“I have never been this close to the Filipino community, ever. Now I have a better appreciation of why Filipinos come to Europe, what they need and where they get the Filipino food they serve in gatherings.”
THAT sweet ketchup spaghetti topped with hot dog slices (blazing red, if nothing else) is a bizarre business proposition if you’re not Filipino.
But Rhafael “Rhaf” Antonio, now a resident of the Netherlands, is firmly one in memory, affiliation and motivation.
He was missing the “speketchup,” and his business sprang from this nostalgia.
The said dish has been dismissed as a gastronomic abomination in the occident (and perhaps elsewhere). But its ingredients are salable in exactly that part of the world now, where Antonio is in an informed position to predict the growing importance of Filipino food.
From his vantage point in the Netherlands, where he lives with his husband and works as a consultant for Heuschen & Schrouff, the biggest distributor of Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean food in Europe, the Filipino food market will be an important one in the continent for the next five years.
“Five years ago, Heuschen & Schrouff were not even paying [that much] attention to Filipino food,” Antonio said.
The firm had given him carte blanche to transform the continent barren of sweet longganisa and the crimson hot dogs of Pinoy children’s parties into a growth area for Filipino foodstuffs.
By all means, Antonio is a credible advocate of this authenticity.
Upon migrating to the Netherlands, he created a recipe for the Pinoy hot dog to be manufactured in the European country.
The hot dogs were on the back burner for a whole two years, given stringent EU food standards on garish food color.
Antonio swiftly pivoted to the more familiar relative of the well-loved treat: the sweet longganisa. And in its classic marinade, he had stumbled upon a gem. The first batches sold out in a month.
Thus emerged Pinoy Kitchen, his first business venture in the Netherlands, but certainly not in his lifetime. Its success was for him the natural outcome of his previous strikeouts.
As a young man in Santa Rosa, Laguna, where he had grown up, he was already selling longganisa, tocino and rice from their family home.
“I tried many things! And all of them failed!” he proudly professed, by way of a business CV.
He sold Jelly ace and ice candy in elementary school back in his childhood hometown, Nueva Ecija.
The son of a company driver, Antonio also took after the business sense his mother, who sold halo-halo and barbecue, and ran a small piggery.
“It used to upset me,” Antonio said. “But now, it has changed. What upsets me is when I see that people don’t care about what they do. All of those failures were, for me, stepping stones. I feel like I learned from each one of them.”
In the scheme of things, Antonio was never a bust in the kitchen. The special relationship with food, mingling with his adventures in entrepreneurship and the ground hustle of “not being well-off” in the past congealed into an extraordinary understanding of Filipino food’s sociality. The inscription of Pinoy Kitchen in the wider European Union network slides along its community significance.
Hence, in the Pinoy Kitchen, his taste testers are Filipinos. The Filipino community, his primary consumers, was consulted as a matter of primary marketing legwork. “From there, I was able to get very good feedback on product adjustments, the branding. Filipinos are very loyal to their brands, those they grew up with.”
He tours a continental circuit of Filipino events.
He formed a group of Filipino taste resource persons. Being immersed in the Filipino community in Europe has been the current by which Pinoy Kitchen and the valued work he does for Heuschen & Schrouff, ran.
Beyond Pinoy kitchen
Antonio now faces expansion on all business fronts. Pinoy Kitchen is adding 16 more products to its range.
And Heuschen & Schrouff’s (H&S) share in the distribution of Filipino ingredients across Europe resonates across the community.
There aren’t Filipino specialty stores or food producers in the continent oblivious to the provisions of H&S, with Antonio trooping the corners of interest. Filipino restaurants making a name in key cities like Paris get their supplies from H&S.
The bright future of Filipino food in Europe — his verbatim prognostication — is imprinted all over his work and increasing demographic awareness:
“The number of Filipinos in the [entire] Europe is the same as that in Canada,” he explained. “But the sales [of Filipino food] here are higher.”
Part of it can be explained by higher incomes in some countries of the continent, like Germany and Austria. Another part is reach, wriggling into the mainstream. H&S has started supplying Filipino food to leading global retailer Carrefour in Belgium. It’s the initial step toward a possible bigger share of retail in France, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany.
And the quietest factor would be Antonio’s footwork. His business interests had carried over to shoring up Filipino entrepreneurship through his insights. He insists that, whilst Filipino customers, the sure buyers, would travel miles to buy and support their own, European customers cannot be ignored.
This, he thinks, explains the success of Thai and Vietnamese cuisines in Europe.
“They adjust. They still want to make it authentic, but they want to make it consumable for European customers. They invest in location and store presentation.”
Perhaps, then, it would be pointless to insist on bagoongwhere it really wouldn’t fly. And until now, very specific food items run into the wall of European food standards. Even the most beloved comfort foods of Pinoys (jog your memories back to a home-loved instant noodle brand that had faced a ban) could fail entry.
The key, Antonio thinks, is producing Filipino foodstuffs in Europe that cannot be imported from the Philippines.
“I ask them, do you think those Filipino buyers will just go away?” he shared of his attempt to inspire the confidence of small retailers in their established suki (loyal buyer) relationships in Europe. These relationships form a foundation for them to ask, in Antonio’s view, how they can expand their market share to European consumers.
“And how can Pinoy Kitchen and Heuschen help you with that?” would be Antonio’s ultimate outreach to his fellow Filipino entrepreneurs.
That’s another mental leap toward loving one’s own. It’s another area where Antonio feels he could plug some gaps. Filipino migrant entrepreneurship runs into many challenges, not least are the rarity of financial education and marketing training.
“I didn’t have financial education,” Antonio shared. “I needed to learn everything myself.”
His own lack of mentorship to his admittedly more comfortable situation now drives his knowledge sharing and recruitment toward the Filipino food movement partly created in his kitchen. His niece and nephew are tapped as social media marketers and photographers. He advises other retailers on ideal price points and consumer tastes.
Antonio’s struggle toward stable entrepreneurship in unfamiliar terrain could have been a template. In the homeland, he had been a supermarket bagger before working his way up the ranks of a BPO (business process outsourcing), in a now classic breach of the class divide courtesy of this sector. It took him two years to move to the Netherlands with his husband after a stint in Canada, where they met.
In this Dutch-speaking country, where Antonio had no Dutch on himself, jobs were elusive. Fortune smiled upon him eventually in the tech sector, but he didn’t twiddle his thumbs in between.
Because the “crazy” ideas keep coming. It is Antonio’s husband who reigns in all that and dines with him without cell phones, with the shop talk dialed down.
Regardless, Antonio could have been on point with the craziness, if for his role in the offshore stirrings of Filipino identity and sense of community manifested in the typical salusalo. He has become a mainstay in these gatherings, wherever they might be — he had recently passed Budapest and Warsaw for these meets.
“I have never been this close to the Filipino community, ever,” he admitted. “Now I have a better appreciation of why Filipinos come to Europe, what they need and where they get the Filipino food they serve in gatherings.”
Filipino retailers have his personal number. And the heat from his own kitchen, fueled by his ideas, drives him to the field.
Quick Questions
What really makes you angry?
When people don’t have compassion for others.
What motivates you to work hard?
Number 1 would be my husband and my family. We came from humble beginnings and there was a point when I was younger that we did not even have enough. I don’t want to experience that again, and I want us to have a comfortable life.
Number 2, it excites me to know that there’s so much that we can do to promote Filipino cuisine. I am a proud Filipino, and I want to be able to share something in making our cuisine big in this region.
What makes you laugh the most?
Reminiscing funny moments from the past with my friends.
What did you want to be when you were small?
I wanted to be a pilot. Because I think I am a natural adventurer. I like to experience new things and see new places. I am able to do that now, even if I end up doing something else.
What would you do if you won the lotto?
I would travel the world with my family.
If you could share a meal with any individual, living or dead, who would they be?
My niece, who passed away when she was 6 years old. I had to stay in Canada to work and support her treatments, and I could not go back home to see her.
What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever done?
Starting a big consulting role in the food industry.
What was the last book you read?
“House of Dragon, Fire and Blood” by George R.R. Martin. I am a big fan.
What celebrity would you like to meet for a cup of coffee?
Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo.
What is one thing you will never do again?
Put career on top of my husband/family. They will always be the first.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Enjoying the fruits of my labor and traveling the world more with my husband.