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Ghee Hiang
In 1999, four founding families went to war over Malaysia's oldest confectionery. Seven years of litigation nearly killed a brand that had traded since 1856. The reluctant heirs who inherited the wreckage discovered the turnaround wasn't in pastries—it was in sesame oil that now reaches 400+ Hong Kong supermarkets.
Beach Street Since 1856, 6,000 Bottles a Day
Seven years of family war, then sesame oil saved everything
When Dato Ch’ng Huck Theng and Datuk Ooi Sian Hian inherited Ghee Hiang in 2006, they weren’t receiving a cherished family legacy—they were accepting custody of wreckage. Seven years of litigation had paralyzed Malaysia’s oldest confectionery. Four founding families had torn themselves apart in court. Heavy machinery, intended to modernize production, had ruined the pastries. Customer service had deteriorated to the point where, according to local food histories, frustrated customers left empty-handed after being chided for not ordering in advance. It was, as Sian Hian later put it, one of the toughest challenges the family business had to deal with — a feud that “nearly spelt its doom.”
The crisis that mechanization created
The previous management’s strategic failure was ironically an attempt at modernization. In the late 1990s, heavy machinery was introduced to cope with increasing demand for tau sar pneah. The result: harder pastries that customers rejected. This violated Ghee Hiang’s foundational promise. Since 1856, when Fujian migrant Teng Tou Ku established the business at Beach Street, the brand had built its reputation on fresh-baked, hot-from-the-oven pastries. Customers would queue for biscuits barely cooled—the experience of eating tau sar pneah warm was inseparable from the product itself. The machines broke that sensory experience, producing pastries that lacked the delicate texture that generations of Penang families had come to expect.
Compounding the quality decline, service had turned hostile. Staff attitudes reflected management dysfunction. Training deteriorated. The warmth that should accompany a heritage brand visiting experience was replaced with impatience and dismissiveness. Brand reputation deteriorated at the same moment the product itself was failing. As Huck Theng later reflected: “It was between my grandfather and father. It mainly started with disagreements on strategy and one thing led to another. They were just at odds with each other.”
Trouble between the families
The flashpoint came in 1999. An extraordinary general meeting resulted in the forced removal of several directors—granduncles and uncles from the other families. They sued. The litigation consumed approximately seven years.
For 73 years, four families—Ch’ng, Ooi, Yeap, and Yeoh—had governed Ghee Hiang under the 1926 arrangement established when founder Teng Tou Ku died and his widow sold the business. Generational tensions accumulated across decades until they erupted into open warfare. Sian Hian offered the starkest assessment: “We did not face many problems during economic downturns. Our biggest setback came in the form of trouble between the families.”
The stakes were existential. The 143-year-old company faced potential dissolution under litigation costs and operational paralysis. Product quality had already declined. Customer trust had evaporated. Without intervention, one of Asia’s oldest food manufacturers would have collapsed into irrelevance.
The court ordered a mutual buyout. The Ch’ng and Ooi families acquired the Yeoh and Yeap stakes, simplifying ownership from four families to two. Sian Hian—an architect by profession, not a food industry veteran—found himself leading a heritage confectionery. They inherited a damaged brand—but they also inherited clarity. The governance paralysis that had nearly destroyed the company was eliminated. Now came the harder task: restoration.
The turnaround nobody expected
The turnaround that saved Ghee Hiang was not the one anyone planned. The new leadership set out to rehabilitate the tau sar pneah pastries that had defined the brand since 1856. But a product with a two-week shelf life and tourism-dependent sales could not carry a heritage brand through a crisis on its own, and the business that eventually did had been on the shelf the whole time: Ghee Hiang Baby Brand Pure Sesame Oil, introduced in the 1900s as a complement to tau sar pneah, using traditional Fujian extraction methods and largely overlooked in pastry-focused narratives about the company.
Production returned to handmade methods. The machinery that had compromised pastry quality was abandoned. Sian Hian articulated the philosophy: “I don’t want to be a supermarket, I don’t want to be selling anything and everything like a sundry shop. We are a traditional biscuit maker, that’s our core strength so we will stick to it.” But the sesame oil operation—which didn’t require the same artisanal touch as pastries—could scale without betraying heritage.
The breakthrough came from serendipity. Sometime between 2008 and 2010, Hong Kong celebrity chef So Sze Wong walked into a Ghee Hiang outlet as an anonymous tourist. She purchased sesame oil without the company’s knowledge. Then, on her TVB cooking show “So Good,” she proclaimed it “the best sesame seed oil in the world”—adding that she treasured it so much she used it only for special dishes. This was not a paid advertisement.
“All of a sudden, we had an influx of calls asking for our product,” Sian Hian recalled. The organic endorsement opened Hong Kong’s market in a way no marketing budget could have purchased. The oil that So Sze Wong praised on air now sits in 400+ supermarkets across Hong Kong, including the entire PARKnSHOP chain of 300+ stores.
Figures reported in the trade press put the Jelutong factory’s output at 6,000 bottles of 700ml sesame oil a day. A 2011 report in The Edge Financial Daily put Ghee Hiang’s total workforce at 110 (roughly half local, half foreign workers) and sesame oil’s share of revenue at 70%—a complete inversion of the traditional pastry-first business model.
When the tourists disappeared
COVID-19 collapsed George Town’s tourism industry. The UNESCO World Heritage Zone where Ghee Hiang’s Beach Street shop has stood since 1856 became, as one report noted, “the sun-scorched colonial backwater it was before its inscription on the 2008 UNESCO World Heritage list.”
Ghee Hiang never disclosed specific revenue impacts. International passenger movement had dropped 99.9% by Q2 2020, and domestic visitors to Penang had declined 42.2%. Against that, e-commerce platforms were activated and delivery services launched. Sesame oil exports—a reported 35% of production, shipped to Singapore, China, Japan, India and Indonesia alongside the Hong Kong channel—continued. Sesame oil, the larger share of revenue, kept shipping.
Huck Theng leveraged his position as Chairman of the Association of Tourism Attractions Penang (ATAP) to advocate for industry reopening and support for heritage businesses struggling through the lockdowns. By September 2021, he was calling for travel bubble expansion from Langkawi to Penang. Penang tourism recovered, reaching 8.24 million visitors in 2024, above pre-pandemic levels. Ghee Hiang came out of the pandemic expanding.
What evolves and what stays
Huck Theng articulates the philosophy that now guides the heritage brand: “Some things have to evolve and some things have to stay. While we have to evolve to survive, we also need to preserve and promote what we are known for. We must not change totally everything; there must be something that our forefathers had done right that gave us an opportunity to grow further.”
This evolution-without-erasure approach extends beyond business decisions into civic engagement. His concurrent roles as ATAP Chairman and President of the Penang Art Society position Ghee Hiang’s survival as cultural stewardship: “If the government does not take the initiative to do something with the heritage, the culture, and the arts scene, no one is going to bother… Without the history, the culture and the heritage, then it will be a state without a soul. You can build a nice and big building with good infrastructure, but you just have a nice body; you don’t have a soul.”
The Beach Street boutique—which survived Japanese bombing during World War II—has been restored to late 19th/early 20th century aesthetic. Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow unveiled the major renovation in January 2023. The space now includes viewing decks and museum elements, transforming heritage retail into experiential tourism. A four-acre factory at Penang Science Park North, operational in 2024, provides expansion capacity without compromising the artisanal character of the original production.
The brand launched contemporary products—DarkChoc, WhiteChoc, and ChilliChoc cookies—alongside the traditional tau sar pneah. The most notable was Tau Sar Pneah Kurma, a dates variant of the pastry the brand has made since 1856.
Forty rivals and one edge
Sian Hian estimates that about 40 tau sar pneah makers operate in Malaysia. Him Heang, founded 1948 by a former Ghee Hiang baker, maintains only one outlet with deliberately limited daily output, commanding intense local loyalty on perceived superior taste. Ban Heang, established 1997, dominates mass-market distribution, including a Penang International Airport outlet, with a broader product range at lower prices. Tean Ean serves tourists with competitive pricing and full halal certification.
Ghee Hiang differentiates through heritage pedigree (since 1856), product diversification (pastries plus sesame oil), traditional authenticity (recipes maintaining original taste), and experiential retail (factory tours, Teels Heritage Cafe, museum-style Beach Street outlet).
Meanwhile, sesame oil and coffee products, which keep for months, expand addressable markets without diluting the core offering. This dual approach—tradition where it matters, adaptation where it enables growth—defines how heritage brands survive not just market disruptions but internal implosions.
The afterlife of a side product
In October 2025, Ghee Hiang announced a research collaboration with Hong Kong Baptist University to study the neuroprotective effects of sesame oil bioactive compounds. For a brand whose primary narrative has always centered on pastries, the announcement marked something quietly significant: the product that four families spent 73 years overlooking, while they argued about biscuit recipes and board control, is now a subject of nutritional neuroscience.
None of the oil’s rise was planned. The sesame oil operation came through the family feud without anyone having recognized its potential. Its export shelf life—months, compared to tau sar pneah’s two weeks—made it immune to tourism volatility. Shelf life and halal certification together opened export markets that fresh pastries could not reach.
The Ch’ng and Ooi families, inheriting wreckage in 2006, were forced to look at everything. The side product they looked at turned out to be the company.
Researched 17 sources in English, Chinese.