Why You Need to Know About Yun Hai, the Importer of the Best Taiwanese Ingredients

At her shop in Brooklyn, retail entrepreneur Lisa Cheng Smith and her team are giving a platform and an identity to Taiwanese products and makers.

Khushbu Shah is the Restaurant Editor at Food & Wine.

Meghan Marin

There's dried fruit, and then there's the chewy, tender, almost juicy dried fruit sold by Taiwanese-American grocer Yun Hai, which defies your expectations of what dried fruit can be. Founder Lisa Cheng Smith started selling the dried fruit in 2021, after China banned the import of pineapple from Taiwan. So Cheng Smith and her partner in Yun Hai, Lillian Lin, started working with Taiwanese farmers and farmer-owned co-ops to dry and package their excess fruit, focusing on Golden Diamond pineapples, a Taiwanese variety with an edible core beloved for its flavor. They added other dried local fruits — green mango (sold sugared and salted) and ripe Irwin mango, pearl guava, and wax apple — shortly after.

This is just one of the many ways Cheng Smith and the Yun Hai team are dedicated to showcasing the variety of food products available from Taiwanese makers. Before she started Yun Hai in 2019, Cheng Smith was able to find only basic products from Taiwan in the U.S., perhaps one or two brands of inexpensive condiments and sauces, never mind high-end artisanal products. "People in recent years were just realizing that Taiwan has a lot of great street food," says Cheng Smith, "but it also has a lot of amazing agricultural products. I couldn't get those things in the States at all." So she decided to fix that, opening Yun Hai as an e-commerce business that she ran while working as a creative director for a prominent design and home-goods company. Her vision was simple: "If you can get a million different brands of fancy olive oil, why can't that exist with soy sauce or sesame oil?"

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The first product Cheng Smith sold was Su Chili Crisp, a product she had been bringing back in her suitcase "for years," whenever she would travel to Taiwan for work. She quickly added soy sauces and hot sauces to her offerings, purchasing from companies run by second- or third-generation makers. Today, Yun Hai sells more than 70 products through its website and nearly double that number in the shop the team opened last summer in Brooklyn.

Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Ali Ramee / Prop Styling by Christina Daley

In addition to a supply of premium Taiwanese packaged goods like fermented black beans, sesame pastes, and specialty oils, Yun Hai carries a few iconic cookware items. (It's one of very few places in the U.S. where you can get a Tatung two-in-one electric rice cooker and dumpling steamer.) Cheng Smith and Li have plans to expand and want to start selling fresh Taiwanese vegetables and other prepared dishes at the brick-and-mortar shop. "I’d love to just be like, yeah, we have tofu that we make here. Here's 20 different kinds," says Cheng Smith.

They are also actively seeking to expand the Taiwanese producers they work with to source highly specific salts, sugars, starches, and heirloom rices that are foundational to the Taiwanese pantry, while also expanding their own in-house line of products. "People know the tech side of Taiwanese products," says Cheng Smith. "But Taiwanese lifestyle products like food and snacks don't have such an identity here — yet. Yun Hai is trying to give them a runway."

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