How Ken Koh revived his ailing family business in Singapore to produce the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of soya sauce

Entrepreneurs have been known to trumpet bold claims, and third-generation soya sauce maker Ken Koh of Nanyang Sauce is no exception. He professes to sit on the “vat of youth,” frothing gently with soya beans that are fermented the traditional way, laced with koji mould. The latter, he posited, contains properties that may reverse ageing and — if you'll suspend your disbelief — possibly kill cancer cells.

Never mind that such assertions may bear whiffs of snake oil sales spiel; Koh has skin in the game. He’s stumped up resources to launch a fermented skincare line, as well as a new age pharmaceutical firm that inked a research collaboration agreement with National Cancer Centre Singapore to explore the cancer therapeutic potential of mycobiota fermentation.

While the 41-year-old demurs on the scientific details, he says ongoing research is promising, prompting a recent trip to Dubai to bankroll his venture. Admittedly, it may seem out of left field.

“Never in a gazillion years would I have imagined that I’d move in this direction,” he mused. “I wanted to tell the world about Nanyang Sauce and sell as much sauce as I could, to turn our family business around and keep it going for the next generation,” said the entrepreneur, who began to delve into the beauty and wellness space after being approached by an A*STAR researcher requesting to study the properties of his soya beans.

Two years ago, he launched wellness-inspired private dining company Nanyang Chef, which features dishes starring ingredients sourced from Bhutan and Borneo. While he credits those pursuits with the pithy slogan, “the secret is in the sauce,” there was a time where Nanyang Sauce's branding was more soya than sizzle.

A LEGACY ON THE BRINK

By the time Koh joined his family business — hitherto run by his mother and uncles — they were beset by debt and circling the proverbial drain. He traces the company's decline to 1996, when his grandfather and Nanyang Sauce’s founder, Tan Tiong How, passed away at the age of 70 after suffering a heart attack.

“He was working so hard, always the first in the factory and the last to leave,” he said. “He did not plan for succession, as it was considered inauspicious. That’s why I wrote my will in my 20s.”

In a way, the family’s fortune has waxed and waned with Singapore’s shifting tides. Tan, who came from a line of soya sauce makers from China’s Fujian Province, fled the Sino-Japanese war for Singapore in 1942 — carrying a jar of koji and the desire to claw out a better future. He eked out a hardscrabble existence as a coolie and brewed his own soya sauce to flavour his meagre porridge meals.

Friends developed a taste for Tan’s umami-rich brews, so he eventually began peddling it out of a tricycle. This bare-bones outfit built on elbow grease creaked and clattered its way into a kampung factory in 1959. While they relocated several times over the decades, the family has hewed to their painstaking method of fermenting hand-brewed soya sauce under the sun for months, stubbornly eschewing mass-market machine production at their own mounting costs. This was before the term “artisanal” was flashed like a badge of honour by chefs and soap-makers alike.

“People are now starting to appreciate old school, real food again, but the 1990s and early 2000s were all about cheaper, processed food and air-conditioned hypermarkets like Carrefour,” recounted Koh.

The patriarch’s sudden passing during that super-sized milieu marked a nadir for the business. “He was the one making the deals with the zha huo dian (sundry shops) and minimarts, and people respected him. When he left, there was really no one to fill his shoes,” recalled Koh. He witnessed his family suffer the financial repercussions of its low-key, handshake economy approach, which ultimately precluded their products from supermarket shelves.

“I grew up feeling like it was all so such a pity. When my grandfather was running the business, we could afford to give away gold pendants in lucky draws and all this stopped because there was no clear succession plan,” he reflected.

THE GRANDSON WHO WOULDN'T QUIT

As a child, Koh played hide-and-seek among clay kilns steeped in the earthy aroma of fermenting soya sauce. He was something of a right-hand man for his grandfather, who entrusted him with counting spare change and tracking stock prices on the flickering Teletex screen. “He would say, 'Call me if the numbers turn green. If they go white, which means losses, call me faster,’” he recounted. That was Koh's introduction to entrepreneurship.

By the age of 11, he was a young fly on the wall at board meetings — and one such conclave remains etched in his memory. A group of consultants had proposed a quicker, cheaper way to produce commercial soya sauce using chemicals. Visibly rankled, the formidable founder rose from his seat and pointed at his wide-eyed grandson. “He shouted in Hokkien, ‘If I don’t dare to feed this to my grandson, how can I feed the rest of Singapore?',” he recalled.

The episode endured as a lesson in conviction and authenticity.  “He was not willing to shortchange his customers and stuck to those values,” said Koh.

Those anecdotes imply that he was, for all intents and purposes, groomed to succeed his grandfather — so why till his 30s to claim the mantle? According to Koh, his mother and uncles emphatically discouraged him from joining the business, out of good intentions. “No parent wants their child to walk the hard path,” he reasoned.

Yet, family members cannot deny that echoes of Nanyang Sauce’s headstrong founder resonate in Koh. As an 18-year-old buzzing with moxy, he shrugged off failure after unsuccessfully pitching for funding at a Singapore Management University business plan competition, and bootstrapped his corporate training company with just S$2,000. The cock-sure youth earned his first contract within a year, eventually secured S$25,000 in funding from SMU and Spring Singapore, and built a venture that continues to thrive to this day.

“Before other people believe in you, you must first believe in yourself,” declared Koh, who lent that training as a dragon boater helped mould his self-confidence.

In 2017, he channelled that obdurate spirit into a bold proposition for his elders: Let him staunch the bleeding of their beleaguered business. He’d start by hiking the price of a bottle of soy sauce to S$10. This was one leap too far for his incredulous predecessors.

“Their jaws dropped. ‘Kikkoman sells a bottle of their soya sauce for S$6, what makes you think you can do that?’,” he recounted.

But this wasn't the flight of fancy dreamt up by a greenhorn. He’d visited enough soya sauce factories across the region to know that they were singular in brewing their soya sauce the “traditional, kung-fu way”— instead of boosting production through chemical hydrolysation. Pricing it at market rate was no longer sustainable.

To allay his uncle’s and mother’s fears that he’d make a muck of their decades-old business, he set up a separate entity — one that sold their surplus, aged soya sauce. “I named it Nanyang Sauce, as they were using the Golden Swan label. Not all of our forefathers were literate, so many brands used logos of animals that could be easily recognised,” he explained.

But that was just the tip of his branding overhaul. Koh then leased a clapped out old shophouse at East Coast Road and transformed it into an experiential space where customers discovered his products through workshops and savoured his soya sauce chicken. Slowly, he cultivated a loyal following of chefs and food connoisseurs with a penchant for the sauce’s richly flavoured, moreish notes. The momentum eventually landed his products on the shelves of FairPrice Finest and Cold Storage.

Besides those premium supermarkets, Nanyang Sauce products are now also sold on Redmart, Shopee, as well as overseas in Indonesia and Malaysia. Along the way, the separate businesses merged, but not without friction between him and the second-generation.

“We are in a harmonious situation now, but it wasn't always this way,” he shared. “I changed a lot of things they weren’t used to. For instance, we never had an automated invoicing system, and relied on hand-written invoices that simply stated Ah Tan or Ah Chai,” he said ruefully.

FULL STEAM AHEAD

Having propelled the business into the digital age, Koh revealed that every drop of soya sauce they produce is spoken for, with the brewery now running at full tilt. It bears testament to his marketing savvy in distilling a fine brew from what was once a fusty old outfit. At the same time, his mother’s tireless dedication to the craft of soya sauce brewing was vindicated when she was conferred the Stewards of Intangible Cultural Heritage award by the National Heritage Board in 2021.

But success, as they know, is a perishable brew. While their lease is up for renewal this year, they’re all teed up to open a production facility in Bhutan, where they source organic, non-GMO soya beans and pristine glacial water for their bespoke vats. Priced at an eye-watering S$10,000 each, these are in high demand, according to Koh.

The remote Himalayan kingdom holds a special place in his heart. For one, he’s convinced that people there — who are the “nicest, gentlest and happiest you can find”— are naturally inclined to brew soya sauce par excellence, thanks to the positive energy they radiate. He dubs it ‘the Rolls-Royce of soy sauce’ — a nod to his 1984 Silver Spirit, which he regards less as an accoutrement of success and more as a sentimental treasure.

“I want to build Nanyang Sauce like how they build a Rolls-Royce, from their dedication to handicraft, to the materials they use,” he concluded.