You’re binging some series, maybe a movie, some K-drama, in fact I’m actually in a deep Korean rabbit hole right now, last night I watched Exhuma, Koreans really know how to make scary movies, none of this “I’m a demon, I’m gonna eat you,” kindergarten bs, like actual old-world spirits & rituals people genuinely built whole traditions around. But you get hungry, you go to the kitchen, you don’t wanna cook, and that noodle packet starts looking at you like a girl at the club who just discovered your personality after she saw the watch, and at that point you already know you’re finished, so you boil the water, throw the noodles in, add a suspicious red powder, and five minutes later you’re at 2AM eating like you just made one of the greatest financial decisions of your life.
And funny enough, that’s exactly what happened to me last night, except while I was eating it, an idea hit me, and I think this is something you guys will relate to. See, when we’re eating those noodles, we never pause and say: how the hell was this packet made in Korea, and now I’m eating it in Seattle, France, India, Morocco, Italy, wherever? How did this tasty little physical object travel from some factory on the other side of the world, cross borders, cross an ocean, enter another country, end up inside a store, and somehow land in my kitchen at 2AM? Because once you ask that question, the ramen stops being just ramen for a second. There is a whole chain of people and companies hiding behind that one packet.
But every time, our brain just skips over it because, well, it’s ramen, who gives a shit, tastes good, who cares.
What if we actually followed the packet backwards? You’re holding it here in America, France, India, Mexico, Middle East, whatever, before that, it was on a shelf. Before it was on a shelf, somebody had to bring it to the store. Before that, somebody had to bring it into the country. And before any of that happened, some company in Korea had to make the ramen and somehow find a way to get it all the way over here. Excellent.
Now we have two people staring at each other from opposite sides of the world. The Korean company has ramen and wants it inside American stores. And somewhere in America, there is a company whose entire business is taking products like that and putting them inside American stores.
Imagine you’re that Korean ramen company, I’m just using Korean ramen as an example, this could just as easily be Spanish olive oil, Italian pasta, Turkish dried fruit, Japanese snacks, Thai sauces, literally any physical food product made in one country and sold in another. You’ve made the product, people like it, maybe you’re already selling it in your home country and a few other places, and then one day you decide: “I want America.” And obviously you fucking do, because America is one of the biggest and richest food markets on earth, hundreds of millions of people, enormous supermarket chains, huge restaurant and specialty-food channels, and consumers who already buy food from every corner of the planet. If your product works there, you can sell a lot more of it and make a lot more money, which is exactly why getting into America matters so much, because you could have the best noodles in Korea, but if nobody can actually get them into American stores, you’re still missing out on all of that.
Wanting America is easy. Getting onto an American shelf is the nasty part. You cannot sit in Korea / Italy / Spain / Turkey / Japan and personally call every supermarket, hold inventory in New Jersey, deal with returns, move pallets around the country, handle all the paperwork, all while trying to run your actual company back home. At some point, you need somebody already inside America who knows how to do that.
Their job is basically: “Give me the product, I know how to get it into this market and onto shelves.” Think about it in the stupidest way possible: you make the ramen in Korea, the distributor already knows how to get boxes of ramen into American stores. You make the olive oil in Spain, they already know how to get bottles of olive oil onto American shelves. You make the thing, they put it in their country.
Because a distributor/American importer has to make money too, they make money by having products to distribute, they live on new products, there are stores that keep asking them what’s new? What else can we sell? K-food is on fire in America right now, we need new things, so the distributor is always looking for the next product that could sell, which obviously creates competition between distributors too, because if the distributor across town finds that new Buldak-style Korean ramen, Italian pasta, Spanish olive oil, whatever, and signs the brand first, that other distributor gets the product, the stores, and the money and the other gets none.
Foreign brand: “I need somebody who can get me into American stores.”
American distributor: “I need good new products I can put into American stores.”
Well, we sit in the middle of both of these people and sell them access to each other. The foreign brand wants a US distributor. The US distributor wants good foreign brands. I’ll give you the exact offers to sell to each side in a second, because we’re going to charge both sides, and I’ll explain exactly why.
But first, you might be thinking: “Saad, beautiful, this all sounds good, but there’s a problem. How the hell do I know which foreign brands actually want America right now?”