At a food fair in New Delhi, a vegetable exporter from the Philippines set out its wares: bags of dried moringa and lemongrass, bundles of taro leaves and a bowl of laing, the creamy coconut-milk stew made from them.
The question Dry Tech Manufacturing wanted to answer was simple: could the simple Filipino food it sells under its Sheentaro brand tantalise the taste buds of the world’s most populous country?
India has hundreds of millions of vegetarians, more than any other country on Earth, making it the ideal market for Sheentaro’s plant-based and ready-to-cook products, Dry Tech vice-president Corinne Anne Cordero told This Week in Asia.
“That’s the main reason why we decided to sign up on short notice,” she said of the Indusfood expo, held in Greater Noida at the start of this year.
“With India having a bigger population than China … and a lot of them are vegetarian, we thought they’d be more open to those types of food ingredients.”
Sheentaro’s products were previously showcased at the China-Asean Expo in Nanning and Cordero said the reception was so positive that “when this opportunity in India came about, we said ‘let’s try it again’”.
Southeast Asian nations are increasingly looking to India as an alternative market, arms supplier and technology partner as China and the US vie for regional influence.