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Kokkaew Narkbua and the search for overlooked local ingredients, from Pattani sea salt to Thailand’s food heritage.
The difference between a good dish and a great one often comes down to details. A brownie needs the right measure of sugar for its crust. A bowl of cacio e pepe relies on little more than cheese, pepper and pasta, which leaves nowhere for poor ingredients to hide. Even a simple martini can shift character with a single garnish. The smallest decisions often shape the final result.
Yet some of the most important ingredients rarely receive much attention. Salt, for instance, often serves as an afterthought despite its power to shape major flavours on the plate. Many chefs and home cooks look overseas for quality, drawn to products such as Himalayan salt. Few realise Thailand has a salt-making tradition of its own, one that has endured for more than 400 years in Pattani.
Among those determined to bring that story back to the table is Prungross, a Thai seasoning brand founded in 2023 with a focus on premium ingredients from Southern Thailand. We spoke with Kokkaew Narkbua, founder of Prungross, about the search for overlooked quality and why Pattani’s centuries-old sea salt tradition remains worth preserving today.
The Salt on the Road
Prungross did not begin with a business plan. It began with a roadside stop in Pattani.
“It started by accident. I was in Pattani meeting a client when I drove past a roadside stall selling salt. I’d heard bits and pieces about Pattani sea salt before, so I stopped, bought some and gave it a try.”
He later shared the salt on Instagram Stories. A friend who ran a gelato shop saw the post and asked whether he could bring some over to test in a caramel gelato. The request became the unlikely starting point for Prungross.
Food was never the original destination. Curiosity was.
At the time, Kokkaew was still working at Procter & Gamble (P&G), managing Thailand’s lower southern region. Years spent in Hat Yai built close ties to the area and a growing interest in products that rarely received attention beyond the South.
“I’ve always been drawn to research-driven projects.”
As interest around the salt grew, a new question emerged: how could a small local product reach professional kitchens? He reached out directly to the local co-operative and placed an order.
“I still remember the first order. It was 100 kilogrammes. The chairman of the farmers’ co-operative delivered it himself. He asked what I planned to do with it and I told him we wanted to test it in a caramel sauce for a gelato shop. He said, ‘Alright, tell me more.'”
That conversation led to Pattani, where the reality of the industry became clearer.
“Production here is tiny. Most people aren’t doing it as a commercial business. They do it because it’s part of their way of life.”
What he found was a tradition that had lasted for more than 400 years despite limited demand and output. Pattani would never compete on volume.
“We went into it on faith. We knew the supply would always be limited. There was no economy of scale. If we couldn’t compete on quantity, then we had to make it as premium as possible.”
That belief shaped everything that came next. Investment went into research, laboratory testing and collaboration with researchers at Prince of Songkla University. His background working in fast-paced consumer goods (FMCG) companies helped build structure around the process.
“Most of Thailand’s salt comes from Samut Songkhram, Phetchaburi and Samut Sakhon. Together they account for almost all national production. Pattani produces around one per cent. In a good year, we’re talking hundreds of tonnes. Phetchaburi alone produces hundreds of thousands. At that point, I simply felt I wanted to help. That was the whole reason.”
The early days looked less like a business and more like experimentation. Equipment was bought with little certainty that any of it would work. A failed attempt to wash salt led him into books, research and traditional salt-making methods from Europe and beyond.
“I started speaking to water filtration companies in Hat Yai, furnace makers, engineers and anyone who might have a piece of the puzzle. I got everyone in the same room and said, ‘This is the mission. Can we make it work?'”
Nearly six months of research and development followed before the idea began to take shape. The result was Fine Flakes from Pattani, Prungross’s prestige sea salt, naturally sweet, mineral-led and built for depth, umami and precise finishing.
“I’d always wanted to build something that felt like my own. Compared with corporate life, building your own company is far more exhausting. But the difference is you can see the impact directly. That’s something I never expected to value as much as I do now.”
The Lab to the Table
“People always said salt from Pattani tastes sweeter than salt from other regions. It turns out they were right.”
Samples went to laboratories at Prince of Songkla University’s Science Park, where scientists analysed the salt’s mineral composition to understand what gave it its sweeter taste. At the same time, Kokkaew continued to taste and compare different batches himself.
“At first, I didn’t believe it. For generations, it had been passed down as local knowledge. Back then, there weren’t laboratory tests to back it up. Now there are. The results showed that Pattani salt genuinely has its own character.”
That moment marked a shift in how the ingredient was seen. Once a difference could be measured and explained, curiosity followed. For chefs, whose work often depends on details most diners overlook, those differences became difficult to ignore.
A scroll through Prungross’s Instagram shows a community that takes ingredients seriously. Among the first to reach out was Chef Parkorn “Tan” Kosiyabong of GOAT, one of our 2024 Future List honourees and winner of Koktail Dining Guide’s 2026 Restaurant of the Year.
“Working with chefs has been incredibly creative and challenging. At GOAT, sustainability is part of every decision. One day Chef Tan asked about using our grey salt variety for fermentation. Most people would have discarded it. Instead, he wanted to see whether it still had value.”
That question sent Kokkaew back to the lab. Tests showed the mineral-rich salt could support fermentation, giving a by-product a second use rather than waste. It reinforced a pattern that had followed Prungross from the start: salt as more than seasoning.
The deeper he went, the more ingredients, science and people began to overlap. Chefs pushed the work beyond flavour into process and possibility.
Today, Prungross products appear in restaurants such as GOAT, venues at the Dome at Lebua and Cannubi. More recently, the brand arrived at Sarnies, moving Pattani sea salt into spaces beyond fine dining and into everyday kitchens.
Each new kitchen becomes another test of what the ingredient can do and another chance to show that something from a small community in Pattani can stand alongside products from anywhere else.
Another Underdog
Salt rarely stands alone. It moves with pepper. If Pattani sea salt had its own story, then what about pepper?
The question came later, after Prungross had already begun to take shape. Once the salt line launched, the focus stayed on what had been overlooked. Kokkaew was still moving around Southern Thailand and the same curiosity that led him to salt began to pull him elsewhere. Trang was known for pepper, but further west in Satun, a similar pattern appeared. Different ingredients, same structure. Small producers. Limited visibility. Products rooted in place but rarely seen beyond it.
“I always look for underdogs. We help those who haven’t shone. That’s always the key.”
Pepper, like salt, was not treated as a viable product. It became something to work with, not simply to sell. For chefs, using pepper meant more control over aroma, depth and expression. For Prungross, it meant staying close to how ingredients live in kitchens.
A standard line exists for pepper, built for consistency and restaurant ordering. Much of the work lies in customisation. Peppercorns carry distinct profiles: floral, sweet, light or intense, each one taking a dish in a different direction. The focus stays on flexibility and how flavour can be shaped.
“We have a standard for restaurants to order from, but chef creativity is always in mind. For those who want more aroma and depth, we explore it with them.”
From there, the work stretched beyond a single ingredient. Salt and pepper became the foundation of a wider way of working.
Alongside it, Kokkaew developed ROSS as a parallel expression of the same thinking. Built for scale, clarity and consistency, it carries the same sourcing logic into everyday use. Clean salinity, predictable performance, less interpretation, more precision.
Where Prungross leans into character and origin, ROSS leans into function. One sits closer to terroir and complexity. The other sits closer to repetition and reliability. Together, they reflect the same kitchen logic from two different angles.
A Larger Frame
Four years after creating Prungross, what matters more is not the paperwork but what sits behind it: the relationship with producers in the South. The relationship is built on commitment, a reason to keep working alongside the communities behind the ingredients.
“People in Pattani told me they have something good at home, but they have not found someone who is serious about it. Younger generations are leaving salt production behind. It is like many agricultural products that people stop paying attention to. But some still continue because they believe in what they are doing. That belief, that faith, gets passed on.”
Salt and pepper have not been the limits of that search. The work has continued to expand into other ingredients and areas. What is now taking shape in his lab is tamarind, in both sauce and powder form, a new underdog in Kokkaew’s eyes. Other regions follow the same pattern: familiar products, often overlooked, each carrying its own local logic. The focus stays on how these can translate into wider use without losing what makes them distinct. The work sits between mass consumption and niche craft, moving across both without fully settling in either.
“My goal at the beginning was simple. I wanted Thai salt to taste the best it possibly could. To the point where it could compete with salt from Europe, the US or Japan, through science and fine dining chefs.”
That goal has not changed. It now centres closer to the people in the villages, the producers behind the salt and the work needed to improve output while keeping the tradition intact. The ambition was never simply to create better salt, but to ensure the people behind it still had a reason to keep making it.
He now works with Thailand’s Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, which selected Pattani sea salt as a pilot project for small-scale salt farming. New filtration tools and production systems now support local producers, improve yields and help keep the tradition alive. The project is carried out in collaboration with the Rubber Authority of Thailand.
