The Spanish gourmet product: revered at home (by some) … but what about abroad?
The Spanish gourmet product
Starting with the very word that defines it, gourmet, a French loanword, it already suggests that we are not exactly leaders among culinary concepts. We are one of the world's greatest gastronomic references, but once you leave our country, you find a desert. How difficult it is to find our gourmet products outside our borders! MadeinSpain.store wants to remedy that.
Opposite profiles of Spanish producers: same goal, sell more
Throughout 2020 I have learned a lot about the Spanish gastronomic sector. Lights and shadows define it. Mostly the latter if we look at it from the perspective of brand development. Because when it comes to product quality, we can only praise it and truly be amazed. There hasn't been a week without a new product or brand discovery that made you take your hat off. A common denominator has been that several of the owners were not descendants of families dedicated to production, but came from other sectors — Architects, International Directors, Marketing Specialists — and with these people, precisely, the “engagement” was greater than that coming from the sector, which tends to think much more traditionally. However, both see the international jump as something to do, but when? Everyone would want it to be tomorrow, but if you put them in the dilemma of internationalizing or recovering the tourists who buy our products or taste them in our restaurants, they will undoubtedly choose the latter.
The new era for Spain: less tourism and more brand value to be known
And it's fine to think that tourism is a much easier market to convince, since those customers already come to our country, are on familiar ground and it's ours. There they won't be able to compare our foods with those of other countries so easily. But, sorry, let's be honest and, above all, let's not fool ourselves, because that kind of customer will take a while to come back here, or at least not with the joy they had up to 2019. That will take some time, still undefined, to return to these parts.
So, what do we do with our harvests, wine production, and countless products that can't freeze time and stop producing until the longed-for recovery? The hospitality industry can't help them as a sales channel as it did before, especially those that were based on an international target audience (the high-quality segment of course, although the mid-quality segment too, if they were located in tourist areas), and they are also suffering firsthand from the absence of that customer. To the point of adapting to this new reality by converting to delivery, which I can understand, although not share, because the essence of a restaurant is not only the food but the experience in the place, the service, the precise moment of enjoying that dish, with that tableware, that decoration… uff!!! It's all of that — I'm sorry — sending the food home doesn't have that.
These new circumstances are not the main reason to readapt to the new times; they are the finishing blow to a deficient, very deficient, planning regarding the value of our gastronomic brands abroad. How well it would serve us to be known abroad so we could rely on exports like crazy in these difficult times!!
Seeing ads for San Pellegrino (Italian sparkling water), Buitoni pasta, French Président cheeses, and seeing how people buy champagne or panettones for Christmas in Spain fills me with envy and admiration at the same time. They really do it very well. And why don't we copy them? We should…
Internationalization is the solution… and it already exists: Madeinspain.store
Well, from MadeinSpain, it's the only recipe we share with our partners, the producers: go abroad to sell. Things have changed a lot recently. It's long gone when finding a Spanish gastronomic product in Europe, for example, was almost a miracle, and now there are many marketing channels: international distributors, national ones with branches, Spaniards who are beginning to be like the Italians of the early century — that is, connectors in the destination countries with the native population. In this case, there are even fully Spanish stores of MadeinSpain products that are starting to make their mark in countries like France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany… So the path is starting to be seen, but it's still far from being a road—imagine it becoming a highway… To encourage these routes, we must do more communication abroad. But an intelligent communication (Smart Communication), where the brand is the epicenter of everything. Generate high-value content based on the quality of the products, their storytellings, the people who make up the companies, their commitments to the environment, their organic and/or biodynamic, vegan production… etc.
All this and much more is what we offer our partners at MadeinsSpain.store. To be part of an agile and dynamic platform where the win/win is guaranteed. We are a communication platform based on the recommendations we create, and we are also a direct sales platform through our online store. Our experience of more than 14 years with international customers endorses us in how to approach and how to seduce them. The rest is simply time to build the necessary trust to achieve loyalty.
I can assure you that the future is ours, because we have incredible Spanish premium gastronomic products, and demand that worships them when they come to Spain and discover them. Let's go find those customers in their home countries and convince them they should have these products in their regular diet, not only when they come to Spain. Those who are clear about this will evolve and, above all, survive. Those who aren't will not, or they will become prey to absorption by bigger fish… even international ones that are always buying in our country. That is said.
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