Thai exporters urged to tap future foods amid greater health awareness

The association president, Wisit Limluecha, told Nation Group’s media arm Thansettakij that Thailand was ranked 12th among world’s food exporters with 70 per cent of food production for domestic consumption and 30 per cent for export.

Despite having only 30 per cent of food production for export, he said that Thailand had a variety of food products compared to large exporters.

“As the global food market is competitive, producers should study trends among consumers to meet their demand,” he said, adding that consumers were paying attention to foods after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wisit said that food producers in Thailand had the potential to produce a variety of diets, especially functional foods, alternative protein, organic foods and medical foods.

Thai functional food has the highest expansion in the global market because consumers are aware of and its price is not high, such as food supplements for building muscle or bone mass, and yoghurt which contains probiotics that benefit the digestive system, he explained.

He said Thailand is promoting alternative protein to meet the decline in meat production due to the pandemic and global warming that affects the production of animal feed. 

He said the promotion also aims to meet people’s demand for plant-based foods or insect foods to cope with risk from meat consumption, such as cancer. However, producers should promote insect food carefully to relieve fear among consumers, he said.

Thai organic food expanded slowly due to the production process that takes some time, he said. He added that more Thai producers were interested in producing medical and personalised food, which gained positive sentiment from trends of food as medicine and for an ageing society.

Wisit expects Thailand’s export of future foods to grow by 5-10 per cent depending on the economic situation.

“Entrepreneurs should follow a variety of situations closely, such as economic slowdown, geopolitical conflicts, and uncertainty over production costs due to a hike in minimum wage, energy cost, high interest rate, freight rate hike, impact of drought on agriculture output,” he said.

Thailand’s future food industry is valued at 150 billion baht in the overall 1.5-trillion baht food industry. In the first quarter this year, the country exported foods totalling 370 billion baht, up 2.79 per cent year on year.

The country’s food exports are expected to reach around 1.6 trillion baht this year, up 3 per cent year on year.