The Peacock: and the woman behind the emoji 🦚⁠⁠

Not only is the peacock (or more specifically the green peafowl, also called the ‘daung’) our company mascot, it is also the national bird of Burma and has long been a symbol of pride and resistance for the country. Burma Food Group’s mission is to bridge cultures through the simple goodness of food. Our focus is to love people, love food, and love life along the way. The peacock is not only a symbol of Burmese history and culture, but our way to honor our core values as a company in a purposeful way.

The Peacock emoji added to our keyboards in 2018, was created and designed by the late Irene Cho, our former marketing executive at Burma Food Group.. As the five year anniversary of her passing nears, we want to highlight one of her many impressive contributions to our company. 

After eating at Burma Love Valencia and noticing the peacock, a repeating symbol within our restaurants, was missing from her keyboard, Irene and her friend Yiying Lu decided to create a design to submit at Emojicon. Challenged with only one day to complete it, they worked diligently and miraculously finished their peacock design by the deadline. A few weeks later, the Unicode Consortium accepted their proposal and short-listed the peacock as an emoji candidate for 2017.  It was approved, and by 2018, the peacock emoji was officially added to our keyboards. 

Creating this emoji was just one of Irene’s many accomplishments. As Yiying puts it, “she possessed many professional talents with her experience as a publicist and a producer for many indie films. She was also a radio show and podcast producer and host, advocating for Asian-American voices and stories.” You can read more about Irene’s emoji creation here. We are so grateful to have had Irene as a part of our Burma family and honor her in our mission to bridge cultures through the simple goodness of food.