Asia-Pacific region streaks ahead in sales of Italian cuisine

It's no surprise that Italian cuisine is popular on a global scale, and getting more popular. What might be more surprising is that the fastest growth is taking place in the Asia-Pacific region.

According to the "Italian Cuisine Market Monitor" report - produced by the consultancy group Deloitte in partnership with Alma, the International School of Italian Cuisine - worldwide sales for Italian cuisine last year totaled 229 billion euros ($253 billion). That was an increase of nearly 11 percent compared to 2016, the year covered in the previous report.

The report said most of the growth is coming from the Asia-Pacific region, where sales for Italian cuisine are growing at a rate of 4.1 percent per year between 2014 and 2018, in striking contrast to a growth rate of 2.0 percent per year for North America and 1.2 percent per year for Europe.

Deloitte predicted that growth in the Asia-Pacific region would continue to grow through 2022, though at a slower 2.7-percent annual clip. Worldwide, the report predicted sales for Italian food would grow 2.4 percent a year through 2022.

Survey company YouGov released a poll earlier this year that showed Italian cuisine is the most popular in the world, followed by the gastronomic products of China and Japan, with the cuisine of Thailand and France tied for fourth.

Outside of Italy, the YouGov survey showed Italian cuisine was most popular in Spain, France, and Sweden.

According to the report from Deloitte, the biggest markets for Italian cuisine are China - with sales worth 71 billion euros ($78 billion) in 2018, just ahead of the United States -- with sales worth 69 billion euros ($76 billion).

Deloitte said factors helping Italian cuisine achieve such strong results included the use of high-quality ingredients.

According to experts who focus on Italian food, part of the reason for the popularity of the country's cuisine is its tradition of simplicity.

"I think Italian food is so popular and so fundamentally satisfying because it is based on fresh ingredients prepared in a simple way," Rachel Roddy, a cookbook author who focuses on Italian traditions, told Xinhua.

"For my latest cookbook, the publisher told me to include a lot of recipes that have no more than five ingredients and I told them that almost all the recipes use fewer than five ingredients."

But Roddy also said that the idea of a national cuisine can be seen as outdated.

"Take the example of what might be the most popular Italian dish, spaghetti with tomato sauce," Roddy said, "Spaghetti came to Italy from Arab culture and tomatoes came from the Americas."

"Maybe that's another reason why Italian cuisine is so loved internationally because in many ways it has such international origins," she said.