Don’t call it an “ethnic” grocery store

By Priya Krishna, The New York Times

Last year, Americans bought half a billion packets of Shin Ramyun, the spicy, beefy Korean instant noodle. The bold red-and-black packaging feels inescapable: It’s a staple of college dorm rooms, bodegas, middle-of-the-country Walmarts and viral TikTok videos.

But 30 years ago, the noodles were largely unknown in the United States. No grocery store would stock them, said Kevin Chang, the director of marketing for Nongshim, Shin Ramyun’s parent company. Except, that is, for a few small Korean grocers, including a fledgling shop called H Mart in the Queens borough of New York City.

In the 1970s and ’80s, as Asian immigration to the United States soared, grocers like H Mart; Patel Brothers, an Indian grocery founded in Chicago; and 99 Ranch Market, originally focused on foods from China and Taiwan, started in Westminster, California, opened to meet the demand for ingredients that tasted like home. These were tiny mom-and-pop shops in suburban strip malls or outer boroughs with large Asian immigrant populations. They weren’t fancy, but they were vital to their communities.

Now, those same shops have transformed into sleekly designed chains with in-store roti machines, mobile ordering apps and locations across the country — all aiming to serve the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States and the millions of others who now crave flavors like Shin Ramyun, chili crisp, chaat masala and chai.

The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the bestselling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by musician Michelle Zauner, who records as Japanese Breakfast). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.

Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.

Turning Specialties Into Staples

Despite their recent growth, Asian American grocers still represent less than 1% of the total U.S. grocery business, which is dominated by retailers such as Kroger and Walmart, said Dymfke Kuijpers, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey who specializes in retail. But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they dictate which products the big-box chains stock.

Americans have become deeply enamored with Asian flavors: From April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales, according to data analytics company Circana. And more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.