Sung Fung Foods
68 NETWORKING CULTURES
Sung Fung Foods
The Sweet taste of success for
Sung Fung Foods
Her husband’ s sweet tooth inspired Ketsalin Wong to take up baking 20 years ago when the peanut brittle he craved arrived from Hong Kong in London’ s shops as a poor second best to the delicacy he remembered from his native Malaysia
Ketsalin, who was born in Thailand and came to England in 1977, had been forced to give up her job in sales with a clothing company when her young daughter developed an eye disease and could not go into a nursery. She stayed at home to care for her but needed an income to supplement her husband’ s earnings – and when the peanut brittle she made for him also proved popular with friends and family, she got out her wok and chopping board and started a small scale commercial concern in the kitchen of her Wembley semi!
Business soon took off and from supplying one Soho supermarket with just a few items, today Ketsalin employs 12 people producing a range of 60 – plus products from the two factory units in Wembley she now owns. Sun Fung Foods supply cakes and biscuits to every Chinese supermarket in the country and have a healthy annual turnover of £ 700k.
“ It was very hard at first,” says Ketsalin.“ I was looking after my daughter and the home and working a 16 hour day – my neighbours still remember hearing my chopping and cooking late at night. My husband handled deliveries on Saturdays having worked at his job with BT all week.”
But where to now? Others who have just received their first Freedom Pass like Ketsalin might be looking to scale down and take life easy. On the contrary, Ketsalin and husband Swee Moh, who is now her joint partner, are thirsty for expansion.
As Ketsalin explains:“ We really have nowhere to go in the UK Chinese market. If we produce more lines, then we will simply be competing with ourselves. we have looked overseas, but the Chinese markets in France and Holland for example are so price driven, we wouldn’ t be able to compete.”
Ketsalin also wants to entice her daughter Vivien into the business a few years down the line and feels that a bigger, more dynamic company will ultimately prove a bigger draw to tempt her away from her successful life in corporate banking.
So when she heard about the free and subsidised services available to production companies in the capital from the DTI’ s London Manufacturing Advisory Service( MAS), she decided to see what they could offer in terms of help and advice.
After an initial assessment, London MAS specialist Sylvain Briand decided with Ketsalin that the best route forward for the company would be to develop engage ISSUE TWO 2006