Learning from their parents' businesses, and striking out on their own
Glife Technologies founders Joe Chen (left) and Justin Chou.
SINGAPORE — Their parents ran businesses in the food industry.
And after having served stints — and finding frustration — in their parents’ companies, two young men have taken what they have learnt and started their own firm.
Their grand vision? To feed "100 million people with plant food and touching a billion lives to go green".
Justin Chou, 30 and Joe Chen, 35, are the founder and chief commercial officer respectively of local fresh produce company Glife Technologies, which aims to eliminate the middlemen from the agricultural supply chain.
Mr Chou’s parents own vegetarian food product manufacturer Growthwell Group and also run Lotus Kitchen at Chinatown Point and Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant at Quality Hotel in Balestier, while Mr Chen’s family owns fruit and vegetable importer Ban Choon Marketing.
Both had found gaps in their parents’ businesses. For Mr Chou who started off helping his family promote their products at supermarkets after his National Service at the age of 21, the lack of branding in their vegetarian products was frustrating.
“Back then I knew that plant-based options was a healthier option,” he said.
“It was a more sustainable choice and was the future lifestyle that people would have. It was just that people were not aware of the convenient and healthier options for plant-based food.”
For Mr Chen, who became general manager of Ban Choon in 2009 after completing his university studies, it was the lack of technology that frustrated him.
“We had 200 staff and 60 million turnover but I felt that the software systems were not that advanced to meet our business requirements,” he said.
“There was no way of tracking where our inventory was. Everything was manually counted.”
CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMEN
The idea to set up Glife Technologies emerged after Mr Chou started local vegetarian chain restaurant Greendot in 2011.
At that time, he began to take an interest in where his restaurants’ fresh produce supply was coming from after noticing the constant fluctuation in price.
“I was looking at my vegetables and asking myself why is my tomato S$1.80 today but S$1.50 tomorrow and then sometimes S$2.”
He became further motivated to reinvigorate the fresh produce distribution business through technology after his father, whose business has remained stagnant with revenues of S$300,000 per month for the last 30 years, challenged him to find a way to shake up the business.
Mr Chou then started Glife Technologies in 2017 and went to China to study how Meicai, a Chinese startup that helps farmers sell vegetables to restaurants by applying technology across the supply chain, reduced its reliance on middlemen.
He eventually brought Mr Chen into the team, tapping on the older man’s relations with farmers in countries such as China and Malaysia to convince them to sell their produce directly to Glife.
“We share with farmers the vision of making a sustainable lifestyle accessible to the masses, and how we do it through Glife by ensuring the freshest produce are served to the people,” explained Mr Chou.
By buying its produce directly from farms before selling it on to its customers, Glife can also ensure that farmers receive a fairer price for their goods.
“With multiple middlemen, the price is subjected to being marked up with each hand it goes through. This eventually leads to farmers being short changed and not reaping the true benefits from their sales,” said Mr Chou.
“However, Glife allows the farmers to sell to them at a price which they think is fair to them, instead of allowing us to decide on it.”
Mr Chen added that Glife has been able to employ its business model successfully by ensuring a significant volume of produce when purchasing straight from farmers.
Other food distributors, he said, have not been able to cut out the middlemen as they do not have the necessary volume to justify a purchase directly from farmers.
DOUBLED REVENUE IN SIX MONTHS
Their model has proven successful so far. Glife was able to secure seed capital of S$1.6 million earlier this year, and while they declined to share revenue figures, they shared that they have doubled their revenue in the past six months.
The company also has a total of 200 customers consisting of several major food and beverage chains, five-star hotels and large restaurant group chains.
For Mr Chou, the model has allowed him to expand his father’s distribution business by serving a much wider audience with greater frequency.
“In the past, for instance, we could only serve vegetarian restaurants in the TungLok Group, and even then, only serve them vegetarian mock meat.”
“But right now, going into selling fresh produce, we are not only able to serve mock meat, we are able to sell them vegetables. They start buying from us not just once a week but almost every other day.”
While the company is still focused on expanding its customer base, it hopes to employ technology across its supply chain and, in Mr Chou’s words, become the “Meicai of Southeast Asia”.
Glife is looking to introduce enterprise resource planning — a software to manage daily business activities — for farmers and an app-based ordering platform for customers.
While it only distributes fresh produce and frozen vegetarian products for now, Glife aims to eventually be the go-to distributor for the vegetarian needs of any restaurant.
“Next time we want to go into noodle, rice, oil, basically all of a restaurant’s daily necessities. But we’ll do it step by step,” said Mr Chou.
