Chinese on one hand have a problem with choosing. A context in which this is especially evident is food. A typical Chinese meal, at home or in a restaurant, consists of multiple dishes. Vegetables are important, but at least one plate with animal protein, meat or fish, is indispensable. In fact, you would like to see at least two vegetable dishes and fish AND meat.

Loving to choose

We could easily turn this around and conclude that Chinese love to choose. A typical western family meal has one dish as the main coarse, often fish or meat. This mean dish is accompanied by a type of vegetable and one type of staple. You can start with an appetiser and end with a sweet dish; again with little or no option to choose from. This does not mean that Chinese dislike a western meal, but they have a problem with the lack of options to choose from. During a meal in a western restaurant in China, you will see that most Chinese patrons eat there in the Chinese fashion: all dishes in the middle of the table and all participants of the meal taking pieces of everything.

Variety in processed foods

This propensity is also reflected in processed foods, in particular in leisure food like biscuits, candy, snacks, etc. A peppermint like mentos is a nice refreshment, but one can get easily bored with that endlessly recurring white pepperminty lozenge. Chinese would like to choose to a variety of flavours, each with its own colour. It would still need to be refreshing, but in a slightly different way. International producers of leisure foods have noted this and many of them offer a much larger variety of flavours and colours than in other markets on the globe. This post shows a selection of such world famous products. I am just showing one picture per product. None is exhaustive. There are many more varieties for each of the shown products.

I am not going to translate all flavours. The pictures will speak for themselves. However, I would like to point out an interesting feature of Lay’s. Their large number of variations includes regional Chinese flavours. One of the bags shown here is of ‘Zibo flavour’; Zibo being a town in Shandong province.

Peter Peverelli is active in and with China since 1975 and regularly travels to the remotest corners of that vast nation. He is a co-author of a major book introducing the cultural drivers behind China’s economic success.