Crossover Cuisines

With new cuisines, flavors, foods, and ingredients popping up faster than ever before, determining which items will eventually enjoy mass-market success has become even more difficult.

Ethnic cuisines approaching mainstream popularity—such as Chinese and Mexican—have traditionally been a fertile source of emerging mainstream ingredients. According to NASFT/Mintel, Chinese led the list of take-out foods eaten at home in 2006—purchased by 48% of consumers—followed by Mexican/Latin 20%, Asian 19%, I…