Walk down the world food aisle of any supermarket and ask yourself what it is for. A taste of home? The dish you saw on TikTok? Imported brands, or British brands with global flavours? It is all of these at once, and none of them convincingly. It is the only aisle in the store built around an idea nobody has ever agreed on.
I have seen a category in this position before, because The Black Farmer made its name in one.
Twenty years ago, gluten-free was a medical aisle. You shopped it because you had to, not because you wanted to. The products were apologetic and the fixture was tucked away. We took a different view: a free-from product should never have to apologise for itself. So we built our premium pork sausage gluten-free. Not a compromise for people with a condition, but a great sausage that happened to be gluten-free.
Look at free-from now. It is a lifestyle choice, a quality signal, in many categories a prerequisite. That did not happen because retailers rearranged shelves. It happened because brands trailblazed, giving everyone else a reason to walk down the aisle. World foods today is where gluten-free was then. It is ranged as if it serves a small subset of shoppers, when everything about modern Britain says otherwise: a category worth around £1.8bn, growing ahead of the market, with West African, South Asian, Caribbean and Latin American foods among the fastest-growing segments in grocery.
Yet the aisle has not made the leap. I have spent recent months walking world food fixtures and studying the category online, and what struck me was an absence. No two retailers even define the category the same way. On one website, American condiments top the world foods page. On another, Italian counts as world food, while kosher and bulk packs sit alongside entire continents.
That is not any retailer’s fault. When a category has no identity, everyone draws its borders differently. Try to name the brand that stands out in world foods. I could not, and I doubt many shoppers could either.
Free-from had its trailblazers. Mexican food had a brand that gave shoppers a Friday night ritual. World foods is still waiting for its champion. It is the clearest white space in grocery.
Here is an admission. For years we chose not to position ourselves as a world food brand. As a Caribbean brand, we felt the fixture was somewhere you got lost rather than found, so we built our home in the mainstream aisles, and I would make the same call again. But think about what that says.
My father, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, came from Jamaica and built a farm in Devon. If a brand born of the Windrush story saw more opportunity outside the world food aisle than in it, that tells you everything about why the category needs a name and an ambition worthy of the food on its shelves.
Part of our mission now is to help give it one. Dishes like jerk, mutton curry and oxtail have earned their place in the mainstream, and they equally deserve a home in world foods, because that shopper is our shopper too. The best brands should be strong enough to trade in both aisles.
So my challenge to retailers is simple. Stop treating world foods as a niche that ranges itself. The demand is there. What the category is waiting for is definition, and definition comes from brands willing to lead.
We watched a small aisle become an expectation once before. We intend to help it happen again.
Alex Emmanuel-Jones is commercial director at The Black Farmer
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