Green Dragon
Thai Hom Mali Fragrant Rice
challenge
Westmill Foods aimed to strengthen Green Dragon Thai Hom Mali rice in a crowded jasmine rice category. While awareness was strong, preference and loyalty varied widely by audience and usage context. The challenge was to understand how consumers and restaurant operators define quality, authenticity, value, and trust, and how Green Dragon compares to competitors and own labels - to sharpen positioning, packaging cues, and communications in a highly habitual, price-sensitive category.
OUR APPROACH
We combined immersive qualitative research with quantitative validation to connect lived behaviour with scalable insight. In-context journey mapping captured real shopping, cooking, and serving moments, uncovering unspoken cues around trust, authenticity, and quality. These insights shaped a large-scale survey across the UK (and Belgium for future rollout), ensuring recommendations were grounded in both cultural understanding and commercial reality.
THE INSIGHT
Rice plays very different roles across communities. For East Asian consumers, jasmine rice is a daily cultural staple, judged through authenticity cues such as Thai origin, heritage symbols, fragrance, and grain quality. For Afro-Caribbean consumers, it is a premium alternative, with choice driven by price, availability, pack size, and deals. Restaurant operators are largely functional, prioritising consistency, bulk performance, and price over brand meaning. Green Dragon sits in a credible but ambiguous space recognised and trusted, yet often secondary to category leaders. The opportunity is not to redefine the product, but to clearly articulate what Green Dragon stands for, and for whom.
THE IMPACT
The study reframed the jasmine rice category from a single mass proposition to a segmented brand role strategy. It clarified where Green Dragon can lead, where it competes as a secondary choice, and where sharper cues are needed to build preference. The work informed positioning, packaging, communications, and channel strategy - equipping Westmill with a clearer narrative and the confidence to drive relevance and growth in a culturally nuanced market.
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