BJM52 Food Model final project

Group member

Food ModelJ M 2 1 1

Chirati Petcharit 5207640185

Kanokkwan Rattanapinanchai 5207640250

Ruthairat Chanchaisomphob 5207640532

Arisa Klinkhachornsak 5207640615

Eva Jaksch 5307930023

THE LOREM IPSUMS FALL 2012

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The Sweet SensationImagine, you are looking at a

cake. Not any cake, a masterpiece of art, deliciously screaming “eat me”. Three layers of fluffy sponge dough with whipped cream and strawberry jam lavishly spread between each of them. A coat of perfectly smooth vanilla frosting on the top, strewed with chocolate and vanilla curls and chocolate-dipped strawberries. And now imagine, this cake has no calories at all. The bad news, however, is that as tasty and realistic it may look, it’s actually a fake.

Along with other kinds of replica foods such as bowls of noodle soup, pieces of fake meat and rice dishes, cakes like this are arranged at shop and restaurant windows to catch the customer's attention – and stir their appetites. The usage of food models began in the early Showa period in Japan, when after the end of World War II Americans and Europeans started traveling to Japan. As for them it was impossible to read the menus of the restaurants, the owners began to display copies of their dishes in the shop windows to help the foreigners order.

These early samples were made of wax, but there were disadvantages with this medium such as fading colors and the food models melting in sun. From the 1980s onwards more persistent materials such as clay, resin and vinyl chloride were used.


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Suthep Nakpongpan, the 47-year-old owner of the “Mike Food Model Company”, was a pioneer in introducing food models to the Thai market. After graduating with a major in financial marketing, he had been working as a banker for several years. Eventually, a trip to Japan - the cradle of the food model industry - in 2001 made him notice replica food for the first time. By this time, he was already fascinated by the food models displayed at the local restaurants. And when five years later he was asked by a Japanese friend to do some food models, Nakpongpan just started creating them as a hobby with basically no knowledge except for the inspiration from back then, because food models were – unlike in Japan – still completely unknown in Thailand.

“I started by going to the market and buying the food that I wanted to do, for example shrimp and noodles. Then, I prepared the block and painted it,” Nakpongpan remembers. However, the step further to finally launching a business without any professional instruction and with only one employee was a challenge. In the first two years he struggled, because many of the foods he had never seen before were hard for him to imagine, and lacking forging experience, they neither looked good, nor realistic. Thus, a lot of his products had been thrown away as they did not come out perfectly. “I didn’t get the feeling of the food, so when it came out, it was not appealing at all. Having ten customers, eight out of them would ask me to redo it again,” he says. “And I gained no profits at all.” As time passed, Nakpongpan’s works improved - noticeably through customers’ complements. His company began to be well-known, the sales increased.


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Not only does a food model have to perfectly resemble the real food, the copy should look more tasty, more fresh and more delicious than the original. Apart from serving as a 3-D menu of sorts, replica food has been already established as the great way to draw customers’ attention and stir their appetite. The main advantage to displaying the food models in the shop are obvious: The dishes don’t have to be prepared every day, they stay fresh all day, even in the sun and no precious food is wasted for this purpose. This can actually save the shop owner a lot of time and money, and also, the dishes can even be hung up vertically without the ingredients slipping from the plate.

Nakpongpan sets the price of food models depending on size and weight. His products are considerably cheaper than competitors, as much as half of the price of Japanese products. Thus, many of his customers are not only from Thailand, but also from other countries, most of them from America, followed by Vietnam and Japan. He even supplies plastic salmon dishes to Norway. For that purpose, the customer sent a real salmon to Thailand, so Nakpongpan and his employees could make a perfect copy of it. “Most of my customers come from the Internet. If you type ‘food model’ in Thai Google, you will see my website pop up in the first link,” Nakpongpan said proudly.


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Nakponpan's business has been constantly increasing, almost doubling its sales and profit from the previous year. Nakpongpan now also uses twice as much of his major materials such as 200-300 kg of resin and 100 kg of clay every month to produce 400 to 500 pieces of food replicas per month. Even with the global recession, his company is now making close to ten million baht a year.

Nakpongpan is very happy to finally follow his passion to making food models and be able to live of the profit. Right now, he has more than 20 employees his company. There are entirely different jobs to do in the five main sections of production, which include blocking, molding, painting, putting products, and delivery, and every employee in his company must be capable of working on any positions they are assigned. "There’s no hidden secret for making a good food model,” Nakpongpan reveals. “Anyone can do it, just concentrate and put great effort in it."

Looking into the future positively, Nakpongpan believes that one day he will have his own shopping market where people can easily grab a replica food product and purchase it right away - just like they can get real food at 7-Eleven. According to his predictions, food model business in Thailand will grow rapidly in the next few years. “Today, there are only five percent of restaurants in Thailand that have food models shown in window displays, so this is just like the first step of food model business entering to the Thai markets,” he says.


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Documents

BJM52 Food Model final project