The World Is Already on the Menu: How Global Brands Are Turning Multiculturalism into a Growth Market
In 2019, McDonald's did something it had never done in the United States: it put its own international menu on domestic menu boards. The Worldwide Favorites program brought the Stroopwafel McFlurry from the Netherlands, the Grand McExtreme Bacon Burger from Spain, and Cheesy Bacon Fries from Australia to American restaurants nationwide. The company's reasoning was blunt: U.S. customers were curious about what McDonald's serves everywhere else, and McDonald's had the global scale to deliver it.
Seven years later, that curiosity is now a category. 7-Eleven is rebuilding parts of its North American fresh-food program around the Japanese konbini model — onigiri, miso ramen, teriyaki rice balls — across a network of more than 13,000 U.S. and Canadian stores.
Mainstream grocers are pulling international products out of the shrinking "ethnic aisle" and into the center of the store. When walking through a Costco, you see bibigo bulgogi dumplings in the freezer, Jongga kimchi in the refrigerated case, Nongshim ramen on the shelf. These items are no longer part of “ethnic aisle” but in the regular aisles, next to Costco's own Kirkland Signature beef bulgogi and roasted seaweed. When a retailer's private label is making bulgogi, the "ethnic aisle" era is over.
The structural change is this: global brands used to localize in one direction — adapt the home product for each foreign market. Now the flow runs both ways. For an enterprise with locations in twenty countries, the question is no longer just "how do we adapt for Seoul?" It is: "which of our Seoul innovations belong in Toronto?"
The demand side is not a niche anymore
Korean food exports reached a record $8.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025, up 8.9% year over year. The largest destination was not China or Japan — it was the United States, at $1.6 billion and growing 13.1% annually. Ramyeon shipments alone climbed 24.5%. That is one country's cuisine, measured in one direction.
Demographics compound the trend. Latino consumers now represent roughly 20% of the U.S. population and one of its fastest-growing segments. Asian grocers like H Mart and T&T are expanding into mainstream trade areas: T&T moved down the West Coast almost immediately after its 2024 U.S. debut, and conventional grocers are answering with multicultural private-label lines and market-by-market assortment. Younger consumers treat global flavours as a default expectation. When they discover a product on social media, they don't see the product as an ethnic product but they see it as a product their local store should already have.
For an enterprise brand, this opportunity serves every constituency at once. Category teams get differentiated SKUs where private-label pressure is compressing margins. Marketing teams get launches with built-in cultural momentum and organic reach. Strategy teams get a growth story that requires no new real estate. The demand is already inside the trade area. The only question is who captures it first.
Why the brands with the most locations find this the hardest
The companies best positioned to capture this are the enterprises with global footprints and mature supply chains. However, they also consistently find this challenging to execute.
Take Tim Hortons. The brand entered South Korea in December 2023 and is now localizing aggressively: 24 outlets today, a target of 50 in 2026 and 160 by 2028, with Korea-specific bakery and dessert development — including items that debuted in Korea first. The Korean stores carry a lineup that doesn't exist in Canada: bingsu-style Iced Capps in black sesame and red bean, injeolmi and hotteok Timbits, mugwort cream crullers. Canadian media has already noticed — Daily Hive documented Canadians commenting with envy, asking "Why is Tim Hortons better everywhere except for Canada?" The home-market appetite is documented. The product is proven. The brand owns the recipes.
So why isn't that menu in Canada? Because in foodservice, a recipe is the smallest part of a product. Every item in the Korean menu is built on ingredients its regional team sources locally. Korean bakery inputs, dairy specifications, sauces, and produce flows from Korean suppliers into Korean kitchens. Bringing that menu to Canada means re-sourcing every input through a North American foodservice distribution where most of those ingredients have no established supplier, no spec sheet, and no landed cost. It means adapting each item to Canadian kitchen operations: different equipment, different prep capacity, different volume and consistency requirements across thousands of locations. The master franchisee that developed the item has no mandate to export it, and the Canadian operating company's procurement system is built around distributors who have never handled these inputs.
Each regional operation was built to run its own market well. That is exactly what makes them poor conduits for moving products between markets. The org chart has an owner for Korea and an owner for Canada — but no owner nor project lead for Korea-to-Canada. The opportunity sits in the seam: visible to everyone, assigned to no one.
The gap is cultural, not just operational
There is a harder layer underneath the sourcing problem, and enterprises consistently underestimate it: regions don't just operate differently; they think differently.
Language is the visible part. The deeper gaps are in how each market defines the product itself. Tim Hortons is a budget daily habit in Canada; in Korea it positioned itself as a premium brand alongside Starbucks. Market analysts at Daxue Consulting note that Korean consumers push back on exactly that disconnect, questioning why "a budget brand" commands premium pricing. The same brand carries a different identity, price architecture, and marketing playbook depending on which side of the Pacific the customer stands on. Meanwhile, the Korean café market is one of the most saturated and trend-driven in the world — Tim Hortons closed its Cheongna outlet in 2025 amid exactly that competitive pressure — and menu development moves at the speed of Korean trend cycles, where an item can rise and fade in a single season. In Canada, the same brand is a daily habit built on consistency. A Japanese konbini is a fresh-food destination; a North American convenience store was built on hot dogs and Slurpees. Same banner, different social contract with the customer.
These gaps show up in the working relationship, too. A North American procurement team and a Korean supplier can share a translator and still talk past each other. There is a cultural chasm of understanding between parties regarding how quickly decisions get made, what a specification document is expected to cover, how disagreement is voiced, what a signed agreement does and doesn't settle. A company can hire an interpreter and the deal can still fall apart because expectations, working styles, internal politics, and etiquette difference can play a bigger role than the language itself.
What the successful programs have in common
The brands making this work share a few operating habits.
They treat cross-market transfers as a supply chain project, not a marketing project. The Stroopwafel McFlurry worked because McDonald's solved sourcing and spec adaptation before the campaign existed.
They borrow institutional knowledge instead of building it. When 7-Eleven set out to bring konbini-quality fresh food to North America, it did not ask its U.S. merchandising team to reinvent it. The company is upgrading the 17 U.S. commissary hubs that supply its stores and partnering with Japanese suppliers to broaden its fresh-food range, and its spokespeople describe working with some of the same fresh-food manufacturers and commissaries as Seven-Eleven Japan. When the knowledge exists in another market — or in a partner — the fastest route is to use it.
They pilot through limited-time offers and regional launches. An LTO in one province tests demand, validates the sourcing pathway, and generates sell-through data before anyone commits to a national rollout. The supplier and logistics work done for the pilot is reusable for the rollout.
They put a single accountable owner on the seam. Someone has to hold the whole chain: source-market supplier, export documentation, import compliance, spec adaptation, landed cost, and distribution into the existing network — and hold the relationships on both sides of the cultural gap. Where no such owner exists, programs stall in the handoffs.
An importer of record that already holds regulatory status in the destination market, already maintains supplier relationships in the source market, and operates natively in both business cultures compresses a cross-border product launch from a multi-quarter internal buildout into a procurement decision. The enterprise keeps what it is good at — brand, marketing, distribution, shelf — and hands off the seam it was never structured to own.
The window is a strategy question, not a trend question
Multicultural demand in North America is not waiting for enterprise supply chains to catch up. It is being served today by specialty grocers, importers, and digitally native brands that move faster precisely because they are small. Every quarter an enterprise spends deciding whether Korean, Filipino, or Japanese products belong in its North American assortment is a quarter in which its customers buy those products somewhere else — and build the habit.
The brands that win this market will stop treating their global footprint as a collection of separate markets and start treating it as a portfolio: products, suppliers, and proven concepts that can move in any direction. The demand curve is drawn. The operational bridge is the missing piece — and it is buildable.
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Kaeros Global Trading Inc. is a Vancouver-based licensed importer connecting Asia-Pacific food products with North American retail and foodservice. If your organization is exploring cross-border product programs — in either direction — we would welcome the conversation. Reach us at kaeros.global.
Sources
McDonald's Around the World Menu Is Now Around the Corner — McDonald's Corporate, June 2019
Japan-Style 7-Elevens Are Coming to the US — Kind Of — TODAY
7-Eleven Stores in the U.S. Will Introduce Some Japanese-Inspired Changes — Entrepreneur
K-food exports hit record $8.5b on US demand, ramyeon boom — The Korea Herald
Tim Hortons to double Korea outlets on localization push — The Korea Times, January 2026
Tim Hortons Debuts First Salads, Scones in Korea Menu Expansion — Seoul Economic Daily, March 2026
I tried Tim Hortons South Korea's new Iced Capps — honest review — Daily Hive
Mass-market in Canada, premium in Asia: The strategy of Tim Hortons in South Korea — Daxue Consulting
Multicultural grocery demand is rising. Here's what grocers can do. — Grocery Dive
