Portside

AAPI-founded (Asian American and Pacific Islander) food start-ups are transforming our grocery aisles and filling our social media feeds, but what does lasting change look like?

In 2018, Jing Gao had a simple goal: to bring her passion for the distinctive flavors of her hometown of Chengdu, China, to the American grocery store—not with a watered-down, Asian-ish “teriyaki” sauce but with a bold, burgundy chile oil with a crispy sediment of fried chiles, alliums, and tongue-tingling Sichuan peppercorns, jarred with youthful, hot-pink branding and clear English labeling. She pitched the product, Sichuan Chili Crisp, to at least 100 investors, and she was promptly turned down by every single one of them.

“They said there was no market for this and that it was considered too niche and was never going to be mainstream,” Gao recalls in a recent phone call while traveling on the road.

So Gao turned to crowdfunding in 2019 and launched a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, bringing in $120,000 in capital to make the product and sell it directly to consumers. Today Sichuan Chili Crisp and other Sichuan-inspired sauces and noodles in Gao’s brand, Fly By Jing, can be found in over 12,000 stores nationwide such as Costco and Walmart, and chile-crisp-like condiments are now made by countless other companies, including Heinz and McCormick. The category has become so popular that it’s even expanded into different cuisines, like with a recently released “Italian chili crisp” from Carbone and an Indian-inspired version from Maya Kaimal.

The success of Fly By Jing—which has grown into a staggering eight-figure business with 27% year-over-year growth—upended investors’ attitudes on the marketability of products once deemed too niche for Americans. It has also emboldened a generation of Asian American entrepreneurs to bring ever more specific or regional flavors, textures, and products to the supermarket aisles. From mala spiced peanuts to calamansi seltzer, from dry tofu snacks to bouncy pancake mixes, distinctly Asian foods are becoming mainstream American foods, and it’s largely thanks to recent start-up brands from Asian American founders. Browsing the booths of the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City in June, one could make a list of various niches in Asian cuisine that are, investors willing, coming to market near you: Asian American baby food pouches? A newly launched brand called Bari ticks it off the list. Frozen Fuzhou-style potato balls? Chenzi has you covered.

Not all of the start-ups have been successful, though; over the years, my inbox has seen the comings and (sometimes) goings of independent AAPI-founded brands for mission-driven teas, frozen soups, barbecue sauces, and more. But the last several years have seen a rapid evolution of Asian consumer packaged goods (CPGs), raising the profile of Asian food in America as a whole.

Sandro Roco remembers when calamansi, a small citrus fruit used extensively in Filipino cuisine, wasn’t even well-known among other Filipino Americans that he grew up with in New Jersey. Yet he felt that its juice had the perfect balance of tartness and sweetness, and he credits his love for it as a major inspiration for launching Sanzo, a brand of Asian-fruit-flavored seltzer waters, in 2019.

“We made Meyer lemons a thing, we made heirloom tomatoes a thing, so how about the calamansi lime?” he recalls in a recent interview, referring to home cooks’ embrace of once niche products.

His hunch paid off, as the calamansi seltzer became the bestseller and “the one that got us on the map,” says Roco, among a lineup of other iconic Asian flavors including lychee, mango, and yuzu with ginger.

Now Sanzo seltzers can be found in 7,500 stores around the country, where they are often the only Asian-style offering in a water and soft drinks category that tends to be dominated by European imports and nostalgic American flavors like root beer and orange creamsicle.

“They said there was no market for this and that it was considered too niche and was never going to be mainstream.” – Jing Gao, founder of Fly By Jing 

Many start-up founders left successful careers in pursuit of foods they craved that weren’t readily available in North America. Caroline Dai was working long hours in finance in Vancouver, British Columbia, when she found herself wishing she could grab a quick bite that was high in protein but wasn’t a sugary cereal bar. Having grown up in Shenzhen, China, before moving to Seattle, Washington, for high school, she knew that ultra-pressed or dry tofu (also called dougan) could be sold in shelf-stable packaging for easy snacking. But she couldn’t find a North American manufacturer that was capable of making this style of tofu. So she ultimately partnered with a Chinese manufacturer in Sichuan province and earlier this year launched TofuGo, a brand of individually wrapped dry tofu snacks in traditional flavors like soy BBQ and spicy chili.   

“Most Americans have not seen tofu outside the fridge,” says Dai. By marketing it as a high-protein snack to pop into your purse, she aims to expand tofu’s perception stateside. The bootstrapped brand earned a five-figure revenue in its first month after launching, and Dai projects $1 million in earnings in its first year.

“I don’t want to exist only in the Asian supermarket,” Dai says. “We want to be really mainstream.”

John Liu was working at TikTok as a senior product manager while baking up a storm at home, often using glutinous rice flour to create an irresistibly stretchy, bouncy texture known as QQ in baked goods and mochi. Originally from Taiwan, he found it odd that mochi was mostly known in America as a wrapping for ice cream in the freezer aisle, instead of being a textural attraction in myriad desserts like cakes as well as savory foods like dumplings. Liu left his job in 2025 and launched KiuKiu, a brand of chewy-textured pancake mixes featuring deep-purple ube and bright-green pandan coconut—both popular flavors in Southeast Asia and, he felt, increasingly well-known in the United States. Since launching earlier this year, Liu estimates the brand is available in 300 stores, including Whole Foods Markets and Safeway.

“I don’t think there are a lot of other brands that lead first with texture as a value proposition, and I’m excited to build on that,” he told me in a phone conversation.

As independent Asian American food brands are taking off domestically, major food conglomerates based in Asia are sensing opportunity. Some are expanding US-based operations, like the Korean manufacturer Pulmuone Foods’s planned $55 million facility expansion in Massachusetts, or the Japanese Kewpie Corporation, which is planning a second US facility in Tennessee. Others are rebranding legacy Asian products for the American market, like the China-based Huang Fei Hong spicy peanuts, which relaunched last year as Wa-Chaa!

Anmao Sun grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, and his father founded Huang Fei Hong 20 years ago in Shandong, China. The spicy, numbing-hot snacking peanuts had been available in H Marts and 99 Ranch Markets in the United States for years, but as their fan base grew, Sun felt the company was missing out on a bigger opportunity to reach consumers who’d never heard of the brand before. The new brand name and packaging aesthetic leans into the iconic imagery of kung fu movies, of which both Sun and his father are fans, and which he says have a deep cultural relevance in the United States. They’re using largely the same Chengdu-inspired seasonings as well as the same varietal of peanuts from a specific area of Shandong that’s well regarded for its premium peanut production. He’s tweaked the recipe to use avocado oil, however, which is not only on-trend for American consumers but gives the peanuts a distinctive crispness.

“The timing is definitely different now than it would have been six or seven years ago,” says Sun. He explains that seeing the rise of chile crisp products and mala hot pot restaurants in the United States motivated him to think bigger.

The year 2018 was a major inflection point for Asian American cultural representation. It was when the first film in decades with a majority–Asian American cast, Crazy Rich Asians, became a massive box-office hit. It was when the K-pop group BTS became the first Korean music group to top the Billboard 200. And in food culture, it was when Momofuku’s David Chang was expanding a media empire with a popular podcast and the Netflix series Ugly Delicious, while other Asian American chefs and restaurateurs were opening ambitious, internationally awarded restaurants like New York City’s Atomix. Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, changing lives and cooking habits around the world.

Gao of Fly By Jing credits the pandemic with putting a sharper focus on what’s in our kitchen cupboards: “A lot of people were evaluating their relationships with their homes and nurturing themselves through food,” she says.

At the same time, more small brands were eschewing traditional advertising in order to market and sell their products directly to consumers through social media. There they found a captive audience.

“I think social media has played a huge role in the growth of Asian American CPG over the last several years,” says James Park, a food content creator and the author of the 2023 book Chili Crisp: 50+ Recipes to Satisfy Your Spicy, Crunchy, Garlicky Cravings.

Through platforms like Instagram and TikTok, scrappy food brands have not only a direct way of introducing their product to customers but a way to show them how to use it. Brands have also educated consumers about how their product is made or how it’s different—Park points to the reels and posts of Heydoh, a single-origin Taiwanese soy sauce brand launched last year, as a good example of the latter. Park believes that chile crisp specifically played a big role in this shift, partly because it’s so photogenic (the cover of his cookbook looks like it’s drenched in the shiny, speckly oil), and that it opened the door for customers to become more curious about other Asian pantry products.

“People are no longer just buying a condiment because they recognize it. They’re discovering something through a video, seeing a recipe that looks delicious, and thinking, ‘I want to make that,’” says Park. Direct-to-consumer shopping and online groceries have made it that much easier to buy the product.

“An ingredient like achaar can build broad awareness much faster than was possible before,” says Chitra Agrawal, cofounder of the Indian pantry products brand Brooklyn Delhi.

Before launching the brand in 2014, Agrawal was a food blogger and recipe developer, so cooking instruction was always central to her business. Social media has just accelerated the rate at which information is shared, creating “viral” sensations out of dishes, like a fried egg with Brooklyn Delhi’s tomato achaar and feta by the content creator Grace Elkus that received 12.7k likes.

The rise in Asian-American-founded food brands can also simply be attributed to the rising Asian American population, the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. We’re also the group most likely to marry interracially, according to a 2017 Pew report.

“Our lives are increasingly interconnected through interracial and intercultural families, friendships, and communities, so these foods and flavors are naturally reaching more people,” adds Agrawal.     

Eric Kim, cooking columnist at The New York Times and author of the best-selling Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home, senses that the influx of Asian American food brands is “the result of the children of immigrants finally growing up and taking space in a market that needs that particular thing,” he wrote in an email.

Like calamansi. Or dry tofu. Or stretchy, sticky rice-based foods. Kim is holding out hope for a Korean American brand of doenjang to appear in his local Whole Foods Market in Brooklyn. Unlike when he needs miso or gochujang, he currently still has to venture out to a specialty or Asian market to find the brown umami paste that’s a building block of Korean cooking. (But perhaps not for long—James Beard Award–winning author Nadia Cho and the chef Mingoo Kang launched the gochujang brand Jangin in July, and apparently doenjang is in the works.)

Even with all the cultural momentum seemingly on their side, the future is not assured for many young Asian American food brands—or for older ones that have been clinging to thin profit margins for years. The Trump administration’s tariffs and trade wars have only exacerbated these challenges for many, as ingredient and shipping costs fluctuate. Then there are the dangers of unsustainable growth fueled by venture capital investment that can lead to hasty acquisition.

The name Omsom has been whispered a lot in CPG circles for the past couple years, ever since it was acquired by DayDayCook in 2024. The brand launched as a direct-to-consumer Asian sauce and recipe kit brand in 2020 and grew fast and furiously, raising over $3 million in seed funding. Founded by Vietnamese American sisters Vanessa and Kim Pham, it underscored a pivotal moment for Asian food in America, building community online with the tagline “Proud, Loud Asian Flavors.” But a year after the acquisition, which the founders described as the next chapter in creating “more damn delicious premium Asian products,” Omsom’s products have virtually disappeared from shelves and online retail channels. (Omsom’s founders declined to comment for this story.)

Whatever the reason for its quiet fade to dark, the fate of Omsom has become a cautionary tale. Liu says he’s had to turn down opportunities from retail chains in order to grow sustainably and focus on serving his current retail partners. While brands like Fly By Jing may have encouraged investors and retailers to go all in on Asian pantry goods, the partnerships don’t always last. Earlier this year, Agrawal petitioned customers to support Brooklyn Delhi’s roasted garlic achaar, a product that had been left out of a Whole Foods Market reset, in order to help keep it in production. The retailer recently dropped its tomato achaar as well, leaving the future of both products uncertain.

“An ingredient like achaar can build broad awareness much faster than was possible before.” – Chitra Agrawal, cofounder of Brooklyn Delhi.

Lauryn Chun of Mother-in-Law’s has seen many ebbs and flows in business since founding the kimchi brand in 2009. This, she says, took place at a time when kimchi was only vaguely understood by many Americans as a side dish in a Korean restaurant and wasn’t available in most non-Asian supermarkets. It was also during a global recession, which changed lives, including hers: she was laid off from her job in financial services the year before launching her brand. Similarly, 12 years later, the COVID pandemic would usher in a fundamental change, inspiring some to switch careers or work for themselves for the first time by starting a food brand they were passionate about.

Kimchi has, of course, become entrenched in American food culture by now, alongside gochujang, which Mother-in-Law’s added to its product line in 2014. Thanks in part to cookbooks and content creators, appetite for gochujang continues to grow in the grocery store, with its presence increasing by 63% on menus over the last four years, according to a report by Datassential. That evolution—from ethnic to mainstream—mirrors what’s happened with many other cuisines over the years, says Chun, pointing to Italian food, which once meant little more than pizza and spaghetti for many Americans. Now Asian products like dried soba are sharing shelf space with Italian pastas, and chile crisp might be right next to the Frank’s RedHot sauce.

For Gao, the most important impact from the explosion in Asian-American-founded grocery products has been “taking up space in a space where we traditionally didn’t belong,” she says. That and helping to “premium-ize” the Asian aisle, chipping away at the stereotype that all Asian food needs to be cheap.   

For Sanzo’s Roco, the stakes are particularly clear now that he has a daughter. Supermarkets are still one of the few places that people from all walks of life visit on a regular basis, he says. Having not seen his culture in the local grocery store during his own childhood, he hopes his daughter grows up in a different world.

“There is real power in the default,” he says. “So just seeing your culture represented [on the shelf] is something that felt very critical to the next generation.”

That may be the most important shift Asian American CPG has produced. The first generation had to convince American consumers that Asian food belonged on the shelf. The next generation has a new proposition: It belongs everywhere.