The American supermarket test

Weekly sell-through at one Atlanta store is the only number that matters right now for Golden BRM Rice.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-04-10 · Ventures

There is a 15kg bag of Golden BRM Rice on a shelf in Norcross, Georgia.

It sits in Hong Kong Supermarket, a regional Asian grocery chain serving the Cambodian diaspora outside Atlanta. Our man on the ground photographs the shelf, the placement and the price tag, talks to the buyer, sees when a competitor shifts position, and tracks what leaves the shelf as opposed to what merely arrives on it.

That store is the test, more than the trade show in Bangkok or the LinkedIn post about export ambitions. It is whether a Cambodian family in Georgia, pushing a trolley round Hong Kong Supermarket on a Saturday, reaches for our bag instead of the Thai or Vietnamese one they have bought for ten years.

The number that answers it is weekly sell-through: how many bags moved through that one store in seven days. A first order can just be a buyer feeling generous. Sell-through is a customer choosing, repeatedly, with her own money.

This is harder for a Cambodian brand than the spreadsheet suggests. The Cambodian-American community is smaller than the Thai or Vietnamese one. People are loyal to whatever their parents bought. The premium shelf at Hong Kong Supermarket is competitive, and Asian grocery runs on thin margins, which means the buyer needs us to move or we lose the facing.

We could not outspend anybody and are not trying to. We are trying to be the bag a grandmother picks up because the packaging looks like home, the price is fair, and her daughter mentioned that it cooked well last week.

If sell-through holds for three months we open a second store, and we do not announce an expansion before the number says we have earned it. If it dips we go back to the packaging, the price and the placement and work out which one lied to us.