Oriental Kopi

An outsider format in a majority market

Oriental Kopi’s founding team was not new to running a food-service brand — or to the discipline of holding one to a standard. Calvin Chan Jian Chern (陈建丞), his sister Chan Yen Min (陈艳敏), and her husband Koay Song Leng had co-founded Black Whale, a bubble-tea chain, in 2018 through their joint venture Golden Whale International. Black Whale won a World Top Gourmet award in its tea category the following year — no public failure sits on the record — but the founders drew their own lesson from the experience about what happens when a fast-scaling format outruns its own standards, and carried that lesson into the business they built next: a kopitiam chain opened in a rented shop lot in Johor Jaya, Johor Bahru, in December 2020.

By the time Oriental Kopi began its halal application in June 2022, the chain had already proven it could scale on its own terms without touching that gap. Two outlets had opened outside its Johor Bahru home base — Mid Valley Southkey in May 2021, Bandar Puteri Puchong in Selangor that November — and a third had just landed in Kuala Lumpur’s Pavilion Bukit Jalil, arguably the country’s most competitive mall market. The brand had built its identity on obsessive operating control: food prepared fresh per outlet rather than reheated from a central kitchen, a coffee blend the company roasted itself from Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica beans, and toast cut to a precise 1.8-centimetre thickness. Every outlet was company-owned — a no-franchise rule the founders held to even as competitors like OldTown White Coffee and PappaRich built out national footprints through franchisees. Revenue was climbing fast enough that FY2023 would close at RM133.0 million, more than 26 times FY2021’s RM5.0 million.

But every one of those outlets operated as a Chinese-tradition establishment, outside the JAKIM halal system that governs what Malaysia’s Malay-Muslim majority will eat — a majority the founders had never needed to serve directly before. JAKIM’s own registration rules compound the structural gap: an outlet has to be open and operating before it can even apply for certification, so a growing chain permanently trails its own footprint through the process. For Oriental Kopi, that meant a market segment larger than the one it already served sat, by construction, out of reach.

The e-Halal registration that began in June 2022 was not framed publicly at the time as urgent. It took two years to become one.

Announcing a strategy, not filing paperwork

On 14 June 2024, at Suria KLCC — one of the highest-footfall retail complexes in the country — Oriental Kopi’s management stood up and announced its JAKIM halal certification. The venue and the timing were deliberate. Malaysia was in the middle of a fast-food boycott wave that had been building since late 2023, driven by consumer sentiment against several Western chains and pushing Malay customers and, in some cases, Malay staff to look for alternatives. Executive Director Chan Yen Min told Malay-language press that the certification let Oriental Kopi absorb exactly that displaced demand — customers and staff both, not as an accident of good timing, but as the reason the announcement happened when and where it did. The distinction matters: a chain that only wins customers has won market share; a chain that also becomes somewhere displaced Malay staff can work has changed what kind of employer, not just what kind of café, it is.

Managing director Calvin Chan Jian Chern (陈建丞) described the process itself in blunt terms to BERNAMA’s Malay wire the same day: “We faced various challenges and obstacles throughout this journey… the overall process, from initial preparations to every detail of daily operations can be very tough. We not only have to meet the food safety and stringent premise cleanliness standards, but also understand and respect the religious and cultural values upheld in the halal certification.” The quote matters because of who said it and where — a Chinese-founded brand’s own leadership, in the Malay-language press, naming the cultural and religious substance of the standard rather than treating it as a regulatory checkbox.

What the opening cost, and what it funded

By January 2025, the results were countable. Of 21 outlets, 13 carried full JAKIM halal certification, with 8 more in process. Twenty-one own-brand halal retail products — packaged coffee, tea, spreads, and pastries under the Oriental Kopi label — had entered five national retail chains — AEON, Jaya Grocer, Village Grocer, Giant, and Watsons. Watsons’ selection was itself a marker: Oriental Kopi became the first coffee brand the pharmacy chain carried, a distribution win that a non-certified competitor could not have secured regardless of product quality. A pharmacy chain built around health and personal-care purchasing decisions does not stock a food brand on taste alone — certification was the qualifying credential that put Oriental Kopi’s packaged coffee on a shelf a Chinese-tradition kopitiam brand would not otherwise have reached. Export followed the same logic outward: the first packaged-food export purchase order — white coffee, bound for Hong Kong — closed in February 2024, four months before the halal announcement, and packaged goods later reached Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, and New Zealand through indirect distributors.

None of this happened for free. The company held to its no-franchise rule throughout — every halal-certified location was one Oriental Kopi itself built and controlled, not a franchisee’s approximation of the standard — which meant funding the buildout itself rather than spreading the cost across partners. Oriental Kopi Holdings Berhad listed on Bursa Malaysia’s ACE Market on 23 January 2025, at 44 sen per share, raising RM183.96 million through a primary issue of 418.1 million new shares — no existing shares were sold, so the founders’ holding vehicle, United Gomax Sdn Bhd, was diluted rather than cashed out. The offering drew 66,041 applications for 3.66 billion shares worth RM1.609 billion — oversubscribed 59.96 times, against a listing-day market capitalisation of about RM880 million. The proceeds funded a three-storey central kitchen and warehouse in Puchong, Selangor — the production discipline that let the certified retail line scale past a handful of flagship stores instead of stalling there, and that carried the chain from 20 outlets at listing (19 in Malaysia, 1 in Singapore) to 28 by October 2025. FY2025 closed at RM450.9 million in revenue and RM60.75 million in net profit, though on AR2025’s segmental basis the certified retail line still accounted for only 6.48% of revenue against 92.81% café — a reminder that market access, not yet market share, was what certification had bought so far.

What changed at the outlets

The clearest evidence of what certification opened is not the listing — it is who started coming through the door and who started working behind the counter, the claim Chan Yen Min made directly to Malay-language press. A pharmacy chain stocking a Chinese-founded coffee brand for the first time is a second, independent confirmation pointing the same direction, measured in shelf space rather than foot traffic: Watsons does not carry a food brand it doesn’t expect its own customer base to buy. What the research does not carry is outlet-level data — customer counts, staff headcounts, or a named branch where the change was visible day to day. That gap is worth stating plainly rather than papering over: the institutional evidence (certification count, retail distribution, the Watsons placement) is solid; the on-the-ground texture of who walked in is thinner, resting on the founders’ own account rather than independent outlet reporting.

Even the institutional evidence has a visible edge to it, though. Thirteen of 21 outlets certified by January 2025 means eight were not — a Malay customer choosing Oriental Kopi on the strength of the halal announcement could still land at an outlet that wasn’t yet covered by it. The company’s own pace of rollout, not just its intent, is what determined how completely the opening reached across the footprint at any given date.

Recognition followed the commercial numbers, though it measured a different thing — craft and scale, not the halal strategy itself. Malaysia Book of Records credited Oriental Kopi with the country’s thickest egg tart and the most egg tarts sold; The BrandLaureate and BusinessToday named it Best Brand and Best Entrepreneur (F&B) for 2025. In May 2026, the chain set a Guinness World Record at IOI City Mall, selling 11,446 units of nasi lemak in eight hours against a 10,000-unit target.

Malaysia’s kopitiam sector already had a precedent for the format choice underneath all of this. OldTown White Coffee, the sector’s best-known predecessor, built its national footprint through franchising before going private in 2017. Oriental Kopi’s founders built the opposite structural bet: no franchising, every outlet company-owned, equity retained inside a single family vehicle. The halal-certified retail line was layered onto that structure, not around it — a growth lever the company could control end to end, from JAKIM registration to the shelf at Watsons, because it had never handed outlet-level decisions to a franchisee in the first place.

What the sequence proves

None of this required Oriental Kopi to abandon what made it a Chinese-tradition kopitiam in the first place — the coffee blend, the Portuguese egg tarts, the format itself stayed intact. What changed was which market could walk through the door, and who could stand behind the counter to serve it. A brand whose founding format sits outside a market’s majority religious requirement does not have to treat that gap as a permanent ceiling or a purely defensive filing. Pursued as a stated strategy, announced in the majority’s own language at the moment demand was already shifting, halal certification became a growth lever timed to a specific market condition — not a compliance cost absorbed quietly, years after the fact.

The clearest measure of that lever is not the listing or the record books — it is the 21 own-brand products now sitting on shelves a Chinese-tradition kopitiam brand had no route to before certification, and the customers and staff Chan Yen Min said the certification let the company keep. The capital markets outcome — the 59.96 times oversubscription — mattered because it paid for the production capacity to serve that opening at scale. It was the consequence of the bet, not the bet itself.

Last updated: July 31, 2026