The COVID-19 pandemic has its silver lining: The lockdown pushed some enterprising people into starting their own online F&B businesses. One of them was Samuel Wong, 38. The fashion designer’s label Evenodd was affected by the pandemic, which prompted him to open a home-based food start-up in 2020 called Mum’s Ngoh Hiang.
It offers ngoh hiang made by his mum, Ellen Kuah, 69. “I had to help myself,” Wong explains of his decision to leave the fashion industry. Instead of the traditional log shape, Ellen Kuah’s handmade ngoh hiang is dainty, flat and looks like a tiny pillow with a delicate trail of beancurd skin.
Each parcel is stuffed with juicy minced pork, chopped water chestnuts, prawns, and, unusually, no five spice powder as she doesn’t like its flavour. After slogging for almost two years to build up Mum’s Ngoh Hiang, Samuel Wong began earning enough money to pay off the outstanding bank loans accrued from running his defunct fashion label. “A lot of savings were lost on it ’cause I was trying not to kill my brand.
It was quite bad – I was even thinking of getting another job while I was running Evenodd. So every box of ngoh hiang we sold counted,” he shares. He was even able to put aside enough savings from what he made to buy his own HDB flat in 2021, a four-room resale unit at Jalan Kayu for “around S$400,000” under the Single Singapore Citizen Scheme.
While Mum’s Ngoh Hiang started as an Instagram preorder-only business, Wong has since exp.