If there’s one thing about Filipinos, it’s that we’re all around the world. For the longest time, our economy has been dependent on migrant labor. We’re also the largest Southeast Asian diaspora. But if that’s all true, then why hasn’t Filipino cuisine gone global? Around metropolitan cities like New York, London, and Hong Kong, dishes like sinigang or adobo have yet to achieve mainstream appeal. But on nearly every corner of every major city, you wouldn’t be hard-pressed to find Vietnamese pho or Thai curry — the same cannot be said for our other, less diasporic Southeast Asian counterparts.
But Filipino food can be mainstream — at least, this is the firm belief of Filipino-American Jake de Leon, the founder of retail food brand Fila Manila.
“I think with most immigrant families in the US, we didn’t have a lot of money. My earliest memory in the food business was helping my mom make lumpia, turon, and longganisa in her kitchen,” de Leon tells me. “We would resell them to friends and family for extra income.” Armed with only a dream, experience from a corporate job in fast-moving consumer goods, and a COVID-19 stimulus check from the US government, de Leon started Fila Manila in 2020, sharing home-style Filipino flavors with the American public.
‘4’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:61e57b90-8573-4bfa-8a70-d5d2eee8a9b4’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Fila Manila founder Jake de Leon. Photo courtesy of JAKE DE
Today, the company boasts a diverse array of products: Filipino classics ranging from banana ketchup and ube spread, to kare-kare sauce. Perhaps what sets Fila Manila’s products apart is the colorful eye-catching packaging that stays true to the Filipino aesthetic — a novel way of branding Filipino flavors for the modern American consumer. The bestseller and Jake’s personal favorite? The instant adobo sauce (perhaps to no surprise, seeing how popular the home-cooked staple has become on social media). “[You can] put it into a pan, and then you add your pork or chicken and you just cook it until the meat is done.” he tells me. “Sometimes we’ve even used this as a salad dressing or for stir fry as well!”
Fila Manila can now be found on shelves across the US, in retailers like Target and Kroger. But perhaps the company’s greatest achievement is that Fila Manila is the first Filipino-American brand stocked on the shelves of Whole Foods. Over Zoom with CNN Philippines Life, he discusses how he achieved just that.
It’s no easy feat being the first Filipino-American brand in Whole Foods. How exactly are you able to get it to the retailer’s standards?
People always ask me, “Oh Jake, why is your Filipino food missing all these ingredients and chemicals?” The funny thing is that if you think about how our grandparents cook their Filipino dishes, all their food is natural, right?
There’s no chemicals in their food. It’s right from the farm or the farmer’s market. My mom and my dad’s recipes are the inspiration behind all of our products. Most of the ingredients they use are fresh and natural. I just copied the recipes and found the best ingredients to include.
There is also a stigma as well, that Filipino food is unhealthy, because it has MSG, it has chemicals, it has fat. But more modern consumers are looking out for those ingredients. One thing that we’re trying to do for them to consider Filipino food, is to make it match their dietary needs.
Our ube is the first in the US market that’s made all natural. There’s no Red No. 3, Red No. 40.
‘ ’78’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:e760bf68-12b2-44fc-b43d-2b54c0e23742’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Fila Manila’s ube spread is the first in the US market that’s
I can kind of relate to that. When my mom makes adobo, rather than using black swan soy sauce, she tries getting something that’s not as mass-produced for the seasoning. But part of the issue is that ‘healthy’ stores are used to stocking ingredients from mostly Western cuisines. Has Whole Foods been welcoming to diverse brands like yours?
Oh, for sure. I think Whole Foods and many other retailers in the US are starting to understand the growth of international flavors. And if you look at Fila Manila, what we’re doing is quite unique. We’re actually the only brand startup to introduce Filipino-specific flavors to Whole Foods and to other retailers in the US
And all the retailers are actually quite excited because they didn’t even realize Filipino cuisine was a missing gap. They didn’t realize it was missing from their shelves until I showed them the data!
And then it happens that Fila Manila fills that gap. And so they’ve been very supportive of our products. Whole Foods started by carrying one product line. Now they carry all three of our product lines nationally.
’18’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:98ca9c1a-636b-42ff-8e0c-c22544d666b4’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Kare-kare marinade, ube spread, banana ketchup, and adobo marinade
Since when have you been selling at Whole Foods?
Actually, Whole Foods was our very first customer in 2020. I developed the product, the prototypes in the spring of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, and then we launched with Whole Foods in fall of 2020. It took me about four months to get it from the idea on the paper to the shelves of the store. It’s not easy, but I had that experience coming from my corporate job to understand some of the more important things you need to do to get the product onto shelves.
On a similar note, what are some challenges you’ve faced in getting Fila Manila to where it is now?
I think there’s still not a lot known about Filipino cuisine with many retailers, and even investors. If you talk to a lot of the investors in the US, they tend to be white and older. So you’re already at a disadvantage because even though we’re the second largest Asian American population, a lot of folks with the resources aren’t familiar with our food.
But in the US right now, the growth of Filipino cuisine is really skyrocketing. Many of the new James Beard Award-winning restaurants and chefs are Filipino. It’s just a matter of time before our cuisine really becomes synonymous with fine dining and delicious flavors. If you look at where Filipino food is today, it is exactly looking at where Korean and Vietnamese food was maybe seven or 10 years ago.
10 years ago, most people did not know what boba was. Most people did not know what pho was, either. But today, you find boba in Target. You find pho in every other town in the US. It’s just a matter of time before our food becomes normal for American flavors.
’79’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:35f88ca3-7c5d-4cae-973c-24f585989b28’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘De Leon and his team making the first batch of Fila Manila
Filipinos are all around the world. And yes, I can see that our cuisine is on the way to becoming more global. Why hasn’t that happened yet?
That’s a really good question! When I first started Fila Manila, I joined a pitch competition at one of the nation’s largest food trade shows based in Philadelphia. And I was actually the finalist and I ended up winning. But one of the questions from the judges at the final round was exactly what you asked. He asked me, “If everything you’re telling us is true, why on earth has no one ever started a Filipino food company?”
If you think about our cuisine within the last 10 or 20 years, most of it has been communal. Most of the time, our food has been cooked and enjoyed in our own homes. Every weekend, we have our friends, we have our family over, every Saturday, Sunday night.
All the parties, we have the same dishes — adobo, caldereta, kare-kare, pancit. But we never really shared them with the outside world. One thing that’s been happening in the last five years is that social media like Instagram [and] TikTok have been accelerating the desire to know more global flavors. And also a lot of TV personalities — Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern, David Chang — on Netflix, they’re really praising Filipino food.
Knowledge of new cuisines like ours has become exponential in the last five years as compared to before.
Absolutely. There is a new renaissance of Filipino food, especially online. Whenever I scroll through food TikTok, I do see a lot more Filipino creators showcasing Filipino dishes. But do you think it’s just social media or are there any other reasons why we’re witnessing this renaissance?
I think it’s also a movement in the broader Asian community. I think the #StopAsianHate movement in the US really awakened the Asian American communities, making us proud of who we are.
’80’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:9451466a-b9b9-4e64-a174-18e3a9939776’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘An old portrait of the de Leon family. Photo courtesy of JAKE
Before, the Filipino community always struggled to find its voice in the US. Growing up, my parents’ message to my brother and I was “keep your head down, stay quiet, and work hard.” I don’t speak for everyone, but that’s [how I see] the spirit of the Filipino-American people. We were always afraid to share who we are. But we’re not shy about our food anymore. There’s a history behind kare-kare. And behind banana ketchup too, when Maria Orosa made it in World War II because the Philippines didn’t have enough tomatoes, but plenty of bananas. So there’s a really fascinating excitement in our community to share who we are as Filipino-Americans.
Awesome! What are your favorite Filipino foods? What did you grow up eating?
I was always around my grandmother from my dad’s side. She used to make all this amazing Ilonggo food. And my mom is Kapampangan, so she made delicious food as well. My favorite foods growing up were honestly the foods that my parents would just cook on a regular basis because it’d just remind me of home. I used to really love sinigang. I used to love baka. I used to love even the adobo that my dad used to make because it was so different from normal Filipino adobo. He used to use olive oil — which is weird — but it’s still a version of adobo!
Even domestically, adobo is so diverse as well. I grew up eating it with hard-boiled eggs, mushrooms, and the sauce would be a little sweet. Only in my junior year of high school did I try it with potatoes. How did all these different variations impact the types of products Fila Manila is selling nowadays?
Actually, all of our recipes are based on my parents’ recipes. Our adobo is based on my mom’s version, and my mom used to add actually a little bit of date syrup, rather than sugar, because dates have their own unique flavor to it. In the Philippines, they have a historical use as an ingredient.
We used to get comments on social media, saying “oh Jake, you put date syrup in your adobo. That’s not adobo! You’re not using adobo ingredients!” And just like what you said — every family has their own version of adobo. There are some families that use coconut milk, even. There’s no right and wrong way. I don’t see anyone complaining why marinara sauce and Italian households are so different from each other!
‘ ’81’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:fd2e8c2b-8098-45ec-b7b4-ca0d31f35e26’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘”Our adobo is based on my mom’s version, and my mom used to add actually a little bit of date syrup, rather than sugar, because dates have their own unique flavor to it,” says de Leon. Photo courtesy of JAKE
My mom still uses soy sauce, vinegar, black pepper, garlic, bay leaf, but she uses the dates. And then it adds a really nice sweet to the salty, to the umami. I thought it was delicious. And I just found a way to get her recipe and this translated into a consumer product.
In some interviews, you mentioned Fila Manila is a Filipino-American brand. In others, you use it interchangeably. I’m wondering: is Fila Manila more pan-Filipino or Filipino-American? Do you think there might be a difference between the cooking styles of the diaspora versus those in the Philippines?
The way we position our products, we say it’s Filipino-American just because we’re speaking to our community. And if you look at our choices and how our taste buds evolve while in the US I think it is a bit different.
I’ll be honest with you. It’s different from someone who was fully born and raised in the Philippines because we are surrounded by different foods. And so, you know, if you look at how we’re positioning our products — it’s all natural, it’s vegan, it’s gluten-free, it’s very clean, it’s good for you — that element that really speaks to many American consumers, because that’s what’s important to them.
We’re not sacrificing any flavor or authenticity because it’s delicious. All of our products actually won Best New Products in different awards. But we want to stay true to the spirit of Filipino cuisine, and at the same time, we have to be modern.
Does Fila Manila have any future plans?