No mean 'fete': In search of the Next Big Food Entrepreneur

The Filipino foodie is a fickle customer.

No sooner have we settled on the season’s must-try dish when a new flavor comes along to tickle our palate. And so begins our Grail-like quest to seek out and consume this dish—until umay sets in, interest subsides, and a new food sensation emerges. All this in the span of six months to a year.

But six months seems a reasonable amount of time to carve a niche in a foodie-eat-foodie world, especially if it’s six months of rent-free vending in one of Manila’s most popular weekend food markets. This, along with some seed money and feature spreads in Entrepreneur and Yummy magazines, is the tasty carrot dangled at participants of the Solane Next Big Food Entrepreneur competition.

Over 60 aspiring food entrepreneurs qualified to present their food idea at Mercato Centrale, making this venture a supersized version of last year’s competition, which yielded a mocktail mobile bar and a mushroom fries joint as its grand winners. (An online search shows that both enterprises continue to operate).

There are four criteria for judging, each given equal consideration: uniqueness and originality, yumminess, food presentation, and marketability. That is, if you were part of the official board of judges; otherwise, I suspect extraneous tasters such as myself and the other guests adhered to our own standards.

Quantitative measures were thrown out the window; my food mantra is “Eat better”— having successfully trimmed down and maintained my ideal weight, I’ve learned to prioritize taste over portion size, and quality of ingredients over cost. I brought along my erstwhile food binge companion, my sister Ina. As a fresh graduate and newly unemployed person, her expectations centered on value for money. To maintain a semblance of objectivity—and because we could—we sampled items from almost every booth.

Even with just bite-sized morsels and short breaks to jot down our notes, it took us a little over three hours to complete this exercise. It took our taste buds days to recover from the onslaught of food.

A handy guide to creating the next food fad

Understand, this was no degustation: no finely calibrated pairings of taste and texture, just a prodigious amount of food consumed in a limited time frame. Our gustatory faculties were overloaded; at some point, the flavors began to blend together and it took no small amount of concentration to make discrete observations about each dish. We were turning into food zombies shambling our way towards the stalls, but we weren’t too far gone. We managed to retain the basic thought processes that allowed us to recognize the need to sample and appraise each morsel that passed into our gullets. For one evening, our raison d'être was to discover the next great food fad.

And what we discovered was this: the next great food fad is neither as exotic nor as enterprising as you would think.

Based on the dishes put forward by the participants, the next food fad is characterized by one or more of these traits:

1) An upsized or downsized version of a favorite dish—We saw mini burgers, tiny dessert shooters, sumo macaroons, and giant meatballs. No complaints about the taste, but it’s going to take more than just novelty of scale for such products to make a dent in an already saturated market.

2) "Fusion" cuisine—Take two beloved dishes from two different food traditions, make a mashup, and voila! Fried Mexican dumplings, Pinoy-style burritos, kaldereta onigiri, omurice-silog with buffalo wings; sometimes it worked, other times the dish labored under an identity crisis.

3) Hipster food: Healthy edition—Organic and locally-raised, fat-reduced, sugar-free options of calorie-laden favorites were also available in limited quantities.

4) Hipster food: Explorer edition—Our intrepid entrepreneurs searched far and wide for unfamiliar tastes; bagnet and Korean ice cream are so last season.

5) Premium fare—Tried and tested dishes, made tastier, more sophisticated , and more expensive by better quality ingredients, or by substituting a familiar flavor with a novel one. It’s going to take a little extra effort in branding and product differentiation to make this work.

6) Portability—Many of the enterprises envisioned go-getters and busy individuals as their target market, creating portions that can be eaten one-handed, or with minimal utensils; balls and poppers seem to be the preferred form for on-the-go eats.

Or it could be longganisa. For some odd reason, a number of food entrepreneurs have made our local sausage (in all its regional diversity) the star of their dish: we found longganisa stuffed with rice, rice stuffed with longganisa, longganisa smothered with cheese, longganisa shaped into balls. It’s like the Rule 34 of this competition: If it exists, there is a longganisa version of it.

Gut to believe

But in the end, we just had to go with our gut.

My nutritional considerations won out, and I gave all my top marks to the healthy options: a vegetarian sisig topped with veggie chicharon and a turkey pita burger smothered in guacamole that catered to my junk food cravings without making me feel like I was eating poorly-made substitutes. 

The perfectly proportioned Earl Grey Mousse dessert shooter and green tea fudge bar also allowed me just the right amount of indulgence. Ina agreed with these choices, because the milk tea craze of recent years has given her an appreciation of tea-flavored comestibles. A fried Mexican dumpling also got her thumbs up: it had the heft of a taco, the crispy goodness of a Chinese dumpling and, in her opinion, the best carb-for-peso ratio of all the items she sampled.

Does this make these dishes frontrunners in the race for the next big food fad? I thought it unlikely, since our choices were skewed towards personal preference and not towards novelty and marketability. So it was a pleasant surprise to find out that three of our options were included in the competition’s finalists:

Business name	Dish concept
Bad Decisions Premium Burgers & Drinks Joint	Premium burgers
Big Jack's	Rice-stuffed longganisa
Chef in Heels	Dessert shooters
Corny Bibingka	Cornbread bibingka
Cruncheon	Deep-fried pork from Pampanga
Flavor Avenue	Bagnet paella
Fun-due and Frozen Fruits	Premium fondue
Great Partners Enterprise	Turkey pita burger
Grill A Pizza	Grilled pizzas
Kombi Kombos	Mini deli burgers
Manila Ball-vard	Savory Pinoy food in mini balls
Marky's Chicken Poppers	Chicken poppers with dips
Mini Me	Mini burgers
Mom's Breaktime	Pusit pancit
Mom's Chia Palitao	Palitao with chia seeds
Oh! Fudge	Dark chocolate and green tea fudge bars
Pastry-rific	Mini cupcakes
Pub Burrito	Pinoy-style burrito
Schmidt's Gourmet Hotdogs	Gourmet hotdog sandwiches
Tramezzino	Panini-style sandwiches

In fact, the selected dishes validated our 6+1 rules for creating food fads: scalability of recipe, fusion-friendly, diet consideration, regional discovery, premium ingredients, portability, and longganisa.

A good 20 percent of the selected dishes are scaled-down versions of regular fare: Chef in Heels’ dessert shooters, the mini burgers from Kombi Kombo and Mini Me, and Pastry-rific’s fun-sized cupcakes. Fusion cuisine is represented by Pub-burrito (sisig on a tortilla), Flavor Avenue (bagnet paella with “bagoong aioli”), and Mom’s Breaktime, whose pancit recipe—according to its proprietor—has Singaporean influences. 

Healthier options were to be had with Great Partner Enterprise’s organic turkey burger and the omega-3 rich kakanin of Mom’s Chia Palitao. And Crunchon fulfilled the new regional discovery category with its eponymous dish, a deep-fried pork delicacy from Pampanga.

Judges put a premium, pun intended, on gourmet riffs on favorite dishes, like the elevated fast food of Bad Decision Burgers and Schmidt’s Gourmet Hotdogs; these also had very distinct branding, which is a must, given the proliferation of similar products in our food courts and weekend markets.

Corny Bibingka’s strawberry balsamic sauce added an extra oomph to the already-fancy cornbread bibingka, while Fun-due and Frozen Fruits owes its place in the final list to its chili tablea and dark chocolate dips.

The native tulingan fish is not a traditional pizza topping, but Grilla Pizza’s novel cooking method made it a smoking success; Tramezzino, on the other hand, takes traditional panini recipes and techniques, but uses a more accessible ingredient: good ol’ sliced bread.

And thanks to Oh Fudge!, gooey green tea candy is now a part of our palate.

Manila Ball-vard and Marky’s Chicken Poppers take top marks for portability: one can easily eat-and-run with their savory snack offerings. Big Jack’s falls under this category too, but more importantly, their rice-stuffed sausage wins the title of ”Most Creative Longganisa Meal Presentation.”  

Requiem for a repast

I’ve since had time to digest the whole Solane Next Big Food Entrepreneur experience. And this is my takeaway: Succeeding in the food business is more than a just a matter of taste. The likelihood of somebody else having the same clever idea is high, so you’re going to have to make sure that your product stands out in all the good ways—great flavor, eye-catching branding, and convenient location—while keeping overhead costs low. And even then, you’re subject to the whims and cravings of a public that hungers for fresh flavors and novel experiences.

So I’m never going to be a food entrepreneur; but if they can dish it, I’m more than happy to eat it. — BM, GMA News