Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on November 1, 2021 - November 7, 2021

If he had not run out of the Worcestershire sauce made using a family recipe that is more than 100 years old, Chris Gunn would never have started his little online home-based business. The thing is, the sauce had been made by his uncle and was always available to the family. They had never tasted the commercial Worcestershire sauce out there or realised that they were sitting on something special.

Gunn, who had been an IT man all his life — working in, and sometimes heading, IT departments in the stock exchange, banks and a securities firm — had spent the majority of his career in Kuala Lumpur, commuting back to Penang every weekend as his lawyer wife and two sons were there. Three years ago, he decided to call it quits and take an early retirement at 54 so he could spend more time with his family.

The one thing you have to realise about Gunn is he is a Penangite through and through. His family can trace its roots all the way back to Cheah Chen Eok — who built and donated the famous Queen Victoria Memorial Clock Tower in Light Street, George Town — and even further back to Francis Light through his common law wife, Martina Rozells.

Gunn’s grandfather, Kam Kee Hock, from whom they inherited the recipe, was one of the founding teachers of the Bukit Mertajam High School and was eventually appointed assistant district commissioner of Province Wellesley (now known as Seberang Perai).

"To me, Christie’s equals premium. That’s how I want my Worcestershire sauce to be regarded.” - Gunn (Photo by Chris Gunn)

“If he were alive today, he would be 130 years old. And we think he, in turn, inherited this recipe from his parents, which would make it even older, but we cannot verify that,” he says.

Gunn was glad he retired when he did because he got to spend some time with his father, who passed away a year after he returned. “It was really good for me. Money isn’t everything.”

It was around this time that his uncle who used to prepare the Worcestershire sauce for the rest of the family stopped doing it. He was too old and tired. At first, Gunn did not think this was a problem. He simply went to a supermarket and grabbed a standard brand off the shelf.

But here’s where things got interesting. “I won’t mention the brand and it has its own distinct taste but it’s just different from what we have grown up with. I didn’t like it because it’s not what I expected.”

He then started trying out the various homemade Worcestershire sauces out there and found them a little blah. “When we put them on our chicken pies, the flavour was just not there.”

And it was then that Gunn decided to make his own. But first he had to find the recipe. It was something that was kept by the elders of the family but by this time, his father had passed on and his mother, who was not a cook, did not have it.

Gunn decided to check with his aunts but before he got a chance to do so, his mother, who had been going through and packing his father’s papers, found it and presented it to him. “Is this what you’re looking for?” she asked.

“And I said yes, yes. I confirmed it with my aunts. This was the famous family recipe.”

(Photo by Chris Gunn)

He made up a large batch and shared it with their friends. “And they actually came back for more. They said, ‘It’s great, can we buy some?’ And we said, ‘No need, we’ll just make some more for you’.”

At the start of the third Movement Control Order (MCO), Gunn was helping his eldest son, a first-year medical student, with a compulsory business module. “These medical students actually have to go out in teams of eight and sell something online. I helped him with that. It was there that we dabbled with Instagram and Facebook and websites. My son and his team sold T-shirts.”

Suddenly, Gunn knew how to set up and run a web-based business. But what would he sell? “And it was there, staring me in the face, our family Worcestershire sauce. And I said, ‘Let’s put this online and see.’ And that’s how Christie’s Home Products came to be.”

He put the sauce on Facebook and Instagram. “And my friends saw and said, ‘Chris, you are now selling sauces?’ And the support from them was very encouraging.”

To be honest, he found the whole process very enjoyable — getting the social media out, making the sauce, experimenting with labels, bringing these to the printers and packing the products. “All of it just felt like fun.”

Firstly, the labels. The first ones, printed on his home printer, simply floated away the moment the bottles were washed. Then he bought waterproof labels from Shopee but although these stuck really well, the ink on them smeared and dissolved on contact with water.

“I even played with spraying a layer of varnish over them and this stuck really nicely and had a premium feel but it was too expensive to do on a larger scale,” he says.

Once the sauce caught on and orders started coming in, he contacted professional printers to make the waterproof labels from the design he had created. “I wanted something vibrant, something that reflected both the old and the new in our product.”

Then Gunn and his wife decided that they would need to source for bottles. “Obviously, I would like to have the bottles that are shaped for easy pouring but we have yet to come across these. Maybe, when we upgrade in the future, we will make our own.”

Two of his friends with premium homemade products of their own — one producing chilli sauce and the other baking Taiwanese pineapple tarts — contacted him to ask if they could ride on his portal. “I said, haiya, create a portal lah. So easy, let me help you.”

But they declined. “They told me they were not tech-savvy and would prefer to ride on what I had created.”

As he had tasted their products, he knew they were of the highest quality, in keeping with the image he hopes to create for his company. “To me, Christie’s equals premium. That’s how I want my Worcestershire sauce to be regarded. And I felt their products were very good. So, I said, ‘Okay, you can climb on my portal, if you want.’ And that’s how these two came about.”

Gunn says the stories behind both products are also quite interesting. “This friend of mine loved pineapple tarts and she went around buying many different Taiwanese pineapple tarts to see if she could find anything that would meet her expectations. She couldn’t. So, she decided to bake her own.

“She makes her own pineapple jam using Morris pineapples, which have a sourish taste and she uses premium butter, organic cloves grown in Balik Pulau to perfume the tarts and almond flour to reduce the floury taste. And she actually packs each individually so they can keep their freshness, and they make really good gifts.”

Naturally, all this comes at a cost and the tarts are expensive. But Gunn points out that once people in Kuala Lumpur tried them, they were soon ordering boxes and boxes of them.

After that, more Penang-based homemade food and sauce makers came to see him and he got his wife to evaluate the food to see if it passed muster. Since the interview, he has already added to his offerings.

Gunn uses Pgeon, an inexpensive delivery service provider — which has teamed up with retail outlets (for drop-offs and pick-ups), in addition to direct to home deliveries — for deliveries. After receiving an order and the payment, it takes about three days to ship out as the chilli sauce and pineapple tarts (if those are ordered) are made fresh.

He finds it especially fascinating figuring out all these building blocks for himself. “When you’re in the corporate world, you have people to do all these things for you. Now, I walk around in my shorts and slippers and figure it out for myself.”

Gunn utilises social media to the max in promoting not only his sauce, but the recipes that it can be used for. “Whenever someone uses our sauce in their dishes, they usually send me a picture of what they have made and I put it up on my Instagram, which gets automatically shared to my Facebook page.”

The whole venture has a home-like feel to it. His customers are mostly his friends — or they become his friends after purchasing the products on his website — and they are eager to share their experiences with the sauce.

“We treated the recipe a bit because some people might find the original one too sweet. For instance, we use molasses which costs a lot more but is about 30% less sweet than normal sugar. And unlike the conventional brands in the market, we don’t use anchovies in our recipe so it is vegetarian-friendly. And there is a mix of spices in there, a lot of them!”

When he started out, Gunn only sold it over his Instagram and website. Customers would WhatsApp him their orders and do a bank transfer for payment. Then he tied up with Shopee Malaysia — followed quickly by Shopee Singapore — which started distributing the product as well.

Gunn is also planning to upload some recipes on his website. “That’s why my wife started creating recipes. There is this Hainanese chicken chop that she has created, as well as beef stew and Penang mee goreng.”

As he had started the company as a way to pass his retirement, he did not expect things to take off so quickly. But the friends he had first shared the Worcestershire sauce with had ordered more for their friends and the whole thing spread through word of mouth.

Although Gunn only started in June and has had little to no publicity, he has already sold more than 800 bottles of the Worcestershire sauce. He admits that he never expected things to grow quite so quickly. But he is content to vibe with it in a laidback Penang style, and keep doing it as long as he derives interest and pleasure in the process. “How it’s going to grow, I’m not too sure.”

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