Blue Elephant to home in on Europe

Blue Elephant Group will further expand its ready-to-cook food in the global market this year as part of its plan to lift sales by 15-20% annually.

Nattakhom Anantawuttikul, sales and marketing manager, said it will expand ready-to-cook food globally as Thai street food is gaining popularity among foreign tourists.

In the Asian market, Blue Elephant will focus on expanding to Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. It will organise roadshows in Germany to seek new distributors for its products in Europe, particularly Scandinavia.

The group decided to penetrate the Indonesian food market after many Muslim customers booked Thai cooking classes at Blue Elephant’s cooking school.

“We will expand our ready-to-cook food to the Scandinavian market after seeing brisk sales for our ready-to-cook products in Norway in just one year. Moreover, the popularity of Thai street food is gaining more momentum among Chinese people,” he said.

The group exports ready-to-cook food to 32 countries. Of the total sales, about 70% is from the European market, 20% from Asia and the rest from Thailand.

Export sales of ready-to-cook food for grocery lines grew 30% in 2016, driven by sharp increases in demand from Holland, Switzerland and Australia. The growing sales momentum is expected to continue this year.

During the first quarter, overseas sales grew by 33%, driven by the expansion of its ready-to-cook products for grocery lines in new markets such as Taiwan and Norway. Sales in Thailand grew only 3%.

Yesterday, the group launched four new products, including ready-to-cook boat noodles ( kuay tiew rua) and cooking sets for fried rice, Phuket-style wok noodles and Thai Blue Tea (butterfly pea flower tea) at Thaifex 2017.

At the same time, Blue Elephant also plans to launch a new Thai restaurant brand, Thai Brasseries, targeted at young urban and professional customers who have high spending power.

The company plans to franchise Thai Brasseries to general investors in the future.

“Each Thai Brasseries restaurant requires an investment of 15-20 million baht, about a fifth of a Blue Elephant restaurant. The speed of expansion will be higher than opening only Blue Elephant restaurants,” another executive said.

Blue Elephant plans to make its readyto-cook food more accessible to customers by selling it online this year through websites such as Lazada.

Blue Elephant began 37 years ago. It has three business divisions including restaurants, ready-to-cook food business and its cooking school.

The group operates 10 restaurants across the world. Of the total, eight are Blue Elephant Thai dining restaurants and the rest are Indian restaurants.

Group sales at Blue Elephant were 800 million baht last year and are forecast to increase to 950 million this year. Of the total, 750 million baht will come from restaurants and the rest from ready-to-cook food and the cooking school. The firm forecasts group sales will reach 1.2 billion baht by 2020.