PROBLAME STATEMENT

There was a cute little girl called Julie. She was born in a factory in Malacca, the brainchild of Su Chin Hock. The reclusive founder of Perfect Food set up his first factory in Alor Gajah in 1981. Starting out with only 200 workers, the company has grown to almost a thousand employees and two more factories.

Beginning life as Perfect Food Industries (or PFI) in a domestic market full of very Chinese brand names, Su decided that a change was in order. Just after the first few batches of PFI biscuits were fresh out of the oven, he was already looking to expand overseas.

“He thought our name was too long,” director Martin Ang says. “So out of nowhere, he came up with Julie. It was easy to remember and was a common name. He certainly didn’t have any girlfriends named Julie!”

An accountant by profession who ventured into the construction business, Su traded balancing spreadsheets and selling building materials for baking biscuits. Backed by a talented R&D team, Su set to work making Julie’s a household name, one biscuit at a time.

From its inception, the company has maintained that food safety and quality are paramount. As such, Julie’s has never used any preservatives or artificial colouring in its cookies.

“There is no shortcut to success,” Ang says emphatically. “Mr Su made the decision not to compromise on quality or safety from day one.”

To illustrate this point, he tells the story behind Julie’s Strawberry Love Letters.

One of the company’s bakers told Su that it would be much cheaper and attractive to use artificial colouring instead of real strawberry paste. By using artifical colouring, consumers would be able to see the “natural” redness of the strawberry cream, whereas with the real thing they would not.

However, when Su was told of the potential side effects of the artificial colouring – it included hyperactivity in children – he decided that it was not worth lowering production costs for.

“It was a similar case with our best-selling Peanut Butter Sandwiches. We sourced our peanut butter from a renowned US brand, even though it was very expensive. When we first launched them in the mid-80s, all our distributors said that we were selling the product for too much. The average price per kilo those days was around RM2.50-RM3.50. We were selling for RM5. But you know what? The customers decided. They loved the biscuits.

“Ever since then, we only use the best ingredients. We believe in Mr Su’s motto: ‘What I don’t eat, I would never let my customers eat’.”