Joy Season

Entrepreneurs in the business of creating happiness share how they, in turn, experience it.

- Koh Yuen Lin

One is a creative type with a reputation as a suave manager in the nightlife business. The other, from a family of doctors, rebelled by taking the entrepreneur route. With their easy confidence and suave eloquence, it would be easy to dismiss Jonathan Shen (picture, right) and Chris Hwang (picture, left) as rich kids who lucked out on a golden product idea: salted egg crisps.

In four years, they went from a two-man operation where Shen and Hwang hand-cooked everything at a rented kitchen facility, to a 150-strong company that sold over a million packets of snacks in 2018. Yet while you crunch through their highly addictive offerings – like the original salted egg potato chips and a spicy mix of dehydrated mushrooms, fish skin crisps and dehydrated beancurd sheets coated in “mala” (Chinese for numbing heat) seasoning – contemplate the fact that the joy they bring to snackers around the world didn’t come without hardship.