Chile's export promotion agency ProChile brought its national food and beverage portfolio directly to U.S. trade gatekeepers on October 20, hosting journalists, influencers, and industry buyers in New York City for a curated lunch and afternoon masterclass built around Chilean wine, pisco, and Pacific seafood.
The Culinary Case
Chef Ignacia Valdés, a veteran of Michelin-starred kitchens in both Paris and New York, designed a lunch menu rooted in her Chilean heritage. Ingredients including caviar, cochayuyo (a native seaweed), merkén (a smoked chili seasoning), salmon, mussels, and lúcuma framed a contemporary take on Chilean cuisine — effectively a sourcing pitch to operators looking for differentiated, story-driven ingredients. For restaurant and foodservice professionals tracking emerging global culinary trends, the lineup signals a category with genuine pantry depth beyond the familiar.
Wine, Pisco, and the Numbers
The masterclass brought together two credentialed voices: Jonathan Charnay, sommelier and partner at Nuyores and former Beverage Director at three-Michelin-starred Masa, led a tasting focused on Itata Valley wines — including heritage varieties País, Cinsault, and Carignan — while Andrea Martínez Sandoval, wine buyer at Astoria Wines & Spirits and Underground Wines & Spirits, walked attendees through Chilean pisco's origins, production styles, and cocktail applications.
The category data supports the pitch. Chilean pisco exports reached US$3.9 million in 2025, up 27.6% year over year, reaching buyers in 40 markets. On the wine side, approximately 350 Chilean wineries export to 140 markets worldwide, with 92 certified under Chile's National Code of Sustainability — a credential covering 80% of bottled wine exports. For bar and beverage directors navigating an increasingly sustainability-conscious guest base, that certification backstory is shelf-ready marketing. Those tracking beverage industry trends in spirits and wine will recognize Chilean pisco as one of the faster-moving import categories in the on-premise channel.
Chile's Pacific seafood sector rounds out the trade offer. The country's coastline produces salmon, mussels, southern hake, jack mackerel, and farmed sturgeon caviar. Chilean seafood exports totaled US$2.918 billion in 2025, and the U.S. accounted for 31.7% of shipments, making it Chile's top seafood export destination — a supply-chain reality that many operators already rely on without always knowing the origin.
What It Means for Operators
"Connecting Chilean products with the media and industry professionals who influence how consumers discover food and beverages is an important part of our work in the U.S. market," said Andrea Sapag, Chile's Trade Commissioner in New York. "This experience allowed us to share the diversity of Chile's offerings, celebrate the people and traditions behind them, and build relationships that can bring Chilean products to wider audiences."
For restaurant, bar, and hospitality buyers, the ProChile event is a reminder that government-backed export agencies are increasingly doing supplier development work that used to happen only at trade shows. Direct, experience-led showcases — pairing culinary context with hard export data — are designed to shorten the distance between a national product category and a U.S. menu or back bar. Coverage of these developments also appears regularly in Food & Beverage Magazine, which tracks import food and beverage movements across North American foodservice channels.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
