A Bag of Cambodian Jasmine in New York

White King Elephant went to the Summer Fancy Food Show on its own for the first time. Here is how it went.

There is a moment we kept seeing all week in New York.

A buyer stops at the booth. They have already sampled forty things that day. We open a bag of our jasmine rice and they lean in, mostly out of politeness, and then they stop talking. Just for a second. Then they look at the bag and ask where Cambodia is on the map, or how much we can ship, or whether we have a broker on the East Coast.

That pause is why we flew halfway around the world.

The show

The Summer Fancy Food Show is the biggest specialty food event in North America. Its 70th edition ran June 28 to 30 at the Javits Center, and it is exactly as overwhelming as it sounds. Thousands of exhibitors. Cheese from everywhere. Olive oil with better branding than most tech startups. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a small gingham table stacked with bags of Cambodian jasmine.

Cambodian rice has been to shows like this before, but almost always as part of a delegation. A shared table, one flag among many. This year we did something different. BRM Agro brought White King Elephant on its own, under its own name, next to the best food producers in the world.

Honestly, it felt like a risk. It turned out to be the best decision we made all year.

Patrick Davenport ran the booth alongside Benny Sithen, our US distributor. Three long days of chefs, importers, and retail buyers asking the blunt questions serious buyers ask. Pricing, volumes, certifications, lead times. We had answers for all of it.

One thing we did not have was electricity. No power at the booth meant no rice cooker, which meant no hot samples. It turned out not to matter. Jasmine rice this fresh does not need a stove to make its argument. People smelled it from a step away, stopped, and came over. We handed out samples of the raw grain all week so buyers could cook it themselves at home, which is arguably the more honest test anyway. No booth tricks, no perfect conditions. Just their own kitchen and our rice.

What they were smelling

The rice on the table was Angkor Malys, the long grain jasmine we build everything around. It has been named the best rice in the world seven times at the TRT World Rice Conference. We know how that sounds. It sounded improbable to some of the buyers too, right up until they opened the bag.

It is grown by Cambodian farmers, milled at our own facility, and meets the US and EU food safety standards that very few producers in the region can. The banner behind us said World's Best Tasting Rice from the heart of Cambodia, and then we let the aroma do the talking.

The part the label cannot hold

BRM Agro started in 2015, but the family behind it was farming rice in Cambodia a hundred years ago, before war interrupted everything. Getting back to that meant rebuilding the whole chain ourselves. Seed, farming, our own mill, direct export. We are the only fully vertically integrated rice business in Cambodia, which is a dry way of saying nobody touches the grain between our farmers and your bowl.

We work with smallholder farmers directly, no middlemen, with financing, training, and real household benefits built in. Those farmers harvest well above the national average, more than once a year. So when a buyer in New York goes quiet over an open bag, that is not our win alone. That is a farmer in Kampong Thom doing exceptional work, ten thousand kilometers from the Javits Center.

Why now

Cambodia has been growing some of the world's best rice for generations, mostly in the shadow of louder neighbors. The problem was never the quality. It was distance, perception, and access.

A trade show fixes that faster than anything else we have tried. No pitch deck survives contact with a chef who has just put their nose over a fresh bag of jasmine. Our mill is scaling up, our US and EU approvals are in hand, and the demand is clearly there. Our job now is simple. Keep showing up with rice worth the trip.

Thank you

By closing time the table was down to its last few sample bags and buried in business cards, which is the best way for a table to look.

Thank you to everyone who stopped, smelled, took a bag home, and asked hard questions. Thank you to the Specialty Food Association for the platform. And to the farmers back home who grew every grain we handed out, this trip was yours.

If you are a buyer, importer, or chef and you want to know what seven-time world's best rice actually tastes like, get in touch. We will send the rice. You bring the pot.

BRM Agro is Cambodia's vertically integrated rice business, based in Kampong Thom, and the maker of White King Elephant premium jasmine rice.