About Truly Gourmet

Ethan Wong grew up in the kitchen of his parents' prawn noodle restaurant, which they ran for more than 30 years. After working in food management in Guangzhou, he came home to Malaysia wanting to make something of his own: a product built for vegans and vegetarians.

In 2018 he started with tempeh, fermenting everything from soybeans to black beans, chickpeas and peanuts in his father's kitchen. The ferments worked, but fresh tempeh lasts only five to seven days. Turning it into chips, which could keep for up to 12 months, gave the idea room to grow.

Then the money ran out. To fund the idea, Ethan spent 14 months working as a private chef in Taiwan. When the pandemic hit in 2020, every plan came to a halt. He tried everything to get by, from building websites to selling cakes. With about RM5,000 left in the bank, he and his wife took RM500 and revived the tempeh chips research.

In December 2020, Ethan drove samples to 139 volunteer testers himself. The average score came back at 8 out of 10, enough to launch. On 6 January 2021, Truly Gourmet's Sea Salt Tempeh Chips went on sale.

For the next 11 months, every day started at 5am: two hours of hand-slicing on a small chopping board, then frying, cleaning and packing. In the evenings, the soybeans for the next batch were peeled by hand, often until 11pm. Demand kept growing. In November 2021 we moved into a 3,500 sq ft space, and the team grew from two to ten.

Getting onto supermarket shelves is hard, because buyers hear from hundreds of suppliers. Bilabila Mart was among the first to back us, championing locally made products, followed by Village Grocer and, by 2023, grocers across Malaysia.

In May 2024 we moved into a 10,000 sq ft factory in Kajang. Apart from the electrical and specialist work, Ethan handled the fit-out himself over five months, buying materials and managing the build between production shifts.

None of this would have happened without Ethan's wife, his partner from the very first batch and the pillar behind the whole journey. Whenever he wanted to give up, she was the one who said: let's stop, get a coffee, and think it through.