It’s a Small Aisle After All

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
In the mid-1950s, Stephen Chen attended a primary school called Buckingham in Cambridge Massachusetts, right by the Charles River.

Stephen Chen:
At that time, there were no Asians in the whole school, so they were trying to diversify a little bit.

Roman Mars:
Actually, there were exactly TWO Asians: Stephen and his sister. Every spring their school had a fair called The 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.

Stephen Chen:
My mom did egg rolls, which were more kind of Americanized egg rolls, not the traditional Chinese egg rolls.

Shirley Wang:
As in, the egg rolls weren’t like the ones Chinese families would typically eat.

Roman Mars:
That’s producer Shirley Wang.

Shirley Wang:
Her recipe for eggs rolls back then used thicker shells and… half a pound of hamburger.

Stephen Chen:
She thought that maybe it would be more recognizable for the American public.

Shirley Wang:
Just in case the egg rolls weren’t well received, Joyce came with a back up – a plate of pumpkin cookies. She dropped off her dishes and went home to clean. When she came back, the egg rolls were missing.

Stephen Chen:
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 manning the food table said, “You know, Mrs. Chen, those egg rolls that you made, they sold out completely. Can you do and make more?”

Roman Mars:
Joyce was thrilled. She made them every year — even after her kids graduated from the school.

Stephen Chen:
At the school fair, they would, you know, announce through the public – the P.A. system – that the Joyce Chen egg rolls have arrived and people would be rushing over to get them.

[MUSIC]

Shirley Wang:
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 US, Joyce had been a housewife.

Roman Mars:
But that experience with the egg rolls changed Joyce’s life. After seeing how much people in the US really liked Chinese food, she decided to tap into that market.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
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.”

JOYCE CHEN COOKS
[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.] (CHOPPING)

Shirley Wang:
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 US 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.

Roman Mars:
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.

Stephen Chen:
And unfortunately, it’s something like buying shoes. If you have a shoe, you have to sell it in the shoe store. It’s just like – that’s the way it is!

Roman Mars:
These were gourmet products, made with the same ingredients she used in her upscale restaurants. But even so — when she and Stephen ventured into supermarkets, they would find her sauces lumped together with all the other Asian items.

[MUSIC]

Shirley Wang:
Joyce Chen’s sauces were placed onto a section that’s come to be known as – the ethnic food aisle.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
If you’ve ever been to a supermarket in the US, you’ve probably seen an ethnic food aisle – or maybe it was called international aisle or world foods. 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.

[MUSIC]

Shirley Wang:
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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
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.

Shirley Wang:
Supermarkets rapidly spread across the country, but there was a clear divide. European immigrants in cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York, shopped elsewhere.

Krishnendu Ray:
There’s almost two kinds of stores. They had the standard grocery store where mostly Anglo American Germanic groceries dominate. And you have stores which are Italian, which are Jews, and Greek tastes.

[MUSIC]

Shirley Wang:
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 liked to eat.

Krishnendu Ray:
Which include various salad greens, olive oil and Italian cheeses. To find a hunk of, say, Parmigiano Reggiano, not very common in a standard American grocery store.

Shirley Wang:
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.”

Roman Mars:
But over the decades, that perception began to change ever so slightly. Americans started to eat more and more Italian dishes.

Krishnendu Ray:
And then if the demand becomes high enough, then you will begin to see some of these elements in the grocery store.

Shirley Wang:
The housewives were getting excited about Italian foods, and mainstream supermarkets obliged. Stores began to stock a small amount of imported Italian products, like canned tomatoes or ingredients for spaghetti and meatballs.

Roman Mars:
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.

Shirley Wang:
So around the 1950s Italian products were given their own little corner of the store, intended for unconventional cuisines at the time.

Stephen Chen:
It was more called “specialty foods.”

Shirley Wang:
Here’s Stephen Chen, again.

Stephen Chen:
Everything that was imported, you know like the olive oils, was put in the specialty food section.

Shirley Wang:
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 kinda there.

Roman Mars:
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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
For one thing, US soldiers were returning from the Vietnam War, where they had eaten Southeast Asian food.

Krishnendu Ray:
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.

Roman Mars:
Veterans like Principal Skinner from “The Simpsons.”

SIMPSONS AUDIO
[I SPENT THE NEXT THREE YEARS IN A POW CAMP, FORCED TO SUBSIST ON A THIN STEW MADE OF FISH, VEGETABLES, PRAWNS, COCONUT MILK. FOUR KINDS OF RICE. I CAME CLOSE TO MADNESS TRYING TO FIND IT HERE IN THE STATE BUT THEY JUST CAN’T GET THE SPICES RIGHT.]

Shirley Wang:
At the same time, international tourism increased significantly and more Americans were enticed to traveling abroad.

[MUSIC]

Krishnendu Ray:
A new kind of a palate becomes what sociologists call “omnivorousness”, where instead of disdain and debunking other people’s tastes, there’s a kind of open mindedness that Americans begin to consume omnivorously everyone else’s food.

Roman Mars:
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.

Krishnendu Ray:
Immigrants are coming from these other parts of the world and teaching and training Americans how to eat different kinds of food.

Shirley Wang:
Meanwhile, supermarkets were like, “Okay. Here is a new way for us to make money.”

Krishnendu Ray:
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.

Roman Mars:
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 syrup-ed just right for the American palate.

Shirley Wang:
As these brands were added to the specialty aisles, that section morphed into something new — the ethnic aisle.

Roman Mars:
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.”

Shirley Wang:
One of the biggest producers to do this was an American brand named after a city in southwest China.

CHUN KING AD
[TRY CHUN KING FOR YOUR BEAUTIFUL BODY, TRY CHUN KING FOR THE BEAUTIFUL TASTE. // EXERCISING REGULARLY AND EATING SENSIBLY ARE A PART OF OUR LIVES. SO IS CHUN KING…]

Shirley Wang:
Chun King was a Chinese food company founded by businessman Jeno Paulucci. Jeno 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.

Roman Mars:
Chun King 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.

CHUN KING AD
[HOW ABOUT A LITTLE VARIETY ONCE A WEEK? SOME LIGHT ORIENTAL DISH LIKE CHOW MEIN! DELICIOUS, FILING BUT NOT TOO HEAVY. PROBABLY SOME TASTY CANNED CHOW MEIN YOU CAN PICK UP AT YOUR GROCERS.]

Shirley Wang:
Chun King swept the nation. It was a staple of American supermarkets. But Jeno was a white man profiting off of Chinese food, and he got there by using gross stereotypes and orientalist ideas of the far east. Chun King 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. Jeno made shopping for Chun King into an immersive “exotic” experience.

[MUSIC]

CHUN KING AD
[THESE ARE CHUNKING EGG ROLLS. OBSERVE WISE MAN, ENJOY ONE. (CRUNCH). VERY TASTY, DELICIOUS. STUFFED FULL OF ORIENTAL FILLING. // MMM…. SCRUMPTIOUS!]

Shirley Wang:
All these things made Chun King 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. Chun King seized on the idea that shopping on the ethnic aisle could be like eating out – a special occasion.

Roman Mars:
But for actual Chinese chefs, like our favorite Chinese mom Joyce Chen, brands like Chun King and its competitor La Choy just dragged the whole cuisine down.

Stephen Chen:
Yeah. Well, there were some people I spoke to and they said they didn’t like Chinese food. I said, “Is it because you’ve eaten Chun King or La Choy?” They said, “Yeah.” And I said, “It’s no wonder.”

Roman Mars:
Joyce was a world class chef whose gourmet ingredients were put on ethnic aisles right beside canned chow mein. But Stephen says his mom actually didn’t mind having her products shelved next to Chun King, because it made her brand look way more classy.

Shirley Wang:
It wasn’t the best tasting food by the Chens’ standards, but Chun King helped make Jeno a multi-millionaire. For lots of American consumers, Chun King 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.

Roman Mars:
More and more nationalities found their foods 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.

Shirley Wang:
However, not all food nationalities are treated equally. One cuisine in particular was able to wiggle loose of its reputation.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
The major foods on the aisle were Chinese, Mexican, and Italian. But this changed in the 1980s, because Italian food got reinvented. Krishnendu Ray links this to a change in how Italians were perceived in the US, as they went from mostly a poor population, to an upwardly mobile one.

Krishnendu Ray:
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.

Shirley Wang:
And of course – Krishnendu says – the key change for Italian immigrants and their food has to do with race.

Krishnendu Ray:
So Italians today would be considered white.

Roman Mars:
And as Italians became part of mainstream white society, so did their food.

Krishnendu Ray:
From the 1980s onwards, Italian food itself becomes fancy.

Roman Mars:
So where Asian, Latin American and other immigrant foods stayed “ethnic”, Italian ingredients weren’t treated as foreign anymore.

Shirley Wang:
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.

YOUTUBE CLIP
[I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU THROUGH THE FOUR S’S: SWIRLING THE OIL, SNIFFING THE OIL [SNIFFING SOUND], SLURPING [MOUTH SOUNDS] AND THEN SWALLOWING.]

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
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.

Shirley Wang:
It’s, you know, that one red sauce, with the white rooster on the bottle and the green cap?

WENDYS AD
[NOT EVERYONE SPEAKS SRIRACHA. // SREE-ACHA? // BUT WENDY’S IS FLUENT…]

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Huy Fong Sriracha sauce. 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 Applebee’s 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.

Art Papazian:
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.

Shirley Wang:
Art Papazian 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 hot sauces.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Nothing moves something off the ethnic aisle faster than a bout of extreme popularity. Art says, that’s another way for “ethnic” products to make the leap.

Art Papazian:
It’s really about, am I satisfied the majority of my consumers need it? Will I sell enough of it to justify me carrying it for a long period of time?

Roman Mars:
He says producers need to generate name recognition around their product, just like sriracha.

Art Papazian:
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, Watcharee’s Thai Sauce?”

Roman Mars:
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 may never get that big.

Shirley Wang:
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.

Aruna Lee:
I saw Korean Cup Noodles, and my impression was why don’t they put it right next to pasta…? There’s asian soba noodle or udon?

Shirley Wang:
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 in the ethnic aisle.

Aruna Lee:
It would have a more better exposure for customers. And having this ethnic aisle, it’s limiting people’s culinary horizon. The more we put things together with the other items that people get more exposure and people can try, you know, things they would never, ever try.

Shirley Wang:
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 aisles, all together.

Errol Schweizer:
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.

Roman Mars:
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.

[MUSIC]

Errol Schweizer:
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.

Shirley Wang:
U.S. supermarkets have on average over forty thousand 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 will sell the quickest. It’s extremely complex, and there’s a lot of money at stake. That’s where planograms become essential.

Errol Schweizer:
It’s like a chart, you know, maybe a grid with pictures of what a grocery set looks like. So 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.

Roman Mars:
Using these planograms, supermarkets have every single inch, every single aisle and wall planned down to a tee. From the expensive so-called “beachfront property” near the cash registers, to the special displays at the end of the aisles. No placement is arbitrary. If a bottle of ranch or 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 “eye-level is buy level” exists because things that are placed right in the customer’s line of sight are mostly likely to sell.

[MUSIC]

Shirley Wang:
This gets sticky when it comes to introducing less popular products. Say you wanted to put Korean BBQ sauce next to other barbeque 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 Papazian says – an item like Hellmann’s mayo or Heinz Ketchup would just sell better.

Art Papazian:
You’re going to sell that 10, 20 times faster than an ethnic item.

Shirley Wang:
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, Nestlé 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.

Errol Schweizer:
It’s very insidious, and this is something they call category captains. – Sorry, I got a little close to the mike 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. Talk about like foxes watching the henhouse, right?

Roman Mars:
Errol says this means that a lot of smaller food suppliers aren’t getting a chance to compete, because they aren’t getting spots where shoppers will notice them. When Errol tried to challenge the store’s planograms, the big brands that design them said, “Well, that’s a terrible idea!”

Errol Schweizer:
They would sort of gaslight us saying, “Well, for every 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…”

Shirley Wang:
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.

Roman Mars:
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.

Shirley Wang:
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 let it keep growing until it emcompasses 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.

99 RANCH AD
[IT’S TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS HERE AT 99 RANCH MARKET.]

LA BODEGA LATINA
[FIND INTERNATIONAL HOLIDAY FAVORITES FROM AROUND THE WORLD AT LA BODEGA LATINA.]

HMART AD
[H-MART. A KOREAN TRADITION MADE IN AMERICA SINCE 1982.]

Roman Mars:
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 huge chunk of the 765 billion-dollar grocery industry.

Shirley Wang:
These stores operate differently. They sell to a niche population and cater to their customer’s 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.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
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.

Shirley Wang:
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.

[MUSIC]

STEPHEN CHEN YOUTUBE CLIP
[HI, I’M STEPHEN CHEN, PRESIDENT OF JOYCE CHEN FOODS. AND I’M GOING TO SHOW YOU THE JOYCE CHEN HOISIN SAUCE…]

Shirley Wang:
He wanted to teach his audience about Chinese cooking. Just like his mom did. It’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.

Stephen Chen
I think, you know, just by promoting her goods,I’m promoting the Joyce Chen brand … her legacy and her history.

STEPHEN CHEN YOUTUBE CLIP
[AND THAT’S IT. CHICKEN CASHEW NUTS. SERVED WITH WHITE RICE. IT’S A MEAL IN ITSELF.]

Roman Mars:
So you’re in a grocery store in another country where do you find all your favorite American foods? Well, you go to the American food aisle. Vivian Le takes us a grim tour after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
So I am here with producer Vivian Le, and… Producer Vivian Le from what I understand you wanted to talk about something that is not the ethnic aisle.

Vivian Le:
Roman Mars, hello. Yes. I do have a lot of opinions on the ethnic aisle but I am here to talk about something that I guess you can say is the funhouse version of it.

Roman Mars:
Okay. Let’s do it.

Vivian Le:
So this actually came up during one of our edits for the main story which was produced by Shirley Wang. So Shirley is from the US but is now living in Melbourne, Australia, so we were asking her if there was the international foods aisle in Australia and what was in it, and she said that the thing that stood out for her was actually a different aisle. And it’s one that you can probably find in a lot of grocery stores outside of the US, so to demonstrate I reached out to my friend Nicholai who is currently in South Korea…

Nicholai:
I’m in Pusan, 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 hotdog relish. I see little packets of nacho cheese sauce and taco seasoning mix.

Vivian Le:
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 the part of the supermarket where you can find American foods all kind of grouped together in one section.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, it’s like the strange inverse of this ethnic food aisle story. But what I love about it particularly is it’s kind of a funny glimpse into what the rest of the world actually thinks about Americans — what they crammed into this aisle.

Vivian Le:
It’s kind of like seeing stereotypes of Americans through snack foods. There are actually a lot of funny photos that people have posted from the American aisles of supermarkets overseas.

Roman Mars:
Like, aside from, you know, A1 steak sauce and nacho cheese, which seem right on the money in terms of like the bull’s eye. He just, like, nailed us on that one. What else do you see in the American aisle?

Vivian Le:
Yeah so I am about to give you a tour of the United States from the perspective of the rest of the world. So I dropped in a picture below from the USA aisle from a grocery store in Myanmar.

Roman Mars:
That’s a lot of Jell-O.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, a lot of Jell-O. A lot of instant Jell-O. 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.

Roman Mars:
Wow.

Vivian Le:
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. Okay, and then at the very edge of the screen, you can see mayonnaise. So it’s ostensibly just soda and mayonnaise in Belgium.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. 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.

Vivian Le:
No, it’s a very narrow interpretation 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, marshmallows — so two different variations of marshmallow — instant cake mix, Pop Tarts.

Roman Mars:
I see a lot of ranch dressing at the top there, too. I think cake and marshmallows and ranch dressing that’s, you know, again, you’re really kind of honing in on the quintessential American diet when you have those three things represente.

Vivian Le:
Yes!

Roman Mars:
So when you see these pictures of the American aisle in foreign grocery stores, like, what do you think of it? Because I see a lot of kind of junky food, comfort food, sweet food that was similar to what we were seeing in the ethnic futile. So what is your interpretation of these sections and in other grocery stores?

Vivian Le:
Yeah. So 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 ex-pats 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 because there things that you can’t have like this analog in a foreign country. You see the same thing 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–

Roman Mars:
A can of Chow mein or something.

Vivian Le:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So it’s just kind of like impulse-buy comfort food, I think.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. When I see these, it kind of illustrates the design problem that is present in the ethnic food aisles. That 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.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, that’s totally right. 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…

Roman Mars:
No, I know what you mean. We have more choices out here.

Vivian Le:
Yeah, 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. Yeah, but like, I’ve noticed something similar kind of happens here too 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 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.

Roman Mars:
Okay. What are some examples there?

Vivian Le:
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 this sad little aisle on the other side of the store that had, like, goldfish crackers, blueberry jam, instant Jell-O mix and like dusty Pepperidge Farm cookies. And so you had like, yeah, like the stacks. And then over there it’s like the miscellaneous Western foods, like over there. 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 is 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.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, it all kind of depends on the context of the store 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?

Vivian Le:
Yeah, yeah. It depends on the customer base, but it is kind of funny how it does go both ways.

Roman Mars:
It does. It does. Thank you, Vivian.

Vivian Le:
Thank you!

———

CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Shirley Wang and Vivian Le. Edited by Christopher Johnson. Mix and tech production by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Emmett FitzGerald, Lasha Madan, Jayson De Leon, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM 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 @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.