Crunch time for a snack business
NTU alumnus Ko Yu Quan was just a freshman when he took over his family’s ailing snack business. With help from electives in NTU, he modernised the business and turned things around.
Text: Foo Jie Ying
Ko Yu Quan (SPMS/2015) was just a freshman when his father died of a sudden heart attack, leaving behind a six-decade-old snack business.
Despite being woefully unprepared, he took on the mantle of helming KrackerKing when it came to the crunch.
The 32-year-old says: “I wanted to go into finance. I never thought of taking over the family business, but there was no one else at home to helm the business.
Yu Quan spent the next three years of his university days leading a double life. By day, he devoted himself to keeping the business afloat. Nights were spent catching up on schoolwork till the wee hours.
Taking a second major in business analytics meant a heavier course load but had its perks. “Wherever I needed a business-related skill, I just had to take an elective related to it,” he says. For instance, when he needed to crunch some numbers for the business but could not afford to hire an accountant, he took up an accounting elective instead.
Formerly called Best Taste, the business was founded in 1955 by Yu Quan’s grandfather. It started out as a snack manufacturer with a strong following but adapted to become a snack importer and distributor following declining export sales and a labour crunch in the 1990s.
When Yu Quan took over the reins in 2012, one of the first few things he did in a bid to revive the struggling family business was to take a crack at manufacturing snacks again.
“I thought it would be a huge mistake not to manufacture traditional snacks like we used to because we make very good keropok,” he says. “So I took my grandfather’s recipe, tweaked it, and went back into manufacturing in Singapore.”
Yu Quan also invested in technology in hopes of modernising the vanishing trade of traditional snacks manufacturing.
For instance, the company uses a centrifugal de-oiling system that spins fried crackers around for 30 to 45 seconds to remove excess oil, making the snacks healthier than an average bag of crackers.
His hard work paid off. By the time he graduated, he managed to clear the debts that the business was saddled with.
In 2020, Yu Quan decided to inject a breath of fresh air into the business by rebranding it as KrackerKing to appeal to a younger crowd. The new brand boasts modern colourful packaging, giving life to its variety of traditional crackers.
Today, the brand supplies an array of snacks to more than 200 major retailers and distributors in Singapore, including supermarkets like FairPrice, Sheng Siong and Prime Supermarket.
With his business on track locally, Yu Quan now dreams of taking a bite of the global snack market. He has invested in automation to ramp up production capacity and is waiting for a good export opportunity to put KrackerKing on the world map.
“We want to make people happy with our snacks,” he says, adding that KrackerKing wants to produce “the Asian snacks the world snacks on”.
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This article first appeared in issue 3 of U, the NTU alumni magazine.
