Fonio, a
cereal grain imported from West Africa, was once relegated to the shelves of
tiny grocery stores frequented by immigrants primarily from Senegal and Mali.
But it has gradually made its way to Whole Foods, where pouches decorated with
a painted map of Africa are nestled amid packages of rice and lentils, aimed at
a broader range of American consumers.
اضافة اعلان
That journey
was pushed in part by a New York City company, Yolélé, which roughly means “let
the good times roll” in Fula, a West African language. Yolélé also offers
seasoned fonio pilafs, a line of fonio chips and, coming soon, fonio flour.
The company
was founded in 2017 by Philip Teverow, a food industry veteran, and Pierre
Thiam, a chef from Senegal who grew up eating fonio. Thiam is confident that
Americans would eat fonio, too, if they had better access to it.
The
nutritious grain is gluten-free and has a slightly nutty flavor. It is also
easy to prepare: “Fonio never embarrasses the cook,” Thiam said.
But crucial
to their effort to appeal to the average American consumer was the packaging.
Innovative package design and brand identity are vital when selling unfamiliar
foods to mainstream markets, industry experts say.
“People
really do shop with their eyes,” said Chris Manca, a buyer at Whole Foods
Market focusing on local products for the company’s stores in New York, New
Jersey and Connecticut. “If your product doesn’t really jump off the shelf and
catch your eye, it’s going to get overlooked.”
In 2019,
182,535 immigrant-owned food businesses, from manufacturing to restaurants,
were operating in the United States, according to an analysis of the American
Community Survey by the New American Economy, a research organization. Chinese
and Mexican immigrants owned most, selling cuisines familiar to American
palates. But entrepreneurs from countries like Guinea, Kazakhstan and Senegal
are gaining a foothold with less well-known cuisines.
Marketing
these foods in the United States has its challenges, like cultural identity and
consumer perception. The savviest entrepreneurs work with designers and brand
strategists to make their products more approachable.
One of the
biggest hurdles is choosing visual clues — fonts, colors, illustrations and
photographs — that channel a product’s physical or conceptual provenance. A
brand identity that’s too sleek and polished might appear inauthentic and lose
credibility. Yet folksy designs or a reliance on regional symbols can look
cliché and dated.
Creating the
right visuals is a “subtle balance,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of
the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. A new
foreign food’s packaging must stimulate curiosity and radiate authenticity,
“making you feel like there’s some sort of familiarity that maybe you had not
yet discovered in yourself,” she said.
Cultural
heritage is crucial for a new product, said Phil Lempert, a food industry
analyst known as the Supermarket Guru. “You have to stand out,” he said, adding
that there is a strong appetite for foreign cuisines and products, especially
among younger generations: “They love to experiment with food.”
The global
food industry has changed substantially over the past several decades, Lempert
said. New foreign food brands today tend to celebrate their origins, whereas
businesses just 10 years ago might have pushed to Americanize their products.
“There was a
stigma there,” he said.
Supermarket
distribution has also changed.
“A lot of
these smaller ethnic brands used to be distributed by ethnic food
distributors,” Lempert said. “Now, these companies are going direct to the
supermarket.”
Other strategies
include posting on social media, especially Instagram, which is considered an
effective, low-cost way to market products, and selling directly to consumers
through websites and e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon.
But the key
is often packaging. A designer’s ability tends to be a blend of creative
thinking, diverse professional experience and wide travels. This often
outweighs a shared nationality, ethnicity or culture; in fact, many
entrepreneurs prefer working with designers from different backgrounds to
better see their story through a fresh lens.
Thiam wanted
to use Yolélé to claim fonio’s West African identity while avoiding labels like
“exotic” and “ethnic.” He and Teverow approached Paula Scher, a partner at the
design firm Pentagram, where Thiam already had connections because of his
cookbooks. He said that he would have liked to use a designer of African
descent, but that when he saw Scher’s map of Africa, it was “love at first
sight.”
After
Scher’s design hit the shelves last spring, sales surged 250 percent, Teverow
said.
Using
product names in foreign languages is a common hurdle for food business owners.
To broaden the appeal of her classic Middle Eastern spice blends like hawaij,
baharat and ras el hanout, Leetal Arazi, a co-founder of New York Shuk, worked
with graphic designer Ayal Zakin to craft a visual solution.
The labels
feature elegant illustrations of the contents in each jar, like turmeric or
chili peppers, balanced with a modern gold logo and a tiny stylized camel in
silhouette.
“All of a
sudden, you are less afraid and intimidated to pick it up,” said Arazi, whose
products are sold at supermarkets like Whole Foods and specialty stores.
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