Nicolas Tang's Blog

Domestic goddess
by Huang Lijie
The Straits Times

Mrs Anastasia Liew, 62, fumbles to hide her hands from the camera.

Wearing a single diamond ring and no nail polish, the founder and managing director of Bengawan Solo cake shop says to the photographer: ‘Can you not photograph my hands? They don’t look good. These hands have been making cakes for more than 30 years.’

Her remark is more self-conscious than vain. But really she should be prouder of her hands – they have helped build her confectionery business from the kitchen of an HDB flat into an empire with a turnover of $43 million last year.

And its cookies such as gula melaka (palm sugar) kueh bangkit and pineapple tarts will retail at London’s famous Selfridges for a week in October in a shopping aisle dedicated to Singapore food products. This is a tie-up facilitated by International Enterprise Singapore, which promotes the overseas growth of home-grown businesses.

The cake chain is also actively scouting for locations in Hong Kong and Japan to open outlets in the next two years.

She says: ‘Our business in Singapore is stable so I dare to take the risk and open in places such as Hong Kong and Japan where we are well known. Their tourists form a large part of our customers.’

Bengawan Solo’s overseas expansion plans were prematurely announced at least six years ago by her son Henry, the younger of her two children and the company’s business development director.

‘He was new to the business and spoke without thinking. I scolded him afterwards,’ she says while affectionately slapping the knee of the 31-year-old National University of Singapore business administration graduate, who sits beside her during the interview in her Holland Road bungalow.

She acknowledges that her strict demand to maintain the standard of her products delayed the company’s move into foreign markets.

Sourcing key ingredients such as fresh pandan and coconut for overseas manufacture was an obstacle and she refused to compromise by using processed substitutes.

She says: ‘Ours is not a bread business where with one dough recipe you can make many different types of bread. Our kueh and cakes have individual recipes that need to be perfected by the workers.’

Her solution: a second factory. The new factory located in Woodlands Link, built at a cost of $5.2 million, began operating this year, almost doubling its production capacity so it can now export its confections without worrying about inconsistency.

Good quality has been the hallmark of Bengawan Solo since day one.

Mrs Liew would buy fresh pandan and coconut rather than stint and use bottled pandan essence or packet coconut milk for the cakes she sold to supermarkets in the 1970s. The effort paid off. Although her cakes cost more, 45 cents compared to the market rate of 30 cents, because of more expensive ingredients, they were a hit.

‘The supermarket manager asked me why I sold my cakes so expensive but I knew mine were better, more fragrant. My cakes always sold out,’ she says with pride in her voice.

Most of Bengawan Solo’s more than 50 types of kueh and cakes, including kueh lapis and lapis sagu, continue to be handmade by more than 130 factory staff to preserve their homemade goodness.

Yet she readily embraces technology if it improves her confections.

‘In the past, you could throw my pineapple tarts against the wall and they wouldn’t break. Now, they melt in the mouth,’ she says.

The secret: machines imported from Japan in the 1990s that produce a thin and even crust.

Another key to Bengawan Solo’s success: Mrs Liew takes feedback seriously.

Earlier this year, some customers complained that her premium pineapple tarts, which use a blend of top-grade butter from Australia and Holland, tasted too strongly of butter.

Eventually she found out that the quality of the Dutch butter had slipped and she immediately reverted to using just one type of butter.

Madam Chen Lee Fung, 40, head of the icing department at Bengawan Solo and an employee of 16 years, says: ‘If we are lazy and take short cuts, she will tell us off. But she is also patient enough to show us the right way to do things when we make mistakes.

‘Once, when the cake moulds were not cleaned to her standard, she rolled up her sleeves and showed the workers how to do it.’

From young, Mrs Liew was assiduous. When she was schooling, she always made sure she was among the top three in class.

Born Tjendri Anastasia to a housewife mother and provision store owner father in Bangka Island off Palembang, Indonesia, the third of eight siblings grew up in Palembang.

After civil unrest in the country in the 1960s forced her to stop school at Secondary 3, she signed up for baking and cooking classes to upgrade herself.

Improving on the recipes she was taught, she conducted culinary classes for housewives and young women in the kitchen of her family terrace house.

The income from these classes allowed her to take more lessons in cooking as well as dress-making in Jakarta before coming to Singapore in 1970 to brush up on her English.

In 1973, she married accounts executive Johnson Liew, a fellow Indonesian Chinese based in Singapore who is 15 years her senior. They are both Singapore citizens and their two children were born in Singapore.

Two years after marriage, the restless housewife began making butter and chiffon cakes from the kitchen of her four- room flat in Marine Parade to sell to friends. It became so popular that a department store in Lucky Plaza went as far as to set up a special retail counter selling her cakes.

The store, however, did not have a licence to sell food so when the law caught up with it, it pointed its fingers at Mrs Liew, who was unaware that her unlicensed home-baking business was illegal.

She stopped her business immediately but customers kept asking for her confections, so a couple of months later, she invested a few thousand dollars to open a store in an HDB shophouse close to home. She named it Bengawan Solo after the popular Indonesian song about Indonesia’s Solo River.

A 1981 Sunday Times article praising its cakes and kueh turned the already popular shop into an overnight sensation.

All-day queue

She says: ‘People would queue outside the shop before it opened and there would still be a line at closing time when all the cakes had sold out.’

The enthusiastic response led to the opening of another outlet in Centrepoint in 1983 and her husband joined her as the company’s accounts director.

By 1987, Bengawan Solo had five stores and a central kitchen in Harvey Road. It became so successful that investors knocked on her door with huge bids to buy over the company, which has never experienced negative growth and remains in the family to this day.

The tempting offers continue to pour in for her company but she remains unmoved because she cannot bear to part with her ‘baby’.

Besides, her son is interested in carrying on the legacy.

She says: ‘When my son, then about 12, overheard that a company wanted to buy us, he said, ‘Mummy, you cannot sell it. I want to run the company.’ ‘

Her younger sister and daughter- in-law also work in Bengawan Solo as the head of the kueh-making department and store operations manager respectively.

Her daughter, Rissa, 35, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point, prefers to pursue her interest in real estate for now. The mother of two is a property agent.

Although Bengawan Solo is a family- run business, not all recipes are known only to family members. The heads of certain cake departments know the recipes for products under their charge and they are told to keep them to themselves.

Sure, her recipes may leak out, Mrs Liew admits, but she prefers to trust her employees and few have betrayed her good faith, she says.

She says: ‘Many years ago there was a worker who learnt my recipes and started his own shop. But it did not take off and the shop closed down after a short while.’

Her soft-hearted nature is what endears her to her employees.

Workers with difficulty paying off their home loans for example, have received five-figure interest-free loans from her that are repaid by monthly deductions from their salaries.

Staff who encounter emergencies such as severe illness in the family have also received help from her in the form of doctor recommendations and cash.

And when busy festive periods end, she often rewards her workers with a meal and karaoke session where she lets her hair down and sings along with the group.

Mrs Elizabeth Ong, 58, director of a biomedical company who has known Mrs Liew for 10 years through volunteer grassroots activities with the Jurong GRC, says: ‘She is an unassuming person who is able to relate to people from all walks of life.’

Mrs Liew continues to be hands-on with the business, making trips to the outlets to gather customer feedback and going on inspection rounds at the factory seven days a week.

With the opening of its 43rd store at Ion Orchard next week, she certainly has her work cut out for her.

She is, however, trying to slowly hand over the reins to the next generation because she understands that age is catching up with her.

‘I certainly hope Bengawan Solo will continue as a family business through the generations and become an internationally renowned brand.’