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. Benny is our man on the ground. He photographs the shelf, the placement and the price tag, talks to the buyer, notices when a competitor shifts position, and watches what actually leaves the shelf as opposed to what merely arrives on it.

That store is the real test. Not the trade show in Bangkok, not the LinkedIn post about export ambitions. The test 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. Not the size of the order, not the shipment volume. 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 genuinely competitive, and Asian grocery runs on thin margins, which means the buyer needs us to move or we lose the facing.

We are not trying to outspend anybody, which we could not do anyway. 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. Grandmother, daughter, kitchen, repeat. That loop is the whole business.

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

One store, one number. It is a slower way to build than a press release and it is much harder to fake.