Lalisa causes a rush on roti sai mai after Instagram post

Lalisa Lisa Manoban of K-Pop supergroup Blackpink has been a trendsetter lately after her debut solo video broke YouTube records gathering 50 million views in 12 hours. She has been named one of the top 20 most admired women in the world and caused a snack shopping frenzy when she mentioned in an interview that she loved the meatball vendors in her hometown of Buri Ram and fans flooded the shops with orders. Now her fans are doing it again, this time after Lalisa posted on Instagram making the Thai sweet roti sai mai, causing a flurry of orders of the treat from Ayutthaya vendors.

The Indian-inspired sweet snack consists of cotton candy-like sugar being stretched into a floss, then rolled up in a thin roti and eaten. The K-Pop star – born and raised in Thailand – posted a video of her assembling a roti sai mai on her Instagram account which has 80 million Lalisa fans, and they raced out to buy it.

Sellers outside the Ayutthaya Hospital reported a surge in customers ordering overnight with obvious Blackpink teenage fans swarming to eat the treat their idol posted. Orders for delivery to other countries also doubled to 5,000 a day, with a noticeable spike in orders from South Korea, the home of the K-Pop genre.

Retailers have been ordering roti sai mai from vendors to resell and their shops since Lalisa plugged the snack with hundreds of orders pouring in and vendors scrambling to produce enough to sell. Vendors expressed their appreciation for the nod from Lalisa has helped them make up ground for all the business lost for years during the pandemic.

The vice-president of the Young Entrepreneurs Chamber of Commerce of Phra Nakorn Sri Ayutthaya applauded her plug and called it another example of the soft power of Thailand. They pointed to another example recently, when rapper Milli ate mango sticky rice on stage at the popular Coachella music festival in California, spiking interest in another Thai treat.

SOURCE: Bangkok Post