Three years ago, Zac Chua, our founder, shared his entrepreneurial journey with Vulcan Post. He has since expanded his startup to a growing popcorn empire.
The Vulcan Post is a digital lifestyle publication inspiring entrepreneurs and creating smarter consumers. Vulcan Post covers a wide variety of topics related to business: small businesses, types of entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovative products or services, successful entrepreneurs and unique business ideas. If you want to start a business, or maybe learn more about social entrepreneurship, you can check out Vulcan Post!
The Kettle Gourmet is honoured to be featured by the Vulcan Post, which shows how we managed to grow despite the pandemic.
The Kettle Gourmet
The Kettle Gourmet is a Singapore start-up by Zac Chua which started off with a mere $100. As an aspiring entrepreneur, Zac expanded and grew his business into a popcorn empire. Zac displayed successful entrepreneurship skills and has also instilled a sense of pride among locals by introducing familiar local flavours that have never been seen before in popcorn.
Tapping on local palettes, we offer a unique range of popcorn in Singapore. The Kettle Gourmet offers unique flavours such as Nasi Lemak, Kaya Butter Toast, Chicken Floss and Chili Crab. We offer all-time classics like Chocolate and Salted Caramel popcorn. Our popcorn is Halal certified, trans-fat-free, non-GMO and baked with quality ingredients.
Our partners
We adopted a digital-first strategy and listed our products on many popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopee, Lazada and Redmart, and our popcorn is delivered by Ninja Van. We made use of the improvements in GPS capability in recent years and our popcorn is distributed entirely via delivery. You can also find our products on various food delivery platforms like Grab, Foodpanda, Airasia Food and Zig.
And yes, now The Kettle Gourmet popcorn is available on the following platforms: FairPrice Finest, Komma Cafe, Red Dot Museum and many others.
Focusing on our customers
When it comes to running a business, we believe that communicating with our consumers is important. “According to a salesforce report, 66 per cent of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.”
Hence we work hard to ensure active engagement on our social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. This was especially the case in the early stage as we wanted to expand our reach within our target market. After all, a happy customer is a key part of successful businesses.
The Kettle Gourmet’s Facebook Livestream
In the article Zac also believes in gathering customer feedback and sales data. Helping him to plan for new flavour launches as well as phase out existing products, keeping the snacks fresh and in demand.
We believe in customer retention and value, always innovating and aiming to increase partnerships. Recently, we purchased the Pokemon license, as part of our new licensing project bringing you the world of pokemon!
Work culture
Based on the article, Zac shared that he gathers his employees every Friday for team bonding sessions, gathering ideas on how to improve the business. He attributes this feedback loop and consistent investments in listening to his employees as the reason of The Kettle Gourmet’s growth.
Growth in a time of crisis
During the pandemic, we stepped up our social media efforts, changing our focus and rebranding ourselves as the go-to work-from-home snack.
Because of The Kettle Gourmet’s digital-first strategy, we have seen a growth in sales by 247% in a short term during the pandemic.
We used the downtime during the circuit breaker to undergo an entire rebranding exercise.
We are proud to introduce our Snack Monsters in our new packaging. Apart from that, we also made changes to our pack sizes to ensure that our customers get to enjoy more of our popcorn!
Our popcorn is also available in family packs (330g) due to high demand from our customers wanting a larger portion as they love our popcorn and they want more.
The Kettle Gourmet offers customizable popcorn gift boxes, each adorned with vibrant colours and our easily recognisable snack monster mascots. We also expanded our business offerings providing a subscription model so loyal customers can have a constant supply of popcorn.
Plans for the future
In the article, Zac shared that he is planning to transform The Kettle Gourmet into a conglomerate by building two more F&B brands within the next 3 to 5 years. He also expressed interest in expanding all over Southeast Asia, to countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia.
Zac also shared that there will be two new exciting flavours coming soon: Fish Head Curry and Pulut Hitam (Black glutinous rice dessert). You can look forward to the release of these flavours by following our Instagram and Facebook!