Logan Central’s Global Food Market has been a staple of the community for almost 20 years.
Operating since 2005, the Sunday markets were nurtured under the watchful eye of Cambodian immigrant Paul Khieu.
Paul suffered a stroke five years ago, prompting son Dean Khieu to take the reins.
Dean, whose family moved from Cambodia in 1981, said he had “vivid memories” of his childhood in Kingston.
“When I was five, [my parents] were already selling vegies in the backyard,” he said.
“They didn’t have much of an education… so that’s what they did.”
The future of the market, which has become one of Logan’s premier tourist attractions, sits in the hands of the forward thinking Mr Khieu.
“The market started with Cambodians… but it has gone to other ethnic communities – the Burmese, Middle Easterns, Thai, Africans – a whole diverse range of communities working together,” Mr Khieu said.
Although he is conscious of preserving the essence of the markets his father helped build, Mr Khieu said he wanted to make sure he could “continue building it in a way that it can sustain itself.”
“Even when I pass away, it is something the community will still have,” he said.
To achieve this, Mr Khieu uses a more modern approach to marketing, a skill he said his father “doesn’t know how to navigate.”
“My dad is quite old school,” Mr Khieu said.
“I have a background in I.T. so I came in and built a website and got the Facebook and Instagram going.
“We’re also starting to get involved with social media food influencers – that helps so much,” he said.
Mr Khieu’s responsibility extends beyond marketing and modernising the market, but to the individual stallholders.
“I grew up with a lot of the stallholders, my father knew them for 20 years before the markets even began,” he said.
“For many of them, this market makes 90 percent of their living.”
Nurturing future generations of stallholders is important to Mr Khieu, who said many of the stallholder’s children would take over from their parents just as he did for his.
According to Mr Khieu, the market brings people together.
He said he had seen people accidentally reunite with family and friends they “didn’t know came to Australia as well.”
“These people come from all different backgrounds, and unfortunately, it is a lot of war-torn countries that people escaped from,” he said.
These are the people, he said, that “engage and mingle together”.
“It’s amazing to see people come together,”
“I want to make sure I can keep that quality of the market that people love.”
