In Conversation with Kevin Britten and Alec Cousins
In our most recent “In conversation with…” podcasts, Kevin Britten, our Managing Director, talks to Alec Cousins, the owner and MD of Super Plant Foods Ltd. Alec is now opening The Mekong Kitchen in Cambodia with the vision of bringing Khmer cuisine to the global retail market.
Duration: 14 minutes
Full transcript
Kevin: Hi, this is Kevin Britten. Welcome to the latest in our series of podcasts, “Kevin Britten in conversation with…” I’m the Managing Director of Top Recruitment Cambodia. Today I’m in conversation with Mr. Alec Cousins, who is the owner and Managing Director of a company called The Super Plant Kitchen.
Right now he is opening a new company called The Mekong Kitchen. It’s a company which is in the process of setting up and starting up in Cambodia. Although in the past Alec has worked in his business of food, he’s worked in North and South America, in Europe, and now, for his first time in Asia, he is experimenting and exploring the market for Khmer food.
Hi, Alec.
Alec: Hi, Kevin.
Kevin: Hi. Thank you. It’s good to be with you today. Alec, can you tell us a little bit about what you’re actually doing in Cambodia?
Alec: That’s a very good question. Thank you for asking that. So I was here at the at the end of last year. I was in Thailand in fact, and taking a one-month break and I thought I’d come and see my friend who had been living in Phnom Penh and is now in Kampot and I just wanted to explore the country a little bit.
My original plan was to be here for two or three days but I was fascinated with Phnom Penh, loved it, enjoyed being down in Kampot and extended my trip to see some of the sites in the north and headed up to Siem Reap and saw Angkor Wat. My two, three days quite quickly extended to two or three weeks and I’ve been back a few times since, each time for slightly longer. I’ve been really taken by the country and the and the people, and its culture and its gentleness and just what a wonderful place. I’m very happy here.
Kevin: Great. This is a story I’ve heard many times foreigners coming to Cambodia and being captivated by the people and the country, but Alec, your business is food. So do you want to talk to us a little bit about what you do with food?
Alec: So, my passion is food.
I worked many years ago in finance for a few years in the City in London. And I was always dreaming of having a business that created something. Discussing interest rate futures and where the treasury bond is going to be in in 15 years time was not particularly captivating to me.
And so, having always been interested in cooking and particularly French food, I had bought lots of recipe books and I thought it was difficult to make fresh stocks. And so that’s how I started off my life. I just didn’t think that people were necessarily inclined to cook chicken bones for five or six hours, but every recipe seemed to call for a good chicken stock or a veal stock or whatever.
And so I set up a company, it was called Joubert and we started making these stocks and demi glace and gravies and expanded into fresh soup and became, over the course of a few years, the leading supplier in our category in the UK.
Kevin: Okay. But you’re not coming to Cambodia to make soups and stocks, are you?
Alec: I’m not sure. I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe there’s a market for that here. I no, I’m not. So after living in the UK, I worked in worked in Peru, worked in South America and we began to look at some of the communities who are growing things like potatoes and chilies and to convert those into products.
It sounds very mechanical, doesn’t it, to say convert. But we were transforming their ingredients into delicious, marketed products for North America and Europe. And I’m looking to do much the same here in Cambodia. There’s a, a wealth of ingredients. Very interesting if slightly lost cuisine, right?
I would like to marry the two. I’d like to bring together our experience in creating products and brands and to use ingredients supplied by some of these wonderful communities and to transform those into products that people will love, chefs and home cooks and everybody in between.
Kevin: Okay. So you plan to export food or food ingredients? What’s your plan?
Alec: So, it’s less to export the food ingredient as such, and it is to add as much value as we can here in Cambodia. That’s really what we want to do. We want to take some of these roots and vegetables and herbs and spices and to transform those into long shelf-life bases for people to be able to use them at home.
A little bit like a Thai green curry base, if you will, but we’re doing the equivalent with Khmer. ingredients and Khmer recipes.
Kevin: Okay, but do you plan to adapt Khmer recipes?
Alec: The Khmer taste is pretty sweet. And a friend of mine was telling me that a pizza, a pizzeria that had opened had to start putting more sugar into the pizza base for them to appeal to the to the local market.
And we’re trying to do exactly the opposite. So, we’re trying to take sugar out. That’s the main difference, it seems, and there’s sometimes an aversion to very spicy. We are just trying to adapt, sometimes to the horror of the development chef that we’re working with. We’re trying to introduce a unique aspect to most of the recipes.
Quite selfishly, most of the recipes are what I like. But I think that I know what other people like and that’s always been the way it is.
Kevin: Okay, but you’re successful in the business. But what challenges do you anticipate in sourcing and producing food products in Cambodia?
Alec: I think, the biggest challenge is probably the consistency of ingredient and the consistency of conversion of those ingredients. The challenge I would say is to ensure that we have a nice seasonal supply of all of our core ingredients. That that’s really the challenge locally, I think Kevin.
Kevin: Okay. And what specific Khmer sauces or pastes? What are you taking out into the global market?
Alec: If you think that there’s, the national dish, if you will, it is amok. We’re creating an amok base that will allow people at home to introduce fish or chicken to, and then to create. It’s really a little souffle, something different from the traditional curry. But we have curries too, and we have little meal kits that will include specifically Cambodian ingredients.
Imagine that we have a jungle soup base and to that you will add Kampot pepper, some chili flakes, so you can spice it up or have it relatively mild and add some palm sugar if you do want to make the recipe sweeter.
So we’re doing some pastes, some meal kits, and over time we’d obviously like to expand the offer somewhat.
Kevin: Great. Now I know you’re a very ethical company. How do you plan to go about building fair partnerships with your Cambodian farmers or producers.
Alec: One of the things we have been looking into is to become B Corp registered. It’s a little bit complicated here because there isn’t a local office, but there is representation, and I think that there are a couple of companies in the food sector who are B Corp registered. So that’s one way of doing it, which will provide an international recognition of the standards that we’re working to.
The other is that, we work in very close partnership with our co packers who have been very generous to introduce us to some of their key suppliers. We will go into the community and understand, who’s growing chilies, who’s growing galangal and garlic and other ingredients, and to be sure that they’re working to the right standards not just in terms of pesticide control, but also, the safety of the workers in the field. That children aren’t employed, all of the usual, all of the usual things. We dig really deep into our supply base. We don’t have so many ingredients that, we’re traveling the length and breadth of the country to be sure the key ingredients are ethically sourced.
Kevin: Great. Your venture, your company will contribute to Cambodia’s economy and I guess culinary recognition globally. Is that the big picture goal of what you’re doing?
Alec: I think the big picture goal is to do that. It must make sense for us to be not sourcing Cambodian ingredients and then converting them somewhere else.
It has to make sense for us to be doing all of that here. And there are obviously a commensurate skill sets that the co packers and our partners will learn from our experience. We’re sourcing packaging, of course, locally, and transport and and all the other add on services locally.
In terms of international recognition, I don’t think that Cambodian food is really on the map. There are obviously some chefs who are going out into the international market talking about lost recipes and bringing those somewhat to public recognition. But it’s got a long way to go.
And we have really nice, close relationships with some well-known chefs. And I’d like them to start using some of our ingredients, some of our pastes and bases that would be impossible for them to find or to create on their own.
Kevin: So you see yourself as leading a trend in Southeast Asian cuisine?
Alec: I don’t, I think that’s probably pushing it a little bit, but we’d like to be able to get some of these recipes onto the map and to really celebrate the fantastic ingredients that one can find here. And hopefully encourage more people to come to Cambodia as a food destination, on a food tour.
Kevin: Why not? It’s super interesting. So you see that in the future, you can see that side of Cambodia growing.
Alec: I think so. I think so. There’s no reason why not. And some of the restaurants here are truly wonderful. We saw it in South America, when we were working in Peru. Over a number of years, that became a real food destination. And it was a theme that united the country. We’d love, of course, for that to happen. But those are lofty goals. I’m not sure Kevin, that I’ve that I’ve got that in me, but I would I’d like to see that happen.
Kevin: Of course. It’s goals are all about big picture and big picture is all about the future. Where do you see this venture going in, in, into the future?
Alec: I think that, we won’t just be concentrating on Cambodian food, but what we would like to do is we’d like to have, hence the name Mekong Kitchen, is a broader range of recipes that are all made here in Cambodia.
That’s what we’d like, that’s what we would like to do. And we’d like to expand our international presence. So right now we have some products on the market in the United States and in the EU, in Switzerland too. So we’d like to continue to work, to grow our distribution base and obviously to grow our brand.
Kevin: Great. That’s it. Okay. It’s been great talking with you today, Alec, about this exciting new adventure.
Alec: Wonderful to see you again. Yeah. And to be here, of course.
Kevin: So this is part of what we see as the growing future of positive moves in the Cambodian economy. And it’s always a pleasure to meet inbound investors and startups with exciting ideas, and particularly because this one is taking Cambodia out to the global market which has got to be good for all Cambodians and good for business, good for the nation.
Again, once again, Alec, thank you very much for joining us. And this is Kevin Britten saying, please join us again on our next podcast.