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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John B. Smyth who wrote (8047)	2/20/1999 9:02:00 PM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

John, OT Not to back away from the mirth that Paul started by posting that advertising gaff by Sanyo but an interesting cultural side note here. Bread is the rage in Kuala Lumpur amongst the modern wives. It seems that home bread making has been discovered here with a vengeance, similar to what happened in the U.S. a few years ago. I began to notice the appearance of instant bread mixes on grocery shelves here about 2 years ago. I bought some and my wife made dinner rolls. Since then she has gone from those instant bread rolls to buying ingredients and making bread from scratch, and on to ownership and almost daily use of the Sanyo bread maker I mentioned before. (I had to go to three different shops before I found one that had not sold out this appliance when it first appeared early last Fall.) Interestingly the entire Chinese clan (consisting of relatives and friends) love her bread. I am talking about hard core, chicken claw and fish head eating, Chinese folks, who turn their noses up at butter, cheese, hamburgers, meat loaf, and any number of western culinary manistays. They all eat bread and a lot of it. Example: at a recent simple meal we had here at the house, 12 people went through four loaves of bread. My brother-in-law ate 8 slices! In this same clan, four out of 7 or 8 wives, (I lose track) make regular trips to a bakery supply shop in town and are baking at home. The fellow that owns this shop has been a wholesaler of cake, cookie, and bread making supplies for several years. He supplied hotels,cake houses, the occasional European bakery, and the like. He told me that in the last two years, his retail business has more then quadrupled. He has had to rent a storehouse off site and set up his wholesale business in another location so he could increase counter space. He has also layed in all kinds of baking gadgets that he never thought he would carry. Remember, this is all during a major recession when other business are dropping like flys. Seems that the universal appeal of one kind of western bread (the U.S. dollar) may share equal billing with another in terms of local popularity. <G> Best, Stitch