I’ve been living in Bali almost a year now and there’s this thing I keep noticing and can’t stop thinking about. The influencer economy. Maybe it’s not even new, but living here you cannot miss it.

Restaurants and cafes inviting influencers in to eat. Hotels and villas inviting them to stay. Sometimes there’s money involved. A lot of the time there isn’t. It’s a free meal, a free night, a spa treatment, a table at a beach club, in exchange for a story or a post or a shout out.

And then I started noticing where it actually happens, which is not anywhere fancy. It’s WhatsApp groups. Facebook groups. Someone posts that a place is looking for creators this week, here’s what they’ll give you, here’s what they want back, DM to apply. No agency, no media plan, no contract. A group chat.

Which made me want to know, and this is the whole reason for this piece. Is that paying?

The Secret Society: the Bali app that screens your Instagram for free meals

The group chats are the loose version of this. Then I found the app, which is the same trade with a bouncer on it, and the whole thing stopped being vague.

It’s called The Secret Society. You sign up with your Instagram, and their team goes through your profile, your audience, your engagement, the kind of content you post, and they decide whether you’re in. You need an active account and three photos of yourself. That’s the whole entry requirement. If you’re accepted you get a feed of things you can apply for, and if the venue picks you, you get a QR code to show at the door.

What’s behind the QR code is not small. Restaurants from casual to fine dining. VIP tables at clubs. Beach clubs, pool clubs, gyms, spas, wellness lounges, clinics, salons, day trips, villa stays, brunches, sunset cocktails. And a plus one, frequently.

What you owe in return depends on the listing. Some want a reel. Some want stories. And some, I love this detail, just want you to be present to create a vibe at an event. That’s a real deliverable, written into a real marketplace. Turn up and be the kind of person who makes a room look full.

Both sides get rated afterwards. The venue scores you on whether you delivered. So there’s a reputation ledger running underneath it, which is the part that makes it a market rather than a favour.

It launched in Bali in mid 2024 and it was never a Bali idea. It came from Dubai in 2017, and the founder’s story is the actual reason I ended up writing this whole thing.

Who built The Secret Society (and why it’s really a promoter app)

Romain Fourel was a general manager at Abercrombie & Fitch in Dubai for six years, and while he was there he started modelling and doing social shoots for restaurants and bars. Which meant that venues started calling him. Not to book him. To ask him to bring people.

He told SEELE magazine it directly. “Restaurants, nightclubs, and beach clubs often asked me to bring Abercrombie models to their venues. That’s when I realized the appetite for these types of connections.”

Before the app existed, he was doing the job on WhatsApp. Not making money from it. Just connecting people, because people kept asking him where to go tonight.

And then this line, which I keep coming back to, about why he built the thing. “The landscape was filled with go-to solutions like promoters, while the social media space was evolving rapidly, but the tools weren’t keeping up.”

Read that again. He is not describing a new industry. He is describing the promoter job, the oldest job in nightlife, running on worse software. The whole app is that job with a rating system bolted on.

He self funded it, worked three years of multiple jobs to save for it, and his wife eventually told him to do it or stop talking about it. As of last year he’s got a team of 60, a thousand venues, and 100,000 members, across Dubai, London, Bali and Riyadh, launching in a new city every sixty days. Riyadh alone hit 4,000 members within about three months of opening.

He also said something about the psychology that I think is the most honest sentence anyone in this industry has said out loud. “I’ve always been fascinated by how hype works. It’s a psychological effect, a group dynamic. Hype needs to feel genuine, though. If it looks fake, it dies.”

So: a marketplace whose product is a feeling that must not look like a marketplace.

Is a free meal taxable in Indonesia? PMK 66/2023 already said yes

This was my actual question, the one that started all of it. And it turns out it is not a grey area at all, which surprised me, because everyone talks about it like it is.

Indonesia settled this in 2023. PMK 66/2023, the finance ministry regulation that came into force on 1 July that year, deals with two words worth learning. Natura, meaning goods whose ownership transfers to you. And kenikmatan, meaning the right to use a facility or a service. Both, when received in connection with work or services, are objects of income tax.

A gifted product is natura. A comped dinner is kenikmatan. A free villa night is kenikmatan. The regulation lists what’s exempt, things like food provided to all employees, benefits in designated remote areas, equipment you need to do the job, and a tasting menu in exchange for a reel is none of those. Tax practitioners in Jakarta have been saying this applies to influencers specifically since it landed, and the tax office reportedly runs a social media monitoring system called SONETA, though I could not find the founding document for that one and I’m not going to pretend I did.

The US arrived at the same answer from the other direction. Comped experiences and gifted products given in exchange for a post are barter income, taxable at fair market value, and brands have increasingly been issuing 1099-NEC forms for the value of what they sent, with the product value sitting in the same box as cash would.

And since April this year Indonesian immigration has taken the strictest line of the three, treating unpaid content deals in Bali as commercial activity requiring a work visa regardless of whether money moved. That’s a whole separate article and I’m not writing it today.

Three authorities. None of them coordinating. All of them landing on the same conclusion, which is that the free dinner is a payment.

The only people still calling it a gift are the people doing it.

What a comped meal actually costs a restaurant

Here’s where I got properly interested, because the two sides of this are not even valuing the same object at the same price.

Say the dinner is a million rupiah. Full service restaurants run a food cost of roughly 28 to 35 percent, so call it 30. The venue’s actual cash outlay on that meal is around three hundred thousand.

But the tax law values what you received at fair market value. Which is the menu price. A million.

I find this genuinely funny in a bleak way. The restaurant is thinking in cost. The creator is thinking in value. The tax office is thinking in menu price. Nobody wrote anything down. And the venue is booking it under food cost, alongside wastage and staff meals, rather than under marketing, which means the thing is invisible in the one line of the P&L where you’d actually go looking for it.

Now the second number, which is the one I’d want if I owned a restaurant.

Full service places run a net margin of about 5 to 10 percent, with prime cost eating 55 to 65 percent of revenue. Take 7 percent as a fair middle. To generate three hundred thousand rupiah of actual profit at 7 percent, you need to sell about four and a quarter million rupiah of food.

One comped dinner costs you about four paid ones, in profit terms. And that’s the generous version, because I’ve only counted the food. Not the table you couldn’t sell. Not the server, the kitchen, the host who managed the booking. Not the hour.

Against that, the benchmark marketing budget for an established restaurant is 3 to 6 percent of revenue. So the question isn’t really whether comping is ethical. It’s whether anyone is counting it against that 3 to 6 percent at all, and from everything I can tell, mostly they aren’t, because it’s hiding in food cost.

If you own a venue and you’ve comped fifteen covers this month, you have spent real marketing money and it is not in your marketing line.

Bali run clubs, club promoters, and who gets paid in cash instead of food

So back to the dinners, because this is the part that actually rearranged how I think about it.

Nightlife has been paying people to bring people for decades and has never once been coy about it. The rates are public and boring. Promoters get somewhere around five to twenty dollars a head depending on the venue and the night. Bottle service typically commissions at 10 to 20 percent of the table spend. Head promoters on a percentage deal can sit at 20 to 35 percent of everything the bar takes. There are sub promoters underneath them on five to ten a head. It’s a tiered commission structure, written down, argued over, paid in money.

Same job. Bring bodies through a door on a night the venue needs bodies. The nightclub version gets a cheque. The hospitality version gets a plate.

And it isn’t just me and it isn’t just apps. The community layer here is enormous now. Bali’s run clubs have gone from a niche expat thing to a real network of clubs partnering with cafés and wellness brands, whole business models built on a morning run that ends at a coffee shop. Entourage, started by two Dutch founders, ran more than 250 events in its first year and grew WhatsApp groups past 4,000 people, runs and padel and surf, hosted at local venues.

Every one of those events is footfall delivered to a business at a specific hour. Every single one is a promoter deal. Almost none of them are called that, and I’d guess very few are invoiced.

Forbes called this the third space boom and framed it as everyone from wellness to hospitality competing on who can make a stranger feel like they belong by the end of the night. Which is lovely, and also, belonging is now a media buy with a rate card that nobody has printed.

Influencer marketing in Indonesia: the market size nobody is counting

Right. The opportunity, which is what I actually wanted to get to.

Start with the honest admission that this industry cannot measure itself. Global influencer marketing forecasts for 2026 run from about 34.1 billion dollars at the low end to 47.8 at the high end, with Mordor landing at 40.51 in between. That is nearly fourteen billion dollars of disagreement about the size of a thing.

Indonesia’s own number is about 257 million dollars in 2025, up from 225 the year before, growing near 10 percent a year. Which sounds modest until you put it next to the participation. GroupM counted around 12 million Indonesian creators producing something like a million pieces of content a month against roughly 143 million social users. One of the highest creator to population ratios anywhere.

Twelve million creators. Two hundred and fifty seven million dollars. That’s about twenty one dollars per creator per year in measured spend.

Obviously that can’t be the whole picture. And the reason it can’t is the reason I’m writing this. The measured number counts cash. It does not count the dinner, the villa night, the beach club table, the QR code at the door, the discount I negotiated for my group. None of that is in anyone’s market size, because none of it moves through a payment rail.

The barter layer is not a small edge case sitting next to the real market. In a place like Bali it might be most of the market.

So the openings, as I see them, and I’d love to be argued with on all of these.

The boring one, which is usually the right one. Somebody should sell venues a way to see this spend. Not a creator marketplace, there are plenty. A tool that pulls comps out of food cost and puts them in the marketing line with a cost per cover attached. Every restaurant I’ve ever talked to about this has a feeling about whether it works and not one has a number. Traceability is unglamorous and it’s the difference between a budget line you can defend and a habit you can’t.

The pricing one. There’s no rate card for any of this in Southeast Asia. Global guides will tell you a hotel creator collab runs three hundred dollars at a small boutique up to three thousand at a property with a formal programme, with raw footage licensing on top at plus 30 to 50 percent. None of that translates to Canggu and everyone here is negotiating blind. Whoever publishes the first credible Bali rate card sets the market, which is a genuinely powerful position.

The one that’s already happening. The industry is drifting from gifting toward paid plus licensing, because brands worked out that the valuable thing was never the influencer’s audience, it was the footage. You can buy a reel once, or you can buy the B roll and cut it into campaigns for a year. That reframes the creator as a production company that happens to have followers, which is a much better business for them and a much clearer invoice for everyone else. It also makes “production fee” an honest description instead of a euphemism.

The one nobody’s built. The community layer has no infrastructure at all. Run clubs, dinner groups, padel WhatsApps, the whole footfall economy, all of it operating on goodwill and vibes with no contracts and no rates. Nightlife solved this decades ago with a commission structure. Hospitality hasn’t, and the people doing the work, me included, are mostly taking payment in a form they can’t bank, can’t report, and can’t build on.

And there’s a real risk in all of it, which is Fourel’s own line. Hype needs to feel genuine, and if it looks fake it dies. Every one of these fixes makes the thing more formal. More formal means more visible. More visible means the audience can see the machinery, and the research on disclosure is genuinely split on what that does. Broadly, telling people it’s sponsored costs you engagement in the short term and buys you credibility over time, and it hurts big accounts more than small ones. So the people with the most to lose from honesty are the people at the top, which explains a lot about who’s arguing for what.

So, comped meal or production fee?

I’m still going to message the next venue and ask for a discount. Let’s be so for real. But I’ve stopped thinking of it as a favour, and I’ve started thinking about what it’s actually worth to them, which is a table of confirmed people on a night they’d otherwise be quiet, and what it costs them, which is more than they think and less than I’d have guessed.

The thing I can’t stop turning over is that we built an entire economy on the one form of payment that leaves no trace. Not because anyone was hiding anything. Because dinner didn’t feel like money.

So my question for you, and I actually want to hear it. If you run a venue, do you know what you spent on comps last month? Not roughly. The number. And if you’re on my side of it, bringing the people, what would it take for you to send an invoice instead of a thank you?

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If you’ve negotiated one of these deals from either side, tell me what it looked like. I’m collecting them.

Writing this from Bali, where I have now walked past three gyms in about four minutes, which is not an exaggeration and is not even unusual anymore.

You know what I mean if you live here. There’s a gym every 300 metres. Then a mega gym. Then a wellness club with cold plunge and infrared and a juice counter. There are running clubs, there are walking clubs, there was that whole drama a while back that I’m not going to relitigate here. The whole island has quietly turned into a place where your workout is a social calendar.

So it makes sense that the food followed.

Why Bali restaurants are putting "no seed oil" on their staff t-shirts

I ate at Butter Protein Club when it first opened.

What I remember most isn’t a dish. It’s the staff. They were wearing crew shirts that basically said it out loud, no seed oil, we only fry in beef tallow. The ingredient list, on a t-shirt, walking around the room before you’ve even ordered.

And their whole pitch was carnivore diet but make it healthy, and make it not cost a fortune, which in Bali is genuinely a position. They were popular from the very beginning and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The shirt WAS the marketing.

They’re still running that way. Butter Protein Club describes itself as an animal-based, seed oil free fitness steakhouse, fried things in beef tallow, stir fries in grass fed butter or olive oil, salads in extra virgin olive, vegan dishes in coconut oil. The Meat Emporium over in Kerobokan does tallow fries too. There is now an entire directory of seed oil free restaurants with a Bali section, which is a sentence I could not have written five years ago.

So I got curious. Is this a real shift, or is it a t-shirt? And if it’s real, where is all that beef fat coming from?

The answer to the second one turned out to be the interesting part.

Why McDonald’s stopped frying in beef tallow in 1990, and why the fix was worse

Quick history, because it’s short and it’s genuinely a bit unhinged.

Until 1990, McDonald’s fried in beef tallow. Then it stopped. The company announced the switch to vegetable oil in July 1990 after eight years of internal study, cutting saturated fat per serving by about 45 percent.

A big reason it happened is one guy. Phil Sokolof, an Omaha businessman who had a heart attack at 43, started the National Heart Savers Association and bought full page newspaper ads in New York and Chicago going directly at McDonald’s over the tallow. He’s reported to have spent around 15 million dollars campaigning over two decades, though I’ll be honest, that figure travels around the food press and I couldn’t chase it back to a primary document, so hold it loosely.

Here’s the part that makes me laugh in a not funny way. The vegetable oils that replaced the tallow were partially hydrogenated. Which means trans fats, which the FDA later moved to eliminate entirely, forcing the entire industry to reformulate a second time.

So the fix was worse than the thing it fixed. For about twenty years. Nobody meant it. That’s what makes it bleak.

And now it’s swinging back. The 2026 US Dietary Guidelines promote cooking with butter, beef tallow and olive oil, and RFK Jr said he was “ending the war on saturated fats.” Steak ‘n Shake switched its fryers to 100 percent beef tallow in early 2025 and posted its best same store sales since 1992. SPINS data puts US retail sales of products containing beef tallow at around 1.1 billion dollars in the year to March 2026, up roughly 275 percent in three years. Conagra put it on the front of a bag of fries. Utz is frying chips in it.

Forty five years of policy, reversed, and the crew shirt in Pererenan is downstream of all of it.

Beef tallow vs seed oils: what the research actually says

Short answer, not really, and I want to be careful here because this is the part everyone gets loud about.

The strongest card the tallow side holds is a real one. Christopher Ramsden and colleagues recovered the lost data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment and published it in the BMJ in 2016. It was a proper double blind trial, 9,423 people, 1968 to 1973, swapping saturated fat for linoleic acid. Cholesterol went down. Deaths did not. Ramsden’s argument is that trials like this got half published for decades, which made the swap look better than it was.

That’s a fair hit and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But then. A pooled analysis in Circulation looked at actual linoleic acid measured in people’s blood across 30 studies in 13 countries and found higher levels went with LOWER cardiovascular disease, stroke and cardiovascular death. Not higher. Lower.

And the American Heart Association’s line is blunt. Their 2024 piece is literally headlined “There’s no reason to avoid seed oils and plenty of reasons to eat them.” Stanford’s Christopher Gardner in that piece: “People are cooking with these oils, not drinking them.” His sharper point is that seed oils are getting blamed for the company they keep, because they live inside ultra processed food, and “it’s hard to cast the blame on the seed oils when these foods contain so many other things.”

Although, fairness, that same AHA article carries a correction from March 2025 because an earlier version got the inflammation mechanism wrong. Even the people telling you not to worry got a detail wrong once.

So the honest read is this. The scientific consensus has not flipped. What flipped is who’s holding the pen. And even the movement didn’t fully get its way, the 2026 guidelines promote tallow but never actually attack seed oils, which is a very quiet detail nobody posts about.

Oh and one more thing I enjoyed. Cate Shanahan, who’s called the mother of the seed oil movement, brands them the Hateful Eight. Two of the eight, corn and rice bran, are not seeds.

How palm oil replaced coconut oil in Indonesian kitchens

Here’s where it stopped being an American story for me.

We did this. Before we had a word for it.

Until the 1960s Indonesian households fried in coconut oil, pressed from kopra, the old dried coconut flesh. That was the fat. It was ours, it grew here, your grandmother used it.

Then the state chose differently. From the mid 1970s the government backed palm because it was faster and cheaper to produce, plantations went from 174,000 hectares in 1974 to around 200,000 by the early 1980s, and by 1984 palm was locked in as the flagship commodity while ordinary coconut got left behind. Coconut cooking oil faded out through the 90s.

So while America is having a wellness movement about going back to the traditional fat, we already did the swap, forty years earlier, at national scale, by decree. And nobody here is nostalgic about it because nobody was asked.

And cooking oil in Indonesia is not a lifestyle choice. It’s a political object. There’s a government price ceiling on it. MinyaKita’s HET sits at Rp 15,700 a litre, and it doesn’t hold, real prices run above it, and plain bulk cooking oil was going for Rp 19,400 to Rp 21,500 a litre in late April 2026.

The government is also now fighting for the leftovers. Permendag 2/2025, in force since January 2025, tightened exports of used cooking oil and palm residues specifically to keep raw material at home for cooking oil and to feed the B40 biodiesel mandate.

Read that again. Your jelantah is now strategic. The oil you already fried in is being fought over as fuel.

Where does beef tallow in Bali come from? Not from Bali cows

This is the bit that changed my mind about the whole business question.

I assumed, lazily, that a Bali tallow supply would come from Bali cows. It almost certainly doesn’t.

Bali has roughly 353,000 head of beef cattle. Sapi Bali is a small, lean tropical breed. A study of carcass composition at the slaughterhouse found separable fat making up only about 1.25 to 2.15 percent of the carcass, rising with slaughter weight, across animals slaughtered at 225 to 300 kilos. For comparison, that’s a fraction of what a grain finished Western animal carries.

You cannot build a rendering business on that. There’s barely anything to render.

Then there’s who eats it. Cows are sacred in Balinese Hinduism and beef is rarely eaten, most strictly among Brahmin and Kshatriya families, less absolutely further down, and buffalo gets used ritually precisely because it’s exempt from the cow’s status. I don’t want to flatten this into “Balinese don’t eat beef,” because that’s too neat and it isn’t true across the board. But it does mean the demand for beef here leans heavily on Muslim Indonesians, Javanese workers and tourists, and the supply chain is built accordingly.

Nationally we don’t even have enough beef for ourselves. The Ministry of Agriculture estimated 2025 supply at about 491,700 tonnes against consumption of 724,200 tonnes, a deficit of 236,500 tonnes, covered by imported feeder cattle and frozen meat. The 2026 gap is projected to be bigger.

So the tallow in that fryer in Pererenan is, in all likelihood, imported. On an island whose used cooking oil is being held back for fuel. Marketed as the natural, ancestral, local choice.

That’s the twist and I don’t say it to be mean about anyone. It’s just what the numbers say.

Is beef tallow better for deep frying than palm oil? The stability data says no

I went in assuming tallow’s economic case was fry life. It’s low in polyunsaturates, so it should survive the fryer longer, and longer fry life offsets a higher purchase price. That’s the argument you hear.

I could not make it stand up.

Standard palm olein has a Rancimat oxidative induction period of about 27 hours at 100 degrees. That is a genuinely excellent frying fat. And a 2025 study in Food Chemistry comparing beef tallow’s frying performance against other fats found that despite tallow’s inherent stability suggesting it should hold up beautifully, most of the samples tested performed similarly to or worse than high oleic sunflower.

So the fat that Indonesia flooded its own kitchens with, for reasons that had nothing to do with health, happens to be one of the better things you can put in a deep fryer.

Which means if you switch to tallow, you’re not buying performance. You’re buying flavour, and you’re buying the story on the t-shirt. Those are legitimate things to buy. They’re just not the same thing as an efficiency.

The beef tallow business opportunity in Bali, in three layers

Three layers, and they point in slightly different directions.

Layer one, the demand is real and it is foreign. Bali took 6,948,754 direct foreign arrivals in 2025, up 9.72 percent, with Australians at 1.63 million the single biggest group. Australians, Americans, Brits. Exactly the populations where 28 percent now say they avoid seed oils. You are not selling to Bali. You are selling to people who flew here already believing this, and Butter Protein Club figured that out early.

Layer two, the supply gap is the whole opportunity, and it’s boring. Nobody in Bali is producing halal certified, food grade, consistent beef tallow at commercial volume. And the certification isn’t optional anymore. BPJPH’s mandatory halal regime explicitly lists edible beef fat, dripping and tallow as products requiring certification, and it applies to imports too. That’s a barrier, which is exactly why it’s a moat for whoever does it properly. The catch is the raw material. Local sapi Bali won’t feed it, so a serious operation is buying trim from Java or importing, and at that point you are a processor and a distributor, not a farm to fryer story.

Layer three, and this is the one that worries me, everyone wants this fat for fuel. The global tallow market is put at 10.3 billion dollars in 2026, forecast to more than double by 2036, but around 64 percent of that is INEDIBLE grade going into industry and energy. US renewable diesel capacity is up 538 percent since January 2021 and tallow, used cooking oil and animal fats have become structurally constrained commodities. Indonesia is doing its own version with B40. So the food business and the fuel business are bidding for the same barrel, and the fuel business is much bigger than you.

And for anyone running a kitchen here rather than building a supplier, the operator maths is less scary than it sounds. When Steak ‘n Shake switched, food cost went from 30 to 31.4 percent of net sales. A 1.4 point gross margin hit. They absorbed it because traffic went up. That’s the whole trade in one number. It costs more, and it only works if it brings people in the door.

Utz’s chief executive Howard Friedman has said the quiet part about all of this, that consumer interest could fade as fast as it arrived and flexibility matters more than committing your whole portfolio. He’s right. This entire category is currently attached to one administration’s dietary guidance in a country most of these customers are only visiting.

So should a Bali kitchen fry in beef tallow, or in coconut oil?

The thing I can’t shake is the coconut.

If what people actually want is a traditional, local, minimally processed cooking fat with a real story attached, Bali is sitting on it. It grows here. It was the default until the state decided otherwise. It’s already what Butter Protein Club uses for its vegan dishes. And Indonesia’s coconut oil industry is right there, underbuilt, waiting.

Beef tallow in Bali is an imported answer to an imported question. Which doesn’t make it a bad business. Imported answers to imported questions is arguably the entire Canggu economy and I say that with love and as a participant.

But if I were putting money in, I’d be much more interested in the boring middle. Certified, consistent, food grade rendering that supplies twenty kitchens instead of one. The Paotere lesson again, honestly. The money isn’t in the fish. It’s in everything that happens between the boat and the plate.

So, my question for you, and I actually want to hear it. If you were opening a kitchen in Bali tomorrow, would you fry in beef tallow you have to import, or in coconut oil that grows down the road and has a better story than either of us has been telling?

And if you work in a Bali kitchen already, tell me what you actually fry in and what it costs you. That’s the number nobody publishes and I’d love to know.

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If your kitchen changed its oil in the last two years, for any reason, I want to hear why.

Hi love. It’s been a few days and my sandals still smell faintly of the ocean and of something that used to live in it. I’m not throwing them out. Worth it.

So. Paotere.

We left the hotel at 6:30 in the morning, and got there just before 7. We’d been asking around beforehand, Rajawali or Paotere, which one, and every person answered the same way and answered it fast. If you want THE fish market. Paotere. Nobody hedged. Nobody said well it depends what you’re after. Just Paotere, like there was only one correct answer and I’d been a bit silly for asking.

What Paotere fish market actually looks like at 7am

The Grab drops you at the entrance and drives off, and the first thing that happens is that you are not in a fish market at all.

You’re in a long alleyway of kiosks. They’re selling food, bags, the ordinary stuff any traditional market anywhere sells. It could be any pasar in the country. There’s no gate, no reveal, no sign going FISH THIS WAY.

What tells you is the people coming the other direction.

Because the entire time you’re walking in, there’s a steady counter-current walking out, and every single one of them is carrying fish. Heavy plastic bags of it, held out away from the body. They’re done. It’s 7am, they’re finished with their morning, when mine hasn’t started yet. That was the first moment it properly landed that I was arriving late to something.

I had also braced for the smell, and I want to be honest about this because I think everybody braces for it. That thick low tide funk you get walking past a supermarket seafood counter near closing. I had decided in advance that I was going to be very mature about it.

It never came. Not at the entrance, not further in, not at the boats. I didn’t understand that at the time. I understood it completely a few hours later, but let me not skip ahead.

Inside Paotere: wet floors, motorbikes and everyone shouting

You don’t arrive at Paotere. It starts happening around you before you get there.

Still outside the roofed part, still technically in the walkway, and there’s already shrimp on the ground in front of you. Squid. Fish laid out on sheets of plastic at your feet, so you’re immediately doing that careful foreigner walk where you’re watching where you step. Then you’re under the roof and the volume goes up. People calling you out, working for your attention, because in a room where everyone is selling more or less the same thing, attention is the only lever anybody has.

Walk farther down, you start seeing motorbikes come through. Actually through, not around, styrofoam boxes strapped to the back, and everyone steps aside without looking up.

And the water. The floor is not damp, it is WET, permanently, in every direction, seawater and melted ice and whatever else, and it is going on your feet whether you like it or not. Wear sandals you have already emotionally let go of. That is my one practical piece of advice in this entire article.

The boats, the barracuda, and Makassar fish prices that stopped me

Then you keep walking and the market opens up and there are boats.

Not two or three picturesque ones. A wall of them, hull against hull, loading and unloading, and behind those, more. The impression is that it doesn’t end. Men moving crates, ice going one way, fish coming the other. This is the part where I stopped taking notes and just stood there for a while.

And the fish coming off them. Honestly.

A barracuda, easily a metre and a half, laid out on the wet concrete like a piece of furniture. Swordfish. A shark, a small one, maybe 50 centimetres, which I did not expect and had to double check with the person I was with because I thought I was misreading it. Crabs. Clams. Tuna in sizes I didn’t know tuna came in. Mackerel everywhere.

Then I started looking at prices.

The barracuda was 200 thousand rupiah. The whole barracuda. Longer than my torso. Whole beautiful fish going for 25, for 50 thousand. I did the math badly in my head, then did it again, because I assumed the first time was a mistake.

How fish gets to Paotere: the 11pm to 5am night shift

I talked to a man named Samsul, who catches and sells his own fish, and I asked him the dumbest, most useful question I could think of, which was basically: walk me through your day.

His day starts at 11pm. He leaves then, reaches the fishing ground around 1 or 2 in the morning, and works with a bagan, which is a lift net platform, the kind with lights that pull the fish up toward the surface in the dark. He hauls the net at 3am. He’s back at Paotere by 5.

Allu, who sells squid, told me almost exactly the same numbers. Out around 11 at night, back at subuh, first light. He closes at 3 in the afternoon. Rian, another seller, goes out right after Maghrib prayer and gets in around 1 or 2 in the morning.

So by the time I rolled up at 7am, freshly showered, feeling quite proud of myself for being awake, every single thing I was looking at was already eight hours old and had been hauled out of the Makassar Strait in the dark by someone who had not slept.

The market’s official rhythm matches this exactly. Researchers from Universitas Hasanuddin who studied Paotere’s operations found marketing runs in two shifts, roughly 5am to 10am and then 1pm to 5pm. Samsul put it more bluntly. The fastest it sells out is 9am. If there’s stock left it drags to noon, and then he comes back for the afternoon round, 2 till 5. Rian said the same, morning from 6, second wave at noon.

The same study counted about 5,000 people moving through that port on a normal day. Fishermen, pond farmers, port staff, collectors, and people like me and you just buying dinner.

Who actually sets fish prices in Makassar (it isn’t the auction)

Here’s where it got interesting for me.

The place is officially called a Tempat Pelelangan Ikan. A fish AUCTION place. Allu, when I asked where we were, said “lelong Paotere,” the auction. The name is right there. The city has been trying to police that auction since the 1950s, and Makassar’s municipal archives show officials writing to the police in 1954 asking them to supervise it because of recurring chaos, which is a very funny detail to find in a government file.

And yet almost nothing I read about how prices actually get set in this part of Indonesia describes anything like an auction.

What it describes is a system called punggawa-sawi. A punggawa is a patron, usually a boat owner or a financier. A sawi is his crew, his client, the person who owes him. Anthropologist Andrew McWilliam of Western Sydney University and Nur Isiyana Wianti of Universitas Halu Oleo describe it as “an economic safety net but also a form of market-based inter-dependency founded on debt.” The punggawa funds the boat, the fuel, the gear. He also runs the shop that sells you rice and instant noodles on credit when the wind is too strong to go out. In return you sell your catch to him. Not to whoever pays most. To him.

They quote one punggawa on fishermen who sell elsewhere, and it stuck with me. “It is like we planted the crop and others have harvested it.”

A study of fishermen in the Spermonde islands just off Makassar found 53 % of fishermen were in one of these relationships and only 37 % were independent. And the researchers are direct about what that means for price. The fisherman repays his debt by selling exclusively to his patron, “who sets the price and keeps track of the debt balance.”

So who sets the price at Paotere? Not the auction, mostly. The person who lent you the money for diesel.

I want to be fair here though, because the researchers are fair about it. This system is also the reason a lot of families eat during bad weather. There’s no rural bank showing up at 11pm to fund your fuel. The punggawa does. McWilliam and Wianti end their paper with a line I keep thinking about: there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and even resilience comes at a cost.

When I asked Rian whether prices were going up or down, he said up. Why? Kencang angin. The wind is strong.

That’s it. That’s the whole pricing model. Small fishermen across Indonesia stop going out for two weeks to two months during the west monsoon, losing up to 5 million rupiah a month according to the national traditional fishers’ union. Allu told me prices were stable the day I came. Rian told me they were climbing. Neither of them was wrong. They sell different fish, and the wind doesn’t treat everyone the same.

Ikan bolu, juku’ eja, and what South Sulawesi really eats

I asked Rian what the actual Makassar fish is. The one that’s theirs.

Ikan merah, he said. Red snapper. Then he gave me the Makassarese: juku’ eja. About 22 to 25 thousand a kilo. Then kudu-kudu, a boxfish, which I had genuinely never heard of. Then bolu. And when I said what’s bolu, he said, bandeng. Milkfish.

Which is the plot twist of this entire piece, because bandeng isn’t caught in the strait at all. It’s farmed in brackish ponds and trucked in. A Paotere trader told Kompas the bandeng there comes from Barru, Pangkep, Maros and Luwu Raya, inland and up the coast, by road.

And here’s the number that made me sit up. Fisheries economist Dr Suhana, reading 2025 BPS household data, found that the single largest weekly per capita spend on fish in South Sulawesi is bandeng, at 80,236 rupiah. Shrimp and lobster second at 43,225. Cakalang third at 35,467.

South Sulawesi is a maritime province with a legendary seafaring history that spends more of its fish money on a pond fish than on anything that swims in open water. The province eats about 66.81 kilos of fish per person per year against a national average of 58.76, and the thing it reaches for most is farmed.

Suhana’s read on why is lovely. He argues people here don’t treat fish as cheap protein, they treat it as something with taste, prestige and tradition attached. Fresh sea fish is what you serve a guest.

Which is exactly what Bahtiar was doing. I met him walking out with a heavy bag and asked what he’d bought. Ikan cepak putih. Ten of them. Friends were flying in from Jakarta and Lampung that same day and wanting ikan bakar and kapurung, the sago dish, the Sulawesi cousin of papeda. He was going to do the fish in kuah asam, sour broth. He was hunting at the fish auction at 7 in the morning because people he loves were coming over.

Then he told me the price, and this is where the article turns.

Indonesia’s seafood export gap: where the money actually goes

Bahtiar paid 200 thousand rupiah for ten fish. Twenty thousand each. And he said, unprompted, that in a restaurant one of those fish would probably run you 25 thousand.

Layer one, the domestic gap. Officially, Paotere landed 187.9 tons in the first quarter of 2026, worth just under 8 billion rupiah, which works out to about 42,000 rupiah a kilo at the dock. Meanwhile the Hasanuddin team physically measured 34.127 tons crossing that dock PER DAY. Thirty four tons a day across a quarter is roughly three thousand tons. The official ledger says 188. That’s about 6 percent. I can’t tell you where the rest goes, and neither could any source I found, which is its own kind of answer.

The market is also legally classified as a Type D port, meaning it’s built and permitted for an average of about 2 tons a day. It’s doing 34. Its own ice plant makes 500 blocks a day and it isn’t close to enough, so people buy ice from outside. The clean water tower is broken, so traders draw from a borehole about 100 metres deep and the big boats buy water outside the port in jerrycans on carts.

Now zoom out, because that’s not a Makassar problem. Up to 29 percent of Indonesia’s fish is lost in the domestic supply chain every year, mostly to bad ice, overpacked baskets and no cooling between hands. National cold storage capacity sits around 500,000 tons against roughly 20 million tons of fish produced annually. That is the entire opportunity in one sentence. A country that catches an ocean and refrigerates a puddle.

Layer two, the export picture. Indonesia is the second largest fish producer on earth by volume, around 22 million tonnes. Its seafood exports in 2025 came to US$6.27 billion, up 5.2 percent, with the US the biggest buyer at 1.99 billion, overwhelmingly shrimp.

Vietnam, on roughly 8.8 million tonnes, exported over 11 billion dollars.

Read that again. Vietnam catches under half of what Indonesia catches and sells it for nearly double. That gap is not fish. That gap is cold chain, processing, grading, traceability and paperwork. It’s everything that happens to a fish AFTER it stops being a fish and starts being a product.

South Sulawesi specifically sent 355,431 tons of commodities to 63 countries in 2025, around 11.1 trillion rupiah, of which fisheries were roughly 7.1 trillion. Biggest single earner? Seaweed, at 2.3 trillion. Top destinations China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. The province’s number one marine export is something almost nobody in Makassar sits down to eat.

Layer three, and this is the one I actually care about. Paotere is not just a supply chain. It’s a room. It has boats, noise, a metre of barracuda on wet concrete, and men who’ve been awake since ten last night. People pay real money to stand in rooms like that.

Tokyo has already run this experiment for us. The old Tsukiji inner market pulled roughly 42,000 visitors a month. Then it moved into Toyosu, a bigger, cleaner, more modern facility, the largest fish market in the world. Visitors dropped to around 10,000 a month and Tokyo has been building shopping complexes and hotels next door trying to win them back.

They upgraded the building and lost the thing people came for.

Makassar is running the exact same experiment right now and I don’t think enough people have noticed. Since 2005 Indonesia has been building PPN Untia, a 38-hectare national-class fishing port on the edge of the city, presidentially inaugurated, meant to take the industry and the auction that Paotere physically cannot hold. Local press spent years describing it as somewhere people go fishing for fun and couples go to be alone.

In the first quarter of 2026, Untia landed 49.1 tons. Paotere, the crowded one that ran out of space over a decade ago, landed 187.9.

Nearly four times, on a fraction of the land, with a broken water tower.

So should Makassar modernise Paotere, or leave it alone?

The opportunity in Makassar is not more port. It’s everything in the gap between the boat and the buyer. Ice that actually works. Cold trucks. Small-scale processing so a fish leaves the province worth more than it was worth at 5am. Financing that competes with the punggawa instead of pretending he doesn’t exist, because he’s the only one lending at 11 o’clock at night and until someone else does, he sets the price. Traceability, which is boring and unsexy and is the literal difference between 6 billion dollars and 11.

And underneath all of it, a market that’s already one of the most alive rooms I’ve walked into this year, that nobody is really treating like the asset it is.

But I’ll be honest about the tension, because I don’t think it resolves cleanly. Every single fix on that list makes the chain more formal. And the informality is not just inefficiency, it’s also Samsul deciding on the spot which fish go to the restaurant and which go to the auntie in front of him. It’s Bahtiar getting ten fish for 200 thousand because he showed up early and knows what he’s looking at. Modernise it badly and you get Toyosu. A better building that fewer people love.

I asked Samsul, at the end, if there was anything he wanted to say. He’d been awake since before eleven the previous night. He said pokoknya semua sukses, bahagia selalu, basically, may everyone succeed and always be happy. And when I asked who all the work was for, he said his family. That was it. That was the whole answer.

So my question for you, and I actually want to hear it. If you were building something in that gap, would you formalise Paotere or would you fund the people already in it and leave the room alone?

Thanks for reading Prep Time. If you’ve got a market in your city that runs on a schedule nobody sees, tell me about it.

The whole world is kind of breaking up with wine right now, lowest it's been since 2000. Except here. Southeast Asia is quietly falling for it. So I went digging into how you even become one of those wine people who can swirl a glass and just know, and found out the fancy word for them literally started as the guy who carried the luggage.

Writing this from a cafe with a garden, open concept, so breezy. Had a flu for a couple of days but being out here is so good, having the sun actually touch your skin after being stuck inside. Also might I add the World Cup finals are coming. I was rooting for France and England and neither of them made it, so honestly the bronze fight is the most fun for me now, eh.

Speaking of. I’ve been on a wine roll these past few months. I’ve never been a wine person before but somehow it grew on me. My palate keeps changing too, started from never liking wine, to liking dry white, to now, give me a sweet red with my steak or a grilled chicken thigh (yes, gym food and wine same plate, best of both worlds baby). I’m not saying I’m a wine expert by any means, I just like what I like (the girl cant even name more than 5 types of wine for gods sake), not to mention I’m seeing a rise of natural wine bars poppin up in Bali. But I always find people who can taste a wine and actually tell you the difference so amazing. They’re the cool kids. I wanna be them.

Wait, the word “sommelier” means WHAT

So I went down a rabbit hole. And the first thing that made me laugh is the word itself. Sommelier. Sounds fancy right, sounds like something you whisper in a dark restaurant. Nope. It comes from an old French word, saumalier, for the guy who drove the pack animals, the donkeys hauling stuff around, from the Latin sauma, which literally meant the load a beast of burden carries. Like. Beast of burden energy. And it gets funnier, because for a while a sommelier was just the person who moved the French royal court's luggage when they traveled, Louis XIV era and everything, and only around the 1680s did it finally become the wine guy, basically a fancy butler. So the cool kids I wanna be? Their whole title started as the person carrying everyone's bags. I think about that every time I watch someone swirl a glass like it weighs nothing.

Ok so how do you actually become one

Anyway I got curious how you actually become one, and ok, it’s a lot. Turns out there are two totally separate ladders and the serious people climb both. One is WSET, the bookish one, four levels of knowing wine, how it’s made, why it tastes like that, taught in like 70+ countries. The other is the Court of Master Sommeliers, which is the restaurant floor one, the blind tasting, the serving, the running of an actual wine list. Most people who take it seriously end up with a bit of both.

And the top? Brutal. Fewer than 300 people in the entire WORLD hold the Master Sommelier diploma, the count sits around 291 to 299 right now. The theory part of that final exam passes about 1 in 10. The baby entry exam is nicer, passes like 60 to 75 percent, so basically the door is wide at the bottom and needle thin at the top. And it costs money the whole way up, a couple hundred bucks for the first WSET course, closer to a thousand for the Court’s intro thing, then over a thousand dollars PER TRY as you climb, before you’ve even bought wine to practice with. So becoming a cool kid is less “born with a magic tongue” and more “quietly obsessed for years and also kind of rich.”

Plot twist: the world is over wine. Except Southeast Asia.

But here’s the plot twist that actually got me. I apparently started loving wine at the exact moment the rest of the planet is over it. Global wine drinking just hit its lowest since 2000, and even Asia Pacific as a whole dropped about 4 percent in a year. And yet. Southeast Asia and India went the other way. As the middle class here grew, people started drifting from beer and spirits toward wine, and the fastest growth in the world is now expected out of Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. So wine is dying basically everywhere except, lowkey, my backyard.

And I find that kind of sweet honestly. Like a whole region learning to love something its grandparents never touched. Wine was never our drink. No family vineyard, no bottle passed down, no old ritual. So we’re building the whole thing from zero, one palate at a time, exactly like mine wandered from “no thanks” to dry white to whatever this sweet red phase is. Even China, which everyone calls this giant wine market, still drinks only about half a litre per person a year, the lowest of the top 20 wine countries. So a big market and an actual wine culture are not the same thing. One is money. The other is a feeling, and feelings take longer.

Bali makes you work for it (thanks, tax)

And here in Bali the feeling has to fight the math, hard. Indonesia taxes imported wine like a crime, duties reported around 90 percent, plus a 2015 rule that pushed some drinks up to 150 percent of their market price. You can carry in ONE litre per adult. So every bottle on a Seminyak list already climbed a giant wall of tax before it hit your table, which is exactly why wine here feels a little glam and a little out of reach. Meanwhile Bangkok cut its wine duties in 2024 and prices dropped up to 40 percent almost overnight, and boom, wine bars everywhere. It kind of blows my mind that one line in a tax code decides what's in your glass on a random Tuesday. Wine likes to act like it floats above money and paperwork. It never has. Even the word remembers, someone always carried the weight.

The natural wine bars, and the purity plot twist

Which, ok, brings me to the bars I keep wandering into. The natural wine ones. Warm light, handwritten labels, bottles that taste a little wild and alive. And natural wine is basically the only part of the wine world still SPRINTING, growing over 20 percent a year while regular wine shrinks, and Asia Pacific is projected to be its fastest growing market. The idea is pretty and simple, grapes grown without the chemical stuff, fermented with the wild yeast that’s already there, nothing really added or taken away, barely any added sulfites.

But here’s the part that made me actually laugh out loud. The movement that’s all about purity and nothing added? Kind of invented by a marketing guy. The origin story is four winemakers in Beaujolais who ditched chemical farming in the 80s, and everyone calls them the Gang of Four, except that name was made up by an American importer named Kermit Lynch to SELL the wine, and the winemakers never even called themselves that. So the whole “nothing added” thing was, itself, kind of branded into existence. And their mentor, a guy named Jules Chauvet, wasn’t some barefoot hippie either, he was a trained chemist who studied fermentation and argued against dumping sulfur in wine before it was cool. The godfather of “wine with nothing in it” understood exactly what was in it. Iconic.

Oh and the purity has a catch the wine nerds still fight about. There’s no such thing as a zero sulfite wine, because fermentation makes sulfites on its own, so the honest labels can only say “no sulfites added,” not none. And then they argue endlessly about how much is too much. Which I kind of love. I walked into these bars for the vibes and the cute labels and turns out there’s this whole passionate messy argument underneath about what “real” even means. Makes the cool kids feel more human. They’re not sure either. They’re just further down the same road I’m on.

Will it last? Maybe not. But..

I’ll be real though, none of this is guaranteed to last. Seoul had its own natural wine craze and reportedly went full boom and bust in like a couple years. Bali’s moment could fade too, the laneway bars turning into smoothie spots by the time you read this, who knows. But the thing that actually sticks isn’t the trend. It’s the people quietly building real careers inside it. The Court has been teaching in Asia for over 19 years now, started in Hong Kong and Singapore, spread into Vietnam, Malaysia, India, China, and in 2025 handed out its 2,000th certificate in the region. Singapore made its first ever Master Sommelier, Mathias Camilleri, back in 2017. Somewhere in a restaurant near you a server who started out carrying plates is doing flashcards between shifts, climbing from the floor to the cellar. Which is honestly the same trip the word sommelier has been making for 700 years, from the one who carries the weight to the one you trust with the good bottle.

Am I gonna become a Master Sommelier? No. Let’s be so for real, the girl still can’t name 5 wines. But I think I finally get why I keep drifting into those bars, why I want so bad to be able to taste a glass and just tell. It was never really about the wine. It’s about the quiet unglamorous obsession underneath it, the years of studying and the insane tax and the fights about sulfites, all that invisible weight somebody carries so a stranger can sit in a garden cafe on a breezy afternoon, a little flu-ish, a little in love with the sun, and craving a glass of cold Chardonnay that was never part of her culture before.