A reading of Thailand's OTOP registry, by the numbers, in five chapters.
One Tambon, One Product. The state registered 154,050 producers across 77 of 77 provinces. Most of them are not on a buyer's map.
The CDD (กรมพัฒนาชุมชน) publishes, and the data.go.th portal republishes, a registry of every tambon-level product and the producer behind it. The 154,050 rows are not a survey; they are a filing. A province with an active provincial office files more rows than a province with more producers and less paperwork. The number measures the registry, not the economy — and that distinction is the single most important thing this atlas can do, because almost every other public number about OTOP quietly elides it.
The categories are the official five: food, beverage, textile, craft, and herbal. National breakdown: Food null% · Beverages null% · Fabric & Apparel null% · Household, Decorative & Souvenir null% · Non-food Herbal null%.See the Domain chapter in the Atlas.
Of 154,050 producers, % have a contact channel on file. % carry an OPC star grade. % have a category they declared themselves.
A registry that cannot reach its own producers is a phone book no one is allowed to use. The completeness matrix in the Atlas prints six zones of the tag, the same six fields a buyer needs to act: where it is, what it is, who certified it, how to call, what it costs, and where on the map. Five of the six are under 10% filled. One — the subdistrict — is 87.9%. The filing office asks for the tambon. It does not ask for the phone.
The pattern is the same province by province. The reach gap is not a mystery to be solved with analytics — it is an operational decision: do the registration form and the dossier ask the same question? The provinces with the deepest gap are the same ones with the most producers. อุบลราชธานี has 5,508 registered producers and 4 of them can be reached.
OTOP sold 243.4B ฿ in the latest full year — -22.5% on the year before, if you read the same dataset the same way.
The CDD's Chaiyaphum provincial office publishes, monthly, the baht total of OTOP sales in each of 77 provinces. The series covers 33 months: BE 2565–2566 in full, 2567 (Jan–Sep) partial. The national total in the latest full year was 314.1B ฿, and the year before that 261.7B ฿. A second filing, annual and sliced by category, comes from the same department and disagrees with the monthly series by 10–50% on most province-years. The Atlas publishes both, side by side, and refuses to merge them — dividing provincial revenue by the number of registered producers would launder filing energy into fake productivity.
Online sales — same department, same year, by channel — were 4.0% of the national annual total. The category with the highest online share was textile (6.5%).See the Money chapter in the Atlas.
The state has certified 4,462 4-5★ producers. 2,947 of them have no contact channel on file. The certificate is on the registry. The route is not.
A star certifies process compliance, not market demand. The 4-5★ producers are the only supply the registry attests to, because the OPC review is the only objective signal in the data. A buyer with a brief and a budget has a smaller usable list than the registry implies — the 2,947 certified names are real, but they cannot be dialled. They are the contact-drive's target list, and the contact-drive is the CDD's missing product.
15 provinces hold at least one such producer. The provinces with the most are not the ones with the most producers — สุรินทร์ has 304 4-5★ producers with no phone, against 386 4-5★ total. A contact drive that reached the first one would clear the gap; a drive that reached the hundredth would still be working in the same province. See the Reach chapter in the Atlas.
Every chart in this atlas is downstream of one decision: do the registration form and the dossier ask the same questions?
The completeness matrix is not a finding — it is a scoreboard for the registration form. A province with a 90% reachable rate and 80% graded rate is operationally healthier than one with the inverse. The chart is what sells the fix to the CDD; the fix is a form field, not an algorithm. Add phone to the registration form as required, and the reach column stops being a number and starts being a market.
The other downstream consequence is the same: a buyer who can filter on price cannot today, because no row carries a price. A field for the price would let the registry answer the buyer's actual question, which is "what does it cost". A field for a URL would let it route a buyer to a real shop. A field for coordinates would let it place a producer on a tourism map. None of these are analytical problems. They are form-field problems.
Until then, this atlas is the most that can be done with what is on file. Every number here is a row in the source; every chart is a rollup; every list is a join. The registry has 154,050 names and % phone numbers. The data cannot fix that. The form can.
Outside the registry, producers say they cannot sell online, tourists say they cannot find the makers again — and the airport tills say curation sells.
The producers' own account is precise. Among 3-star OTOP groups in Chiang Rai, 11 of 13 cite marketing and PR as the blocker: members are mostly elderly, with no online skills, no product photography, and no practice talking to customers through social media — while raw-material costs rise faster than the prices they can charge. Peer-reviewed study, JMSD via ThaiJO.
Curation is the proven way through. The OTOP Select airport stores carry 186 products from 64 producers at Don Mueang alone, and Suvarnabhumi plus Phuket cleared 324 million baht — foot traffic plus a trusted shelf, not a longer catalogue. thailand.go.th, 2024-09-09.
Tourists already love the product when they can touch it: the OTOP night market in Patong holds 4.2 stars across some six thousand public reviews, praised for variety, bargaining, and street food — the same discovery that dies the moment the trip ends. Public review aggregation.
That ending is the discovery gap this site exists to close. An expat shop serving long-stay visitors describes its whole mission as the days otherwise spent searching markets or retracing a journey to a distant village — the maker is real, the route back is not. otopthailand.com. And the trust anchor buyers already recognise is the grade: the official five-star showcase lists 569 products, a tiny curated shelf above a 154,050-row registry. otop5star.com.