Truly Gourmet Tempeh Chips: My BFM Interviews
In 2025 BFM invited me twice: once in English on BFM 89.9, once in Chinese on BFM 财今. Here are both interviews, and the short version of the story.
BFM 89.9: the English podcast
Making Tempeh a Truly Gourmet Brand
Open For Business, BFM 89.9 · 19 August 2025 · 28 min
Presenter Richard Bradbury, producer Carol Wong
What we talked about, in my own words:
- How it began in 2018: tempeh experiments at home with soybean, black bean, red bean and peanuts. Fresh tempeh lasts about a week, so I turned it into chips that keep for months.
- COVID and our last RM5,000. I put RM500 into a test, found over a hundred testers in a Facebook group for entrepreneurs and drove the samples around the Klang Valley myself, asking about taste, colour and price.
- Launching on 6 January 2021, and screen-printing the first packs myself on a small machine, because I wanted them to look premium.
- The idea behind the brand: an affordable premium snack with a natural taste and real ingredients. The black pepper flavour alone took about a year to get right.
- Eleven months of 5 am starts in my dad's house, then two and a half years in a bungalow kitchen, where I learned about airflow the hard way. That shaped how I built the factory.
- Building most of the factory with my own hands, and why I chose to grow the business myself instead of taking on investors.
- Why other tempeh chip brands help the whole category grow, and why work should support life, not the other way round.
BFM 财今: the Chinese interview
In Chinese, BFM 财今 asked me about the hard days behind the brand.
What we talked about, in my own words:
- Days that started at five in the morning: slicing, frying and packing by hand, then peeling soybeans at night while watching an anime, until about eleven.
- Moving into a bigger space that was even hotter than my dad's kitchen, setting up rooms for frying, packing and mixing, and growing the team step by step.
- Bigger retailers coming in, getting onto the shelves of Village Grocer, and renovating the factory myself, apart from the electrics.
- The many times I wanted to quit, and my wife telling me to stop, go for a coffee and think it through.
- Why a failure only means you have learned one more thing, so you try again until it works.
The short version
2018. I fermented tempeh from every bean I could find, then saw a brand in Indonesia turning tempeh into chips. Chips could last a year.
2020. We were down to our last RM5,000. My wife let me take RM500 to test the chips, and I drove samples to 139 testers across the Klang Valley.
2021. Truly Gourmet launched on 6 January. My wife and I did everything: up at 5 am, slicing by hand, frying, packing and shipping, in my dad's house.
The bungalow, then the factory. Two woks and two burners grew to seven deep fryers and a team of ten. Then came a 10,000 sq ft factory in Kajang, which I built mostly myself.
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