JAKARTA, INDONESIA  — Alvina Chun, also known as Mamame, and her daughter Liz Kang, have taken tempeh, typically a soybean-based product, and “snackified” it into tempeh chips. Rather than using tempeh’s traditional formulation, to be more inclusive to consumers diets, Mamame Tempeh Chips are formulated with black-eyed beans, which are fermented, sprinkled with tapioca flour, fried in coconut oil and seasoned with the company’s flavors of original, sea salt, rosemary, hot chili, cheese and barbecue.

“The real innovation in bringing tempeh into a chip form was the motivating factor to raise awareness as to why tempeh is such an amazing product and also make it accessible and consumable for people of all ages,” said Liz Kang, co-founder and co-chief executive officer at Mamame Whole Foods. “We substituted it (soy) with black-eyed beans and we also substituted the frying cooking oil with coconut oil. That’s due to the oxidation of the chip; we wanted it to be crunchy and shelf stable.”

Alvina, Liz said, was a stay-at-home mom for approximately 27 years and had a passion for cooking.

The family moved often due to the nature of their father Sunghan Kang’s job. Indonesia, in particular, was a country Liz spent a majority of her childhood in and regularly ate the country’s staple food, tempeh.

 “My mom liked to translate it (tempeh) into different kinds of foods that were existing tempeh chip recipes,” she said. “There are thicker sliced chips, thinner sliced chips and people bag it up and sell it on the streets. We saw a rise to more vendors doing this (tempeh chips) during COVID (in Indonesia).”  

The rising tempeh chip trend sparked Alvina’s entrepreneurial instincts to produce her own version of the fermented snack.

After two years of product development, the company launched in March 2023.

The bootstrapped business, which self-manufactures the tempeh chips in its 10,760-square-foot plant in Jakarta, Indonesia, ferments the black-eyed beans with a tempeh starter, rhizopus oligosporus, for more than 50 hours. At the end of the fermentation, the beans become bound together with mycelium to form a cake, Liz said.

“After fermentation, the beans (or) cake becomes malleable, and this tempeh mixture is mechanically piped into a casing,” she said. “Once the black-eyed bean tempeh is shaped in this cylinder, it is sliced and fried. What you get is a really crunchy, protein-packed, fiber-packed beany chip that has a real crunch because it’s 60% bean and 40% tapioca flour.”

As first-time entrepreneurs, the founders were lucky enough to turn Sunghan’s facility, which he previously rented for his job manufacturing interdental brushes, into Mamame Whole Food’s manufacturing facility.

Alvina, who had no prior food manufacturing experience, developed the formulation and transitioned the facility from producing dental accessories to food manufacturing. Alvina also sought advice from people in the industry who would consult with the company, Liz said.

“During COVID everything was shut down and the space was empty so my mom would go in once in a while to use the factory to ferment her tempeh,” she said. “My mom began batch frying chips and from there we changed all our business licenses to become a food manufacturer.”

While the company is based in Jakarta, the founders are expanding the product nationally as well. Its markets include South Korea, Japan, Singapore, United Kingdom, Poland and Hungary.

Mamame Whole Foods entered Erewhon, a Los Angeles-based retailer that sells organic foods, in late October and expanded nationwide to all Sprouts Farmers Markets via the retailer’s Innovation Center program in November.

“I’m hoping the next couple of years for 80% of my business revenue to come from the US,” she said. “I think it’s a realistic target just because the snack landscape is so advanced there.”

Mamame Whole Foods gained attention from US retailers by exhibiting at trade shows, including Natural Products Expo West and the Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show.

In addition, the company works with Pod Foods, a business-to-business distribution platform connecting food startups with grocery buyers, and OverSeas Food Trading, Ltd., a French American importer in Fort Lee, NJ, the latter which helped the company launch with Sprouts.

“The Sprouts Innovation Center Program, which is nationwide, that’s a three-month cycle and we’re really performing quite well,” Liz said. “We hope to continue to do that in order to become an everyday item.”

The company’s original, hot chili, rosemary and sea salt flavors are the first four stock keeping units to be available in the United States. Its cheese and barbecue flavors are sold in South Korea, Japan and Singapore, Liz said.

The tempeh chips, which offer 10 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber per serving and have less than 1 gram of added sugar, are also sold in three sizes of each flavor to be available for each touch point of consumers’ days, Liz said.

Future flavor innovations may include a sweet line.

“So, it may be tempeh chip seasoned with coconut sugar and cinnamon, like a churros tempeh chip,” she said. “They (the cheese and barbecue flavors) perform really well out here so we’re waiting to see what the right moment to bring them into the US is.”

To launch more product lines and build another plant in Jakarta to support its retail growth in the United States and other markets, the company is raising a seed round in Asia. If the seed round goes well, Liz said, the company has plans to raise funds in the United States.