Anastasia Tjendri-Liew

At 78, Anastasia Tjendri-Liew is the founder and managing director of Bengawan Solo — S$76 million in annual revenue, forty-plus outlets, five terminals at Changi Airport, the brand most likely to be in the bag of anyone flying out of Singapore with a gift to deliver. She has been doing the morning walk for forty-six years. She has not yet named a successor.

“From day one, when I do something, I want to give the best to my customers. I’m in the factory seven days a week, with no off days — unless I’m overseas on holiday. If I’m in Singapore, I must go every day. I have to check everything, taste the flavour and texture. If something isn’t right, I’ll find the person responsible. I’m very strict. It’s not easy, but I cannot compromise on my products or their quality.”

That is from Her World, published 29 October 2025, the day she received the Her World Woman of the Year award. She has said variations of it across four decades of interviews. The consistency is the point.

Born into civil unrest #

The third of eight children, Anastasia was raised in Palembang, South Sumatra, in a Hakka-speaking family on Bangka Island who had made their way to the mainland. The family was Indonesian-Chinese — a community that navigated the racial tensions of post-independence Indonesia with the practical literacy of people who understood they were guests in a country with complicated feelings about their presence.

Civil unrest in the mid-1960s curtailed her formal schooling at Secondary 3. She was still in her teens. Where formal education stopped, she improvised. A six-month baking course. Cooking classes taught from home, modest income but enough to fund further study. A dressmaking diploma she would never use. The skill she could carry across borders was the one her mother had given her: she could bake, and she could bake well.

In 1970, an Indonesian-Chinese cousin sponsored her move to Singapore to improve her English. The plan was practical and temporary. She was in her early twenties. The city was not supposed to be permanent.

In 1973, she married Johnson Liew, a fellow Indonesian-Chinese accountant fifteen years her senior, and they settled in a four-room HDB flat at Marine Parade in the city’s east. She had a dressmaking diploma she had set aside. She had a kitchen. She had the recipes her mother had given her.

The 45-cent conviction #

By 1975, she was selling home-baked cakes to Singapore retailers — butter cakes, chiffon cakes, kueh lapis, products reaching President Emporium, Katong Emporium, Klasse Department Store, Lucky Plaza. The commercial logic of selling cakes from a flat was informal, unplanned, and persistent. She was good at it, and her customers kept coming back.

The first friction came at the pricing table.

“The supermarket manager asked me why I sold my cakes so expensive. But I knew mine were better, more fragrant. My cakes always sold out.”

That is from the Straits Times in 2009, recalling a conversation from around 1976. She was charging 45 cents in a market where the standard was 30 cents. The manager’s logic was correct by the metrics of his spreadsheet: she was overpriced. Her logic was correct by the metrics of her kitchen: freshly grated coconut, hand-squeezed pandan juice, Holland butter. She was not using bottled essence because she had tried it and knew the difference.

The pricing philosophy she set in 1975 she would never revise. Bengawan Solo’s pandan chiffon cake sells today for S$22. The quality posture behind it has not changed in five decades.

The knock at the door #

In 1979, health inspectors from the Ministry of Environment arrived at her flat. Selling cakes from a home kitchen was illegal. The instruction was unambiguous: stop.

She stopped immediately. She was still in her early thirties, a mother of two young children. There was no business plan, no grand entrepreneurial vision, no manifesto about Singapore’s heritage confectionery sector. There was a compliance order and a practical woman who followed it.

Then her customers came to the door.

The decision to open a shop — rather than accept the government order as the end of the story — was not made from ambition. It was made under pressure, driven by the people who had been buying her cakes and refused to stop. She rented Block 58 Marine Terrace at S$1,200 a month and named it Bengawan Solo, after the Indonesian folk song her mother loved about the Solo River in Central Java. She had not planned to run a shop. She had planned to comply.

Compliance, in her case, became creation.

I wondered if I could continue #

The first years of the Marine Terrace shop were also the years of her hardest personal doubt — not about the product, but about the cost of producing it.

“I didn’t have enough time for my kids — it was very hard. Sometimes, I wondered if I could continue, but I told myself to keep going. I tried my best.”

She told Her World this in October 2025, forty-six years after opening the shop. The struggle it describes was immediate: a mother of two running a business in the years when the business was small enough to need everything she had, and her children were young enough to need the same. She made a point of taking her kids out once a week. The specificity of the doubt — “I wondered if I could continue” — is the detail that distinguishes the memory from a stock narrative of early-stage difficulty.

She continued. The business expanded through the 1980s. By the time the expansion reached the 1990s, rapid growth had produced customer complaints about quality — the first real threat to the conviction she had held since the 1975 pricing argument. She responded the way she had responded to everything else: personally. She walked the manufacturing line, identified the failures, and instituted the quality-standards system that still runs today. The founder’s daily presence at the factory is not a leadership affectation. It was the solution to the first operational crisis of her own making.

Proof arrives in newsprint #

In 1981, journalist Alan John wrote a feature on Bengawan Solo for the Sunday Times. It produced queues before the shop opened and empty shelves by noon. National name recognition arrived in one print run.

For the founder, the significance was personal rather than commercial. The article was confirmation, from a source she had not sought and could not have arranged, that the pricing argument she had won with the supermarket manager in 1976 was correct. Refusing to use cheaper ingredients had been right.

She sent Alan John a cake that year. She has sent him a cake or a tin of mooncakes every Christmas and Mid-Autumn since. Over forty years of unbroken gifts to the man who first said, in print, that what she was doing was worth noticing.

The loyalty is its own portrait.

The recognition arrives — one decade late, then all at once #

The 1980s and early 1990s were expansion years: more outlets, the first central kitchen at Harvey Road in 1987 (Singapore’s first in the confectionery industry), production consolidation at Woodlands in 1997. By 1998, Bengawan Solo had roughly eighteen outlets and a growing presence in Changi Airport’s Terminal 1 departure lounge — the channel that would eventually account for more than half of all sales.

In 1998, she became the first recipient of the ASME Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award. It was the first professional recognition, nearly two decades after the Marine Terrace opening, that what she had built constituted a legitimate entrepreneurial achievement rather than a successful domestic hobby. She had known it since the 1975 pricing argument. The award was external confirmation.

The Public Service Medal followed in 2008, the same year revenue crossed S$40 million — three-and-a-half times the 2000 figure. The Public Service Star arrived in 2013. The Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame in 2018, under the SCWO’s Business & Enterprise category, among twelve women honoured that year. Her World Woman of the Year in October 2025.

The arc of recognition is long. The first award arrived nineteen years after opening. The most recent arrived forty-six years after. Between them: no down year.

The son’s childhood promise #

In 2002, Henry Liew graduated from NUS Business School and joined the company as director of business development. He was twenty-three.

The story Anastasia tells about her son is specific: at age twelve, he had told her she “cannot sell it.” The instruction was a child’s claim, not a legal document. But she had remembered it. Twenty years later, he arrived with a business degree and took his place in the operation. The childhood promise had become a career choice.

Henry is now 46 and operationally embedded. Younger daughter Rissa chose real estate. The company’s store operations are managed by Henry’s wife. Anastasia’s younger sister leads the kueh-making department at Woodlands. The business the Indonesian homemaker built in a Marine Parade flat is, four decades later, a family business in the fullest sense — four members of two generations running the same operation, with the founder still at the centre of it.

The 1979 logic, replayed in 2020 #

On 22 April 2020, Singapore’s Circuit Breaker order closed all standalone confectionery outlets as non-essential services. The airport channel — by then accounting for more than half of all sales — had already collapsed as international travel stopped. Bengawan Solo’s two primary revenue streams shut simultaneously.

She was 72. The decision she had made in 1979 — to open a shop rather than accept a closure notice as the end of the story — was being tested against its own logic. The perishable stock was redirected: cakes and kaya donated to food charity Willing Hearts and the migrant-worker programme Project Chulia Street. The production line was protected. The quality posture was maintained through the closure.

By 2024, annual revenue reached ~S$76 million — a new all-time high, eleven percent above the pre-pandemic figure.

The founder who turned a 1979 shutdown into a founding act turned a 2020 shutdown into a recovery. The pattern is not coincidence — it is the operating logic of a person who has spent forty-six years refusing to accept that a closure notice is the end of anything.

The scholarship of a woman who left school at Secondary 3 #

In 2023, Anastasia established a named scholarship at Singapore Management University and donated S$100,000 each to NTU, NUS, and SMU heritage funds. The gifts were made quietly. She did not articulate the symmetry publicly.

She did not need to. The homemaker who had left school because civil unrest made staying impossible was now funding the education of others. The baking course taken when formal schooling ended had become, across fifty years, the foundation of a curriculum endowment. The scholarship carries her name at a university she could not have attended.

The succession question she answers without answering #

At the Her World Woman of the Year ceremony on 29 October 2025, a journalist asked about succession. She and Henry both demurred. Her answer was direct.

“If I still can work, I’ll work. If I cannot, I’ll see how. I hope Bengawan Solo can carry on and grow further. That’s all I can hope for.”

Three decades ago, she told a colleague she planned to retire at 48. She is now 78. The retirement age she had declared passed thirty years before the Her World award.

The answer is not evasion. It is the clearest possible statement of a founder who has not yet found a way to let go — and, more precisely, who has not yet found a way to transfer what she holds. The quality system at Bengawan Solo is not a document. It is a practice: the morning walk, the texture check, the tasting, the conversation with the person responsible when something is not right. The system is her. The question of succession is therefore the question of whether what she has built can exist when she stops walking the floor.

Henry Liew is 46, NUS-educated, operationally embedded for twenty-three years. The infrastructure is there. The two-unit Woodlands facility is HACCP-certified, the outlet network is established, the airport channel is mature. What has not been transferred is the thing that cannot be written in a manual: the conviction, held since 1975, that 45 cents was the right price because she knew her cakes were better.

She told Her World in 2025 that she is in the factory seven days a week. She said it as a statement of practice, not as a statement of retirement planning. The morning walk continues.

The brand she refused to sell has never had a down year. At 78, she is still the reason.

Last updated: May 12, 2026