Picky eaters may find vegetable chips unappealing to their discerning taste buds, but a group of young entrepreneurs made eating healthy taste amazingly good, proving healthy can be anything but boring.
Brother and sister Frank and Anne Gaw and their childhood friends Jay Tan, Andrew Tan and Beng Ng have been serving freshly cooked kangkong chips since 2018. They’ve grown from a group of passionate friends to a team of dedicated professionals, all united by a shared mission—to redefine healthy snacking and prove that flavor and well-being can go hand in hand.
“Eating healthy does not mean we have to compromise the taste of the product. And we’re not claiming we were the first to came up with the concept. It has been served and earned by many people across the globe, but I guess, we were the first to come up with flavored, ultra crispy kangkong chips,” Anne said.
Served in crown-shaped paper cups, kangkong chips remain crisp after delivery, unlike fries that can go soggy anytime, especially if it is ordered through a delivery app. Another fun fact about the chips is that only premium coconut oil is used to fry the chips.
Chips are served plain or dusted with flavors like cheese, barbeque, sour cream, spicy, sweet corn and salted egg which is a premium and original flavor.
KangKong King has hogged public interest for a while when it started, as the first brand to commercially retail crispy kangkong. This was noticed by a big US retail food chain, Seafood Island, but recognizing the need to solidify their operations and ensure they could deliver consistent quality at scale, they politely declined. This marks their foresight and commitment to building a sustainable, long-term brand.
Now, the group is mightily proud of what they have achieved so far, from frying atop the Gaw’s rooftop deck to renting a three-floor building in Manila were they found a home for all aspects of operations—raw materials sourcing, cooking, packing, dispatch, R&D and social media engagements.
Eureka moment
It was actually Frank, Annes’ elder brother who came up with the idea to sell crispy kangkong in kiosk format, using the dusting technique of Potato Corner, a super mega brand, to flavor the chips.
Anne said it was just a passing thought while the family, together with a friend, dined in a Chinese restaurant in Cebu and ordered crispy kangkong as appetizer.
Frank nursed the idea and took it back to their home where he immediately started R&D at their rooftop with the help of some family helpers.
“It was four months of trial and error, and all the while our family was our taste testers. There were times when the entire house reeked of the frying oil with a confluence of aroma coming from the different flavors we were testing. My mom one time told us, how the house smells good enough to eat,” Anne said, noting that their parents were very supportive of their efforts to create their own business.
It is a good thing that Frank had some experience with quite a few startups when he decided to go full blast with KangKong King, but like the other co-owners, he does not have experience in food and beverage retail particularly quick-served food.
“So everything we did was from scratch. A typical day when we were just beginning the R&D was a morning trip to Quiapo to buy lots of water spinach. Sellers were asking how come we buy so many kangkong. Nevertheless, we just soldiered on everyday—buying raw materials, testing the product until we found the perfect balance on the thickness of the batter and the right proportion of flavoring,” Anne shared.
Sustainable practices
The shift to pandemic almost crippled the business as lockdown measures were implemented, prompting the owners to temporarily shutter their branches at Robinsons’ Place Manila, SM Fairview and Robinson’s Galleria.
But the need to support their own staff had the co-owners decide to step-up their game by creating R&D for packed chips, which were warmly accepted by consumers, especially that the brand has found a cult following.
For lack of suitable packaging, the young entrepreneurs used brown bag packaging at first with stickers for branding and later on transitioned to green packaging. Now a better format of sustainable packs, version 4, are imported from China.
Anne said the company wanted to offer a wholly-Filipino snack from contents to packaging, but local sources of packing caused a big dent on operations expenses. This is why they turned to China for their packaging needs.
“But as long as a product is using 70 percent of raw materials from local sources, it is still considered a local product,” she said.
As businesses start to recover, KangKong King also began to rebuild and reopen kiosks at Robinson’s Place Manila, Robinson’s Galleria and SM Fairview and launched new branches at Alabang Town Center and One Ayala Terminal.
It delivered its first shipment to Island Pacific Supermarket, a chain of Filipino grocery stores in the US, in the second week of 2024. Locally, packed chips are available at Berde Eats, Kultura, Mylenes, Makati Supermarket Alabang, Unimart and the Marketplace.
Co-owners are in talks with a consolidator to bring KangKong King to other destinations in the US and other countries.
“And as my father always tell us, it’s difficult to come across a winning concept for business, but if you did, nurture it and it will nurture you back,” Anne said.