- Chris Hwang, cofounder of The Golden Duck, started the snack brand in 2015 with one product — salted egg yolk chips.
- A decade on, it’s sold in over 3,000 stores and plans to expand into the US this year.
- From selling off his cars to afford payroll in the pandemic, here’s how he built the business.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Hwang, the 33-year-old cofounder of The Golden Duck, a Singaporean snack brand. It has been edited for length and clarity.
At 23, I dropped out of law school to start The Golden Duck, a gourmet snack brand that reimagines Asian flavors like salted egg yolk; a decade later, it is sold in over 3,000 stores worldwide. We’ve set our sights on expanding into the US in 2025.
I don’t have any culinary experience, but I love food.
The idea for the brand came about when my cofounder, Jonathan, approached me one day and asked, “What do you think about salted egg?”
I thought, “Salted egg is great. I love it in a Chinese Zi Char restaurant. I love salted egg crab.”
I asked him what he had in mind, and he said, “How about we make salted egg yolk potato chips?” I thought it would be the kind of chips that come with dips, a Western concept that doesn’t really sell well in Singapore.
He said, “Hear me out. I found a way to put it on a chip in a dry format.”
I sat down with him and a chef friend of ours, and I tried it. It was so mind-blowingly good. The flavor, with the chilies and curry leaves, perfectly coated the chips. I said, “We have to do this business.”
Cooking out of one tiny kitchen
We launched in 2015 with just one product — salted egg yolk chips.
At the start, our capacity was so limited that we were just making it out of a home kitchen, producing only about 50 packs daily.
We started selling them at a tiny seven-foot-long pop-up booth in Singapore’s Suntec City mall for $7 a pop.
On the first day, the sales were not too crazy. But on day two, a queue started forming. By day three, we had sold out by 3 p.m. and had to put a maximum order of five packs per order.
Our products are often given as gifts or bought as souvenirs, and I think this is where it started. People started bringing their friends down to help them buy more packs, and it became a gift item for friends and family.
A huge opportunity for authentic flavors
The Golden Duck
We now have two lines of products: our snack boxes, which comprise flavors like salted egg crab seaweed tempura and salted egg fish skin chips, and a line of canister potato chips.
Asian flavors are gaining traction in the West, and I think people all around the world are craving authentic experiences.
We all know what sour cream and onion flavor or barbecue tastes like. But why not have sour cream and Sriracha?
That’s one of our newest flavors in the canister line of chips that we launched in 2024, along with others like truffle wagyu and Himalayan pink salt.
Challenges in scaling up
We were hesitant to scale up initially, scared that it was just a flash in the pan and it would flame out fast. So we were very, very hesitant to put in capital to set up a store.
We did pop-ups for a few months until we finally got a tiny store in Chinatown, which had just enough space for one person to work in.
From there, we kept expanding. From 2016 to 2018, we grew to 10 stores in Singapore and more stores overseas. At the peak, we had about 15 stores, and we were also selling to retailers like 7-Eleven and other supermarket chains.
Some of the biggest surprises in our business came from scaling up our own manufacturing. The moment we tried to give a product a shelf life, we had to consider, “How will this taste after six months?”
Hiring the right people was key. If you hire someone who hates being in a hot place, your products will come out pretty bad. We needed to hire people who care about their food.
Weathering the pandemic
The lowest point in the business came during the COVID-19 pandemic when our tourism revenue evaporated overnight.
I subscribe to the ideology that leaders eat last. I thought — if the company can’t afford payroll and cannot meet its obligations to continue its business, I’m going to sell my cars.
From 2019 to 2021, I sold three cars so that I could lead the fundraising efforts during the pandemic.
We also had to restructure the team, going from 200 head count to about 120 over the course of one year.
We had to tell friends that we’d brought on board that we wouldn’t be able to work together and that we were sorry for where the business was.
We now have a team of 25 people, producing results close to what our team of 200 was producing just five to six years ago.
Eyes set on a US expansion
A couple of years on, we now sell in countries around the world, including China, Australia, Germany, and even Trinidad and Tobago.
Now, we are eyeing the US as our new market.
I just returned from the US in December. It’s a huge market for snacks, second to none. And the US consumer is so discerning and excited, and they’re happy to consume and try new things.
We wanted to develop something that they would find interesting and exciting but still familiar, so we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.
This new line of canister chips is basically like Pringles but better. It’s so easy to explain to Americans because we don’t have to tell them what fish skin is or what seaweed tempura is.
