The very first product to offend my sensibilities was this. Pepsi Thailand launched this under the Pepsi Treats line, a dessert-inspired range that is also zero sugar. Apparently, it tastes a little like it has a chocolate-pistachio finish, but some people online also said that it just tastes like a regular Pepsi.

Now, I will be the first person to admit that I complain constantly about the lack of interesting flavors in soda, but I also crap on Dubai chocolate as a flavor, as regular readers will know. So I guess I deserve this fuck you from the universe. 

I’m going to call out Lays for one teeny tiny thing. Why does this variant say specifically that it’s made with real potatoes? Are you telling me all the other variants are not? I can’t get this out of my head.

This next product was perhaps one of the more intriguing products for me. Low GI rice isn’t exactly earth-shatteringly new. But it’s usually a niche product available in small quantities and priced at a premium. The fact that this is a supermarket own-label of the most fundamental staple in Thai cooking, leading with a health claim on a bulk pack means that the low GI claim is one to watch for in the region. 

Gummies are all the rage right now, and why not - it’s candy and who doesn’t love candy? But I’m less gung-ho about all these functional gummies. I don’t see their utility. I know the idea is to get people to be more regular about consuming their vitamins or nutrition supplements or whatever, especially when they don’t want to deal with the traditional pill format. But that logic doesn’t really track.

I had a small conversation with a shopper about this particular brand of gummies. They told me that they took it to help them sleep. So I asked the natural questions.

The answers:

They treat the functional product like, well, a treat - to be had once in a while. How does that help when consistent consumption would probably give somewhat desired results?

And so my entire attitude towards the gummy supplement format is skepticism. But the list of benefits that gummies offer now just gets longer. And they look like products for kids, though maybe this is just a regional aesthetic preference. I am open to having my mind changed about this…

Now, Thai food being what it is (beloved and ubiquitous), I assumed I’d see way more local brands for everything at the supermarkets I visited. I went in expecting shelves reflecting Thailand’s agricultural powerhouse status. After all, the country is among the world’s leading exporters of rice, coconut, banana, tapioca, and a bunch of other things. 

So, it surprised even me when my own first impression was, wow, there’s a lot of imported food here. Shelves were helpfully labelled with the country of origin. I thought I was just at some fancy supermarket that catered to expats. But I saw that in other supermarkets as well. Turns out, Thailand, with one of the most developed food processing sectors in South East Asia, actually imports a fair bit of processed food. While nowhere as high as the UAE, Japan, or Singapore, but still a pretty significant amount.  

Check out the flags in the pictures below to see what I mean:

I asked GourmetPro expert Rob Hall, who’s lived here for nearly two decades, about this and he did say, the nicer the store, the more international it gets. But Rob also pointed to something deeper. He highlighted that Thailand is very good at processing and developing anything that comes from the local agricultural-based goods. This includes sauces, pastes, cooking oils, snack foods built on local ingredients. These categories are genuinely Thai and genuinely good. 

The disconnect happens further up the value chain, in the broader FMCG layer, which includes packaged goods, dairy, confectionery, beverages, where international brands have made significant inroads. Which is some gossip I heard at Thaifex as well. Someone told me that traditional Thai confectionery brands were feeling quite a bit of heat from Chinese, Korean, and Japanese brands. These outside brands reached consumers through social media, offered greater novelty through flavor, shapes, packaging, and experience. 

Thai brands had a greater presence in convenience stores though, where the average consumer shopped more frequently.

I’ve found that the best place to understand what a country does with its food at home is the cooking pastes and sauces aisles. Across every supermarket I visited, these were proudly local, with lots of aunties and uncles on pack to declare authenticity. Another marker of authenticity for me is the packaging, which looked like it hadn’t been upgraded since the 80s. Because they are probably such an integral part of everyday cooking, brands are confident that nothing needs to change as long as the quality doesn’t. Flashy isn’t what they’re going for. The basic building blocks of everyday home cooking – rice, noodles, soy sauce, fish sauce, etc. – were also local.

As Rob told me, the essence and foundation of Thai cooking is the paste, which does make sense if you’ve ever watched a cooking show featuring Thai food. It’s all about the fresh aromatics and involves mortars and pestles and some serious upper body strength. If you want to make that green curry or tom yum from scratch, cancel all other plans for the day.

So, understandably people prefer buying the packaged paste. And the cooking paste/seasonings aisle in every store I visited was decently sized, varied, and clearly doing brisk business (no dust settling on those packs). This is also what food assembly looks like in Thailand. Rob highlighted that you’re not abandoning the cooking entirely, but instead you’re telescoping hours of prep into minutes. So cooking a green curry could just be a 30-minute exercise rather than an all-day affair, and you’d still end up with a very good dish.  

I asked Rob if people were cooking a lot less in Bangkok because that’s happening in cities around the world. In many Southeast Asian cities (and indeed around the world), lives are getting busier and skills are being lost, so perhaps that trend is playing out here too?

Rob pushed back. “Cooking is such a strong identity of Thais,” he said. Fair point. But he also said what’s undeniable is that the convenience economy here operates at a scale and intensity that makes it feel like the city has collectively decided home cooking is optional. And the reasons are less about preference than circumstance.

Traditional Thai cooking is high-heat, intensely aromatic, and produces serious smoke. Traditional Thai houses (as well as a lot of Asian houses in the days of yore) solved this with outdoor kitchens, a separate space where you could fry and stir and char without making the rest of the house uninhabitable. Bangkok apartments have not inherited this feature. Thai home design websites are full of content about the hot kitchen problem (“ครัวร้อน”)  for a reason. The average size of a Bangkok apartment is 30-45 sqm. So the gap between wanting to cook and being able to cook is a ventilation issue.

Rob is careful not to overstate this point though. His read is that it’s less about kitchen size and more about the whole package of urban life. “I think it’s more along affordability. People can only afford a tiny little place and within that, they’re limited in what they can potentially cook. Or it takes so much time to commute, and they’re too exhausted.” 

When you look at it like that, the pastes seemed very reasonable in both price and quantity. 

There’s also the simple economics that don’t favor cooking much in many cases. Data from Thailand’s National Statistical Office for 2024 reveals the average monthly household expenditure was THB18,207 (~USD500). Over THB8,000 (~USD243), or 42%, is spent on F&B. What is alarming, however, is that the average household debt stands at THB606,378 (~USD18,409).

On the flip side, a plate of pad thai or fried rice from a street stall costs THB40-80 (USD1.50-2.50). The raw ingredients to replicate that at home would cost more and the process would take longer. There is simply no financial case for cooking from scratch when eating out is this cheap.

Rob described the Bangkok morning as its own kind of evidence. “If you’re out and about at 6am, anywhere, you see the early crowd. Everyone’s buying stuff on the way to work.” At every income level and at every price point. “Convenience is everywhere, at every strata,” he said. 

The numbers bear this out as well. Southeast Asia’s food delivery market as a whole has been expanding, with platform GMV reaching USD22.7 billion in 2025, up 18% from 2024. Thailand is the fastest growing in the region at around 22% year-on-year. 

67% of Thai consumers order from delivery apps at least several times a month. 29% use on-demand grocery platforms weekly, well above the global average. 

The coffee aisles in these supermarkets were a bit of a revelation. In general, people everywhere obsess over coffee like it’s a religion. So unending coffee aisles do not come as a surprise. They’re usually just filled with different brands and formats. Rarely do you find much more. But shelves here are full of value-added coffees that actually seem to sell. Collagen, L-carnitine, probiotics, CoQ10 seem as natural in this category as they would in the beauty section. And they occupy near-prime real estate on shelves too – bang in the middle at the touch level, highlighting how they are likely to be high-velocity items.

Rob explained to me that this was very much the norm. “There’s a massive industry within F&B here around functional wellness and it’s closely tied to beauty benefits. And it’s only growing.” 

But it isn’t just coffee. A whole host of F&B products across categories come fortified with collagen and L-carnitine. 

Fiber is also a growing claim on pack here, as it is in many other parts of the world.

This is what Rob calls “functional core”. The function is the entire point of purchase, not just a bonus feature bolted on. And you see it everywhere, especially with collagen, L-carnitine, Vitamin C (which is a collagen booster), and fiber. The aesthetic drive here, as Rob pointed out, is completely unabashed. “Thailand embraces aesthetics,” he said. He recalled Dove’s “inner beauty” campaign flopping badly in the Thai market, because performative modesty about wanting to look good simply doesn’t land here.

These beauty-adjacent products aren’t a gimmick or a brand trying to stand out. They are giving Thai consumers exactly what they want. Thailand has had beauty-from-within and functional drinks for decades. Rob mentioned little medicine-bottle tonics that have been on Thai shelves forever – the ones that look like they belong in an old-timey apothecary. These are mainly vitamin or energy drinks and they feel no need to change their packaging because they do brisk business. About 40% of Thai consumers say they regularly take supplements or vitamins to boost their health, which is higher than the global average of 30%.

But Rob draws a sharp line between functional core and what he calls the tack-on, and that distinction is worth paying attention to. “I struggle with the whole functional thing a little bit, especially adding protein to everything. I think higher quality is what people are after. Less, not more.” His test is simple: is the function the primary reason you’d buy this product, or is it decoration? “A lot of functional stuff gets cycled through, gets trendy, and then I don’t see it in two months,” he said.  

Like this spread thing. It was on the bottom shelf as opposed to the eye level of the vitamin drinks above.

His theory is the underlying logic that separates the enduring from the ephemeral. The best functional products replace an existing product with a slightly better version, instead of asking consumers to adopt a completely new behavior. “Consumers will have something functional as long as it’s pretty close to what they were getting before – like tea with less sugar or collagen drinks,” he said. But if you ask consumers to suddenly care about protein in a snack they’ve always eaten for flavor, that’s a harder sell. 

Ultimately, the health aspiration is real. But it coexists with deep devotion to intensely seasoned street food, sugary drinks, and heavy pork dishes. Here, functional foods seem to be less about replacing indulgent foods and more about supplementing them.

You’re probably wondering what Thais are actually putting in their supermarket baskets. As I understand it, they mostly shop for snacks, drinks, supplements, and staples. These sections were huge, and I have some 3,500 more photos I haven’t even gotten to.

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