, she plans on selling the Korean chili paste Gochujang. She hopes it gets shelved next to hot sauces in the store instead of on the ethnic aisle. We have a more better exposure for customers and having this ethnic aisle, it's limiting
SPEAKER_14: people's culinary horizon. More we put things together with other items that people get more exposure and people can try, you know, things they would never ever try.
SPEAKER_11: Aruna isn't the only one who feels this way. Small companies that make products like Indian pickle, salsa, or canned jackfruits would love a chance at being spotted by shoppers who aren't going down the ethnic aisle. And honestly, that might look like abolishing the ethnic food aisle altogether.
SPEAKER_04: You have to start integrating categories so that you're not having to put stuff into these segregated kind of old school and really out of date ethnic aisles.
SPEAKER_05: Errol Schweizer is a former Whole Foods executive and now advises food companies. He has long wanted to do away with the practice of putting all international food on a single aisle. He hoped to shake things up when he worked at Whole Foods. He tried to integrate some of the ethnic products with non-ethnic products on other shelves. But he says giant stores like Whole Foods can be hard to change. And that's because the way we shop and the way stores organize food is all locked in by this one big complicated system called the planogram.
SPEAKER_04: This is like grocery nerd stuff because the planogram is not something that you think about in day to day life. But a planogram is essentially a picture with a lot of data.
SPEAKER_11: U.S. supermarkets have on average over 40,000 items in store. Not only do managers have to keep track of everything, they also have to figure out where to place an item based on where it'll sell the quickest. It's extremely complex and there's a lot of money at stake. That's where planograms become essential.
SPEAKER_04: It's like a chart, you know, maybe a grid with pictures of what a grocery set looks like. So when you when you look at a bunch of shelves in a grocery store and you back up from the shelf maybe four or five feet and you look at it, it's like a snapshot.
SPEAKER_05: Using these planograms, supermarkets have every single inch, every single aisle and wall planned down to a T. From the expensive so-called beachfront property near the cash registers to these special displays at the end of aisles. No placement is arbitrary. If a bottle of ranch or a bag of potato chips goes somewhere, there has to be a strong economic reason behind it. Some shelves get more attention than others. The phrase I level is bi-level exists because things are placed right in the customer's line of sight are most likely to sell.
SPEAKER_11: This gets sticky when it comes to introducing less popular products. Say you wanted to put Korean barbecue sauce next to other barbecue sauces on the condiment aisle, which is one of these attention getting areas. A planogram would tell a store manager that putting the less familiar ethnic Korean sauce on premium supermarket shelf real estate would be a waste of that space because as Art Papasian says, an item like Hellmann's mayo or Heinz ketchup would just sell better. You're going to sell that 10, 20 times faster than an ethnic item.
SPEAKER_11: To make the calculation even more fussy, supermarkets work with some of the biggest brands on the shelf to make planograms. Brands like Coca-Cola, Nestle or Frito-Lay. These brands decide where their products get placed and they aren't exactly giving themselves the worst spots. Supermarkets also allow these huge corporations to dictate where smaller brands should go as well.
SPEAKER_04: It's very insidious and this is something they call category captains. I'm sorry, I got a little close to the mic because I got kind of excited to talk about it. You know, essentially they've outsourced or farmed out some of that work to their biggest brands in the category, which like when you think about it, yeah, of course that's a conflict of interest. It's crazy when you think about that's what grocery chains are doing. Talking about like Fox's washing the hen house, right?
SPEAKER_05: Errol says this means that a lot of smaller food suppliers aren't getting the chance to compete because they aren't getting spots where shoppers will notice them. When Errol tried to challenge the stores planograms, the big brands that designed them said, well, that's a terrible idea.
SPEAKER_04: They would sort of gaslight us saying, well, for every like square inch that you don't give us in this space, we have data to prove that you're losing money and you're not doing your job as good as if you were to give us all that space.
SPEAKER_11: Say a supermarket decided to mix everything on the shelves together, ethnic and non-ethnic products. Maybe Soba noodles gets a spot next to SpongeBob mac and cheese, but that means you're taking it away from ingredients it's traditionally served with like ponzu sauce, for example.
SPEAKER_05: There is something exciting about using an ingredient beyond its intended purpose, but sometimes when you mix ingredients in unexpected ways, you also risk losing the food's cultural context.
SPEAKER_11: It's hard to envision what an ideal situation might look like. In this very interconnected age, ethnic aisles are growing longer and longer as people learn how to use ingredients from many different countries. But do we just keep letting it grow until it encompasses the rest of the world? Shopping on the ethnic aisle can be extremely limiting anyway. Sometimes, I need more than a couple options for fish sauce.
SPEAKER_05: It's time for the holidays here at 99 Ranch Market.
SPEAKER_14: Find international holiday favorites from around the world at La Bodega Latina.
SPEAKER_04: H Mart, a Korean tradition made in America since 1982.
SPEAKER_05: Bigger chains like 99 Ranch or H Mart, which serves Asian groceries, or Patel Brothers, which supplies South Asian products, or Bodega Latina, which specializes in Hispanic foods. These so-called ethnic or international supermarkets bring in $49 billion a year in the US, a pretty sizable chunk of the $765 billion grocery industry.
SPEAKER_11: These stores operate differently. They sell to a niche population and cater to their customers' sometimes extremely specific needs. And they don't have to worry as much about explaining their culture to customers who don't know what's up.
SPEAKER_05: Ethnic aisles continue to change, but they have not gone away completely. Not yet. And it's still where you can usually find products like Joyce Chen sauces.
SPEAKER_11: After his mom passed away in 1994, Stephen took over that part of the company while his sister kept Joyce's cookware business going. A few years back, Stephen started making YouTube videos explaining how to use Joyce Chen sauces. Hi, I'm Stephen Chen, president of Joyce Chen Foods, and I'm going to show you the
SPEAKER_06: Joyce Chen Hoisin sauce.
SPEAKER_11: He wanted to teach his audience about Chinese cooking, just like his mom did. That's not usually his thing to step into the spotlight. Stephen recalls that when he and his celebrity chef mom would go out to eat, they'd get recognized. The manager would send over a bottle of wine and Stephen would feel a bit embarrassed. But with his videos, he became another face of the company.
SPEAKER_07: Well, I think, you know, just by promoting her goods, but you know, when I promote, I'm promoting the Joyce Chen brand, I'm promoting Joyce Chen and her legacy and her history.
SPEAKER_06: And that's it. Chicken cashew nuts. Served with white rice. It's a meal in itself.
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SPEAKER_10: Roman Mars. Hello. Yes. I do have a lot of opinions about the ethnic aisle, but I am here to talk about something that I guess you could say is the fun house version of it.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, let's do it.
SPEAKER_10: So this actually came up during one of our edits for the main story, which was produced by Shirley Wong. So Shirley is from the US but is now living in Melbourne, Australia. So we were asking her if there was an international foods aisle in Australia and you know what was in it. And she said that there was this thing that stood out to her that was actually a different aisle. And it's one that you could probably find in a lot of grocery stores outside of the US. So to demonstrate I reached out to my friend Nikolai who is currently in South Korea.
SPEAKER_12: I'm in Busan, a city along the southern coast of South Korea. The extent of their American selection here is basically a three foot wide section. There are things like A1 steak sauce, maple syrup, Classico, pasta sauces. They have Heinz ketchup, Heinz yellow mustard, Heinz hot dog relish. I see little packets of nacho cheese sauce and taco seasoning mix.
SPEAKER_10: So there is this thing that exists in supermarkets outside of the United States called the American aisle, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's part of the supermarket where you could find like American foods like all kind of grouped together in one section.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's like the strange inverse of this ethnic food aisle story. But what I love about it in particular is it's kind of a funny glimpse into what the rest of the world actually thinks about Americans. What they cram into this aisle. Yeah, it's kind of like seeing like stereotypes of Americans through the worlds of like snack
SPEAKER_10: foods. But there are actually a lot of funny photos that people posted from the American aisles of supermarkets overseas. Like aside from, you know, A1 steak sauce and nacho cheese, which seemed right on the
SPEAKER_05: money in terms of like the bullseye. He just like nailed us on that one. What else do you see in the American aisle?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So I am going to give you a quick tour of the United States from the perspective of the rest of the world. So I just dropped in a picture below from the USA aisle from a grocery store in Myanmar. So here it is. That's a lot of jello. Yeah, a lot of jello, a lot of instant jello. We have Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, Fruity Pebbles, of course. And the curveball that I see here is apple cider vinegar, which I never really thought of as an American ingredient, but apparently this grocery store in Myanmar thinks that apple cider vinegar is a very American product. And so below that one, I have a picture from the USA aisle from a store in Belgium. And basically it's root beer, Coca-Cola, cranberry juice, various flavors of Fanta. And then at the very edge of the screen, you can see mayonnaise. So it's ostensibly just soda and mayonnaise in Belgium. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Wow. That's, I mean, I guess that's pretty American too, but you're not going for a lot there. I mean, you're not getting your nacho cheese sauce here, which is a real shame.
SPEAKER_10: No, it's a very narrow interpretation of, of, you know, the USA here. So I have another photo. It's from the North American section of a Spanish supermarket. And this is exactly kind of what I think about when I think about encapsulating the American diet into one section. So it's cake frosting, Hershey's syrup, marshmallow fluff, marshmallow. So two, two different variations of marshmallow instant cake mix pop tarts. I see a lot of ranch dressing at the top there too.
SPEAKER_05: I think cake and marshmallows and ranch dressing. That's again, you're really like kind of homing in on the quintessential American diet when you have those three things represented.
SPEAKER_05: So when you see these pictures of the American aisle in foreign grocery stores, like what do you think of? Cause, cause I see a lot of kind of junky food, comfort food, sweet food that was similar to what we were seeing in the ethnic food aisle. So what do you, what is your interpretation of these sections and other grocery stores?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So I think, I think the main theory isn't necessarily that other countries are trolling us so much as it is. You know, maybe they might be catering to expats who are away from home and they kind of crave this kind of comfort food thing. So you're going to see, you're going to want to eat like frosting and junk food and stuff when you think about home. Cause it's, there are things that you can't have like this analog in, in a foreign country. You see the same thing in, in the ethnic aisle in the United States too. It's, you know, it's not the best stuff. It's not something that you would like immediately think of Chinese food when you see like a
SPEAKER_05: can of chow mein or something like that. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: So I was just like, it is kind of like impulse buy comfort food, I think.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. When I see these, it kind of illustrates the design problem that is present in the ethnic food aisle is that there's some things just don't have good analogs and you need to place marshmallow fluff somewhere and classifying it as American seems about as good as anything. Yeah, that's, that's totally right.
SPEAKER_10: And it's, you know, it's kind of funny because, you know, I don't personally shop in, you know, the international section of the supermarket and I don't mean that from like a high and mighty, you know. No, I know what you mean.
SPEAKER_05: We have more choices out here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: I'm in Southern California. I live by like five different Asian supermarkets. So if I need like sriracha, I'm going to go to the Vietnamese supermarket. So yeah. But like I've noticed something similar kind of happens here too at, at some of the Asian supermarkets that I've been to. So you know, for the most part, a place like H Mart might organize the store more by product type rather than, you know, the country of origin because you know, they have a lot of pan Asian ingredients there. So you'll have like a big row of pickled items from Korea next to China, next to Vietnam or noodles from all over the place. And they're all kind of grouped together and it looks really cohesive. And it's not necessarily called the American aisle or anything like that, but you will see these little neglected pockets of like random Western products that are, you know, popular enough to stock, but seems like the store isn't exactly sure how to integrate them with like everything else.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. What are some examples there?
SPEAKER_10: Okay. So this is going to be a little anecdotal. But I was just at the store called Mitsuwa this weekend and you know, the story was in my brain already. So you know, they have like four aisles of Japanese snacks of like chips, cookies, candies, and they're all kind of shelved together by type. And then there's a subtle aisle on the other side of the store that had like goldfish crackers, blueberry jam, instant jello mix and like dusty peppered farm cookies. So you had like the snacks and then over there it's like the miscellaneous Western foods like ooh. And you know, at the Vietnamese grocery store that I regularly shop at, there's like these two gigantic aisles for like cookies and candy, like an endless row of Southeast Asian cookies. And on the other side, it's like an endless row of Pan Asian candies. And then in the corner of that aisle is like Gushers, Saltines, and Raisin Bran. And they're all separated into one section right there. So it's just interesting to see what products the store chooses to include and the way that they've kind of chosen to group them together. Yeah, it all kind of depends on the context of the store.
SPEAKER_05: And it totally makes sense to me that, you know, Gushers aren't with the rice candy, you know. But I mean, you can also make a case for them being together. I mean, you know, there is not an obvious sort of design solution to this because you really are working against what people would expect because you're trying to make it as easy as possible for a customer to come in and know what they want to find, you know.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah. It depends on like the customer base, but it is kind of funny how it does go both ways.
SPEAKER_05: It does. It does. Thank you, Iman. Thank you.
SPEAKER_05: Thank you. Thank you. Ninety Nine Percent Invisible was produced this week by Shirley Wong and Vivian Lea. Edited by Christopher Johnson, Mix and tech production by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kirk Colston is the digital director. The rest of the team is Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berrupe, Emmett Fitzgerald, Lasha Madon, Jason De Leon, Sophia Klatsker and me Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org, or on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi dot org.
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