Cover Story
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SANGKAYA
HITS A SWEET SPOT WITH ITS LATEST VENTURE Pure, refreshing and wholesome, the Sangkaya story is as wonderful as its ice-cream tastes. Founder Micheal Mok tells RACHAEL PHILIP that the brand found instant fame when it hit the streets in 2014 (for who can resist coconut ice-cream?) but it took the company some additional churning to get it on the path it is today.
alaysian brand Sangkaya (M) Sdn Bhd could very likely be the world’s biggest coconut icecream producer. It produces 6000 litres of the delightful dessert every month. That’s 800,000 scoops per month! And this figure is only set to grow. “The coconut ice-cream may be popular in Thailand but it is mainly a cottage industry business,” explained founder Micheal Mok. The brand is set to grow to 43 outlets in Malaysia by the end of the year. This includes Sabah and Sarawak. On June 20, 2022, the company sold its first scoop of icecream in Japan. By year end, it would see a kiosk opening in Brunei. On why Japan was chosen as its first foreign foray, Micheal said that one of the company’s directors is Japanese and he helped take the brand there. “Japan is a challenging market. They say if you can make it there, it is a major breakthrough.” The team was taken by surprise
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Malaysia Retailer Vol 10 No 1
when its products sold out within days. They didn’t have enough raw material in Japan – a happy problem – and had to rush out ingredients from Malaysia.
QUALITY GUARANTEED Sangkaya’s star raw material – pure, natural and premium coconut milk – is exported to Japan where it is manufactured by an OEM company. This helps preserve the superior quality the brand is known for. The Sangkaya ice-cream is also a low overrun ice-cream, an industry term for rich and dense ice-cream achieved when a low amount of air is incorporated into the product during the churning process. Together with the highest quality ingredients, this qualifies the preservative-free dessert as a super-premium product. Are Sangkaya’s ice-creams actually ice-creams? “Our product is more gelato than ice-cream because of the low fat and sugar content but gelato is a lesser-known term in Malaysia so we opted to go with ice-cream. But in
Japan, we are marketed as a gelato product,” said Micheal. “We are proudly a Malaysian company with our Malaysian formulation, Malaysian R&D team and Malaysian raw materials including young coconuts and coconut milk. We are selective about the coconuts we use, right down to its variety and from which region in the country it comes from.
NUTS ABOUT COCONUTS Our tagline also reflects our vision to revolutionise the F&B industry with our innovative coconut products, and so every single one of our products revolves around coconuts, making us truly ‘Nuts about Coconuts’. The coconut milk used is fresh and pasteurised. The challenges of handling fresh coconut milk are real as stocks have to be maintained at the correct amount and kept at the right temperature. It helps that our central kitchen is HACCP-, ISO-, GMPand Halal-certified. The name Sangkaya is also very Malaysian. Sang-, a prefix of
