The 70% Revenue Engine Nobody Saw Coming

The confectionery business was in ruins. Seven years of family litigation had paralyzed operations. Heavy machinery—meant to modernize—had destroyed product quality. Malaysia’s oldest food manufacturer was, by one director’s admission, “one week from collapse.” The new leadership at Ghee Hiang (義香) in 2006 had no grand strategy for revival. They were simply trying to survive.

She proclaimed that it was the best sesame seed oil in the world. She said she treasured it so much that she uses it only for special dishes.

Their first move: abandon the machinery and return to handmade production. Their second: focus obsessively on quality. Their third: wait—though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing.

Three years later, Hong Kong celebrity chef So Sze Wong (蘇施黃) walked into a Ghee Hiang outlet in Penang (槟城). She was a tourist. She bought pastries and a bottle of sesame oil. She left without introducing herself.

Weeks later, on TVB’s cooking show “So Good” (蘇GOOD), So Sze Wong pulled out a bottle of Ghee Hiang Baby Brand Pure Sesame Oil and proclaimed it “the best sesame seed oil in the world.” She said she treasured it so much that she uses it only for special dishes.

The phone lines lit up. “All of a sudden, we had an influx of calls asking for our product,” recalled Executive Chairman Datuk Ooi Sian Hian. Within months, Ghee Hiang sesame oil was in 400+ Hong Kong supermarkets, including PARKnSHOP’s 300+ stores.

The endorsement was not paid. The celebrity was not courted. The Hong Kong market was not targeted. The entire breakthrough—which transformed a 150-year-old confectionery’s overlooked side product into 70% of company revenue—happened because someone who knew quality walked through the door and recognized it.

The Product That Was Always There

Ghee Hiang Baby Brand Pure Sesame Oil was never meant to be the star. Introduced in the early 1900s using traditional Fujian extraction methods, it was a secondary product line for a company famous for tau sar pneah—the flaky mung bean pastries that tourists queue for at the Beach Street (海墘街) heritage shop in George Town’s (乔治市) UNESCO World Heritage Zone.

The pastries made Ghee Hiang famous. The sesame oil kept the lights on.

By the late 2000s, sesame oil already accounted for the majority of Ghee Hiang’s business. The pastries had a two-week shelf life and required tourists to visit Penang. The sesame oil shipped anywhere and lasted months. The pastries depended on tourism cycles. The sesame oil generated steady export revenue to Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Australia, and the UK.

Yet every article about Ghee Hiang focused on tau sar pneah. The sesame oil remained “the revenue engine nobody talks about.”

The dominance wasn’t a deliberate strategic pivot. It was organic evolution. Management never held a board meeting to declare “we’re becoming a sesame oil company.” They maintained quality on both product lines while the one with natural export advantages grew faster. The sesame oil won not because of strategy, but because of substance.

The Crisis That Enabled Excellence

Understanding why Ghee Hiang’s sesame oil reached world-class quality requires understanding the crisis that preceded it—and the specific decisions that emerged from chaos.

In 1999, the four founding families—Ch’ng (庄), Ooi (黄), Yeap (叶), and Yeoh (杨)—who had owned Ghee Hiang since 1926 erupted into open warfare. The tensions had been building for years. Second-generation owners clashed with third-generation managers over strategy. Personal grievances accumulated. Business philosophy diverged. What started as boardroom disagreements escalated into family rupture that threatened to destroy everything four generations had built.

The flashpoint came at an extraordinary general meeting. Directors were forcibly removed—granduncles and uncles from other families voted out by their own relatives. The removed directors sued. The litigation would consume approximately seven years of the company’s attention, resources, and energy. Management was paralyzed. Strategy was frozen. The brand drifted while lawyers argued over ownership percentages and voting rights.

Meanwhile, the operational crisis deepened in parallel. Previous management had invested heavily in machinery to meet rising demand—a logical modernization that turned catastrophic. The machines produced harder pastries that customers rejected. The texture was wrong. The freshness was compromised. The entire sensory experience that had made Ghee Hiang famous—hot pastries barely cooled from the oven, flaky layers that melted on the tongue—was destroyed by equipment designed for efficiency rather than tradition.

Customer service deteriorated alongside product quality. According to local food histories, “frustrated customers used to leave the shop empty-handed, after being chided for not making their orders early.” Staff morale collapsed. Service became hostile. The company that had built its reputation on welcoming tourists from across Malaysia and beyond was actively driving customers away.

Quality declined. Reputation suffered. Revenue followed. The 143-year-old brand approached collapse. As one of the eventual successors later admitted, the company was “one week from collapse” when new leadership finally took control.

The court eventually ordered a buyout. After seven years of litigation, the Ch’ng and Ooi families acquired the Yeap and Yeoh stakes, simplifying ownership from four families to two. The legal battle was over. But they inherited wreckage.

The new leadership—Datuk Ooi Sian Hian (an architect by profession) and Dato Ch’ng Huck Theng (庄学腾) (a media entrepreneur and fine artist who never planned to join the family business)—faced an existential choice. They could try to out-modernize the modernization that had failed, investing in better machinery, more efficient processes, faster production. Or they could acknowledge that the entire approach had been wrong.

They chose the latter. They would return to heritage methods.

The machinery was abandoned. Production reverted entirely to handmade pastries. This meant slower output, higher labor costs, and limited scalability. But it also meant quality—real quality, the quality their great-grandfathers had established in 1856.

Crucially, the sesame oil factory in Jelutong—which had never been mechanized in the ways that compromised pastry quality—continued its traditional semi-mechanized extraction methods. These techniques dated to the early 1900s when Ghee Hiang had first introduced sesame oil as a product line. There had been no reason to modernize it. So it remained unchanged.

The sesame oil didn’t benefit from new investment or strategic attention. It benefited from not being ruined by the same modernization impulse that destroyed pastry quality. While management focused on rehabilitating the pastry business—the famous product, the heritage centerpiece—the sesame oil production continued unchanged. Same Fujian extraction techniques. Same traditional equipment. Same commitment to purity.

Quality wasn’t improved. Quality was preserved. And in a market where competitors chased efficiency, preserved heritage quality became distinctive—though no one realized it yet.

The Endorsement That Changed Everything

So Sze Wong didn’t know she was about to transform a Malaysian food manufacturer’s revenue structure. She was on vacation, browsing George Town’s heritage district. She walked into the original 1856 Beach Street location—which had survived Japanese bombing during World War II—and bought what interested her.

She wasn’t invited. She wasn’t courted. She wasn’t part of any influencer campaign. She was a chef on holiday who recognized quality.

Back in Hong Kong, filming “So Good,” she reached for the bottle she’d brought from Penang. On national television, she delivered an endorsement that money couldn’t buy: “the best sesame seed oil in the world.”

The specifics matter. She didn’t say “very good.” She said “the best in the world.” She said she “treasures it” and reserves it for “special dishes only.” This wasn’t marketing language. This was genuine conviction.

The Burning Kitchen, a food blog, later verified: “And in case you are wondering, no, it was not a paid advertisement.”

The Hong Kong market opened immediately. Sesame oil exploded to 70% of total revenue. Exports reached 35% of sesame oil production. The Jelutong factory’s 6,000 bottles daily became insufficient; plans for expansion began.

All because a chef on vacation recognized quality that had been there for a century.

Why This Couldn’t Be Replicated

The conventional response to a competitor’s breakthrough is imitation. But Ghee Hiang’s story can’t be replicated because its core elements weren’t manufactured.

First, the heritage. Ghee Hiang was founded in 1856. Their sesame oil uses extraction techniques from Fujian Province (福建省). Over a century of continuous production created institutional knowledge that can’t be compressed into a development cycle.

Second, the crisis-tested quality. The sesame oil emerged as the company’s most reliable product precisely because it hadn’t been subjected to modernization experiments. The traditional methods persisted not from strategic foresight but from benign neglect.

Third, the organic endorsement. So Sze Wong’s credibility derived from independence. She had no financial relationship with Ghee Hiang. Any manufactured version—paid campaigns, sponsored content—would lack the authenticity that made her endorsement compelling.

Fourth, the halal certification. Ghee Hiang’s sesame oil is halal-certified, produced in a separate facility from the lard-based pastries. This enabled access to Malaysia’s Muslim-majority population, the Middle East, and Indonesia.

Competitors can’t replicate the heritage. They can’t buy organic endorsement. They can’t compress a century of quality into a marketing campaign. Ghee Hiang didn’t build this moat deliberately. They inherited heritage, survived crisis, maintained quality, and got lucky. But the moat is real.

From Serendipity to Strategy

The decade following So Sze Wong’s endorsement saw Ghee Hiang transform from reactive beneficiaries of luck to strategic operators building on their advantage.

When COVID-19 collapsed George Town’s tourism industry in 2020—international passenger movement dropped 99.9% by Q2—Ghee Hiang’s diversified revenue structure proved its worth. Pastry-dependent competitors struggled. Ghee Hiang’s sesame oil exports continued.

The company used the pandemic to invest in expansion. A new 4-acre factory at Penang Science Park North became operational in 2024. In October 2025, Ghee Hiang announced a research partnership with Hong Kong Baptist University studying neuroprotective effects of sesame oil bioactive compounds—positioning a century-old heritage product for 21st-century wellness markets.

None of this was predictable in 1999. None was planned in 2006. But each step built on the previous one. The sesame oil that So Sze Wong discovered wasn’t the endpoint. It was the beginning of a transformation that heritage brands rarely achieve: converting accidental advantage into structural competitive position.

The Universal Lesson

Heritage businesses facing crisis typically choose between modernizing aggressively or retreating to tradition. Ghee Hiang’s story suggests a third path: maintain authentic quality so consistently that organic opportunities find you.

The key insight is that the opportunity came after the quality was established. So Sze Wong didn’t discover Ghee Hiang because of marketing. She discovered it because she wandered into a shop and found something genuinely excellent. The marketing followed from quality, not the reverse.

Consider what would have happened if Ghee Hiang had chased trends instead—reformulated for cost efficiency, prioritized scale over quality. So Sze Wong would have bought a bottle of ordinary sesame oil and never mentioned it on television.

The celebrity endorsement required the quality to already exist. No amount of marketing could have manufactured that moment. But the quality—maintained through crisis, preserved through benign neglect—created the conditions where the moment could happen.

This is what “luck favors the prepared” actually means. Not that preparation guarantees luck. But that preparation creates the conditions where luck, when it arrives, can be converted into lasting advantage.

Every market has products like Ghee Hiang’s sesame oil—heritage offerings with genuine excellence that remain invisible to global platforms. They lack marketing budgets and international visibility. They exist in local markets, appreciated by local customers, unknown to the wider world.

The question isn’t how to make them better. The question is how to help the world find them.

So Sze Wong became, accidentally, the bridge between hidden excellence and international market. Her platform reached audiences that Ghee Hiang’s marketing budget never could. A century-old product from a small Malaysian factory now commands premium prices across Asia because one person recognized its quality and had the platform to share that recognition.

How many comparable products remain undiscovered? How many heritage brands maintain excellence in obscurity, waiting for their version of So Sze Wong to walk through the door?

Luck favors the prepared. But it also requires someone willing to look.

Last updated: January 15, 2026