Empathy may be anomalous to many executives. But one passionate industry leader argues that empathy is an essential tool for growing a business and optimising consumer engagement.
“Empathy is not nice to have,” explains Eugene Cha-Navarro, MD and head of Oceania for CJ Foods, parent of the global Bibigo brand, which has brought traditional Korean delicacies to the world. “It is a very important foundation on which everything else becomes meaningful,” she explains in an episode of Women Transforming Food, the monthly podcast from G100 and Inside FMCG.
“Food is how human beings express love, identity, memory, and belonging. And it is one of the most personal categories in human life. That is precisely what makes empathy not just relevant in the industry but essential.
“When you truly understand the people you are serving, their lives and their cultures and their daily moments and their hopes, you make a better product, build deeper partnerships and create something that genuinely belongs in people’s lives rather than simply sitting on the shelf.”
Talking candidly with Women Transforming Food’s co-hosts, Amie Larter, CEO of Octomedia, the publisher of Inside FMCG, and Angeline Achariya, Asia Pacific chair of the Food Systems Innovation and Resilience Wing, G100 Mission Million, Cha-Navarro says empathy allows you to see similarities before differences, a practical tool she uses daily. “It works precisely because it overcomes the instinct to categorise before you understand.”
With a PhD in organisational management exploring how emotions shape leadership and organisations, she has navigated leadership roles in Korea, Switzerland and Japan to prove that empathy is a high-performance commercial driver. Now based in Australia she is building a food brand that does not ask Aussies to adapt to Korean food, but instead brings Korean food into the heart of Australian daily life.
Consumers can credit her for finding locally made Korean cuisine favourites like sauces, dumplings and kimchi at Woolworths and Coles stores nationwide.
Cha-Navarro cites her first approach to the major Australian retailers to seek listings for CJ’s Korean products as an example of deploying empathy to advantage.
“The feedback I got was that Korean food was still niche, or the timing was too early. My response was not to agree or argue with it. It was to find the similarity underneath it.”
She pointed out to the retailers that they already sold Gyoza and wontons, that their customers already loved dumplings – they just call them different names.
“That reframed the conversation entirely. Instead of asking a buyer to take a risk on the unknown product, I was inviting them to expand a category they already trusted. And once that common ground was established, I could introduce what makes our product Mandu (Korean dumplings) genuinely distinctive. The Korean flavour profile, the local manufacturing and the quality of the different ingredients. Similarity opened the door.”
The same principle applies within teams, she reflects. “I remember having lunch with the Indian intern who had just joined the team. She brought her own food, and as we ate together, she started explaining what it was.” The food was a momo, a popular Nepali dumpling which is a staple of Indian street food, the intern’s own cultural adaptation of a dumpling, similar in shape and concept, just with different spices and ingredients.
“That was a small and simple moment, but genuinely enlightening, because in the conversation, we were not talking about differences at all. We were recognising something shared.”
Cha-Navarro says empathy has become a “survival requirement” in the current food industry theatre. The first is navigating price increases driven by ingredient costs and an energy crisis. “The brands that will navigate this without losing consumer trust are the ones that have built genuine emotional credibility. You can raise the price inside a relationship, but you cannot increase the price inside a transaction.”
The second is the soaring popularity of GLP-1 medications, which are fundamentally reshaping how millions of people relate to food – how they think about proportion, indulgence, and what they allow themselves.
“Understanding that shift is not a data problem; it is about adopting an empathetic approach,” she stresses. “You have to genuinely understand the emotional landscape of the consumer who is now eating differently and feeling a complicated mix of hope and grief about food that they loved. No algorithm gives you that. Empathy does.”
She cites a third factor: Evolving implementation of AI. While it may be transforming consumer research, product development, and factory operations, AI is merely amplifying what manufacturers already know, Cha-Navarro says.
“If our organisation is built on genuine human understanding, AI can make us sharper, and it is built on assumptions about the consumers we have never truly listened to.
“AI just process those assumptions faster. So empathy is the operating system that determines whether every other capability you build – your data, your technology, and your supply chain – actually works in the service of the human you are trying to reach.”
Cha-Navarro’s conviction on the importance of empathy was seeded in a boardroom discussing KitKat’s success in Japan. Coming from Nestle’s global strategy team in Switzerland, her job was to develop a global strategy framework, brand guidelines, and toolkits that local markets around the world would use and execute. When she moved to Japan to work on the KitKat business directly, she experienced a ‘eureka moment’.
“KitKat was born in the UK. By every conventional measure, it should have remained a foreign brand in Japan. But instead, it has become one of the country’s most beloved local icons. Over 300 flavours deeply connected to Japanese culture and emotion.”
Realising that was not the result of only a global brief, that something else was at work, understanding that factor became her research topic.
“Looking across the industries and geographies, I started noticing a pattern: Some organisations navigate the journey between the global ambition and the local relevance with remarkable consistency. They earn a place in people’s daily lives, their culture, and their identity. Others with equally strong products and equally rigorous strategies never quite crossed that threshold.”
She looked at the elements in the organisation’s DNA that allow the brand to be truly global and truly local at the same time. Her PhD concluded that empathy lay at the heart of the answer – not just at a personal quality but at an organisational one. Such a capability could be deliberately built, practised, and scaled, she concluded.
Empathy is the ultimate competitive advantage, she concludes. “My research confirmed something that surprised even me. Unlike emotional intelligence, which is at least partially innate, emotional capability, the organisational form of empathy, can be learned. It can be deliberately cultivated through the organisation’s routines, practices, and learning systems.
“That means it’s a buildable,” she concludes. “And anything buildable is a strategy.”
- Listen to the Women Transforming Food podcast to hear Cha-Navarro talk about achieving the balance between authenticity and accessibility, how framing can cause brands to get it wrong and the simple routine that can drive change in the ways food companies approach different markets.
