Ethnography and taste testing in Cairo kitchens for a Japanese seasoning brand entering Egypt

A global consulting firm working with Ajinomoto, Japan's leading seasoning manufacturer, needed to know whether a flagship MSG seasoning could find a place in Egyptian kitchens, a market with limited official data, a culinary culture built on generations of family recipes and strong loyalty to local brands. Desk research and surveys could not show how Egyptian households and professional chefs use seasonings, what drives their preferences, or whether there was real appetite for an international product. The decision at stake was the market entry itself: positioning, channels, pricing and timing.

MindMarket designed a two-phase ethnographic study in Cairo, a pilot to test the methods and then full fieldwork with the consulting firm and the end client present. The team spent time in seven households across socioeconomic backgrounds, observing how families cook, season, taste and adjust, and how knowledge passes from mother to daughter; ran in-depth interviews with professional chefs in restaurant kitchens; and completed the picture with central location testing in a professional test kitchen, where consumers and chefs tasted dishes prepared with and without the product under controlled conditions. Ethnographic depth and controlled sensory testing were combined in one study, with one point of contact for the client.

The findings fed directly into the market entry plan: product positioning for Egypt, a distribution strategy that separates consumer and professional channels, marketing messages that respect tradition while introducing something new, pricing calibrated to observed willingness to pay rather than demographic assumptions, and an entry timeline adjusted to realistic adoption. The consulting firm described it as one of the most valuable research engagements it had run in the Middle East and North Africa, because it gave confidence in decisions that cannot be made from a desk in Tokyo or New York, and noted the clarity and responsiveness of the project management.