Jeane Huang
M.A. (Cultural Management), Chulalongkorn University
Shopping souvenirs while visiting foreign destinations is a common practice for tourists. The gourmet packaged food made from local premium quality agricultural products in the travel destination has been increasingly topping the shopping list of visitors due to visitors’ curiosity for the original, local, exotic, and all natural products and also to the demands for “gourmet” food, a modern concept that usually guarantees to “good quality”. The abundant variety and the high quality of Thai agricultural products provide great ingredient basis for gourmet packaged food such as dried fruits, rice crackers, tea, coffee and herbs. As some of the food suppliers start emerging themselves to meet the global growing demands for “gourmet food” from local and international visitors, they are also met with challenges. This paper aims to study Thai gourmet packaged food suppliers and marketers such as “The Gourmet Market” of The Mall Group, “The Royal Project”, The King Power Duty Free and some of the well-known Thai gourmet packaged food brands on how they position themselves to take advantage in the gourmet food shopping trend and weather if they can stay competitive in a market catered to visitors’ destination shopping.
(Presented in the International Conference – Thai Food Heritage: Local to Global, 4-6 August 2009, Tawana Bangkok Hotel, Bangkok, organized by The Project of Empowering Network for International Thai Studies (ENITS), Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University with support from the Thailand Research Fund (TRF))