In a sector where margins are thin, competition is relentless, and the pandemic tested every business model imaginable, a group of Malaysian women not only held their ground — they expanded, pivoted, and built something lasting. These eight entrepreneurs span catering groups, organic bakeries, heritage restaurants, and culinary schools, each one demonstrating that a clear idea, executed with discipline, can carve a real position in Malaysia’s crowded food and beverage market.
The Leaders
The individuals profiled here were identified through Prestige Malaysia’s editorial coverage (published 8 March 2022). Their roles, business names, dates and stated contributions are drawn from that source. Where information on a specific category was not provided in the source, that is noted accordingly.
Datin Christine Bong — Co-Founder, Brickhouse Group
Role
Datin Christine Bong co-founded what became the Brickhouse Group, a multi-vertical hospitality business operating F&B outlets, catering services, and event management in Malaysia. What began in 2015 as a single university café called Glasshouse Cafe has since grown into an operation that, as of the source’s publication date in March 2022, had served over 1,000 clients for private and corporate functions.
Contribution
Facing early challenges with manpower retention, Bong chose to undergo barista training and certify herself, then built an internal training programme for staff passionate about coffee. When the university café model hit a growth ceiling — limited by school-term calendars and price constraints — she led a deliberate pivot into catering, which she described as the company’s most consequential strategic decision.
During the first COVID-19 lockdown, Brickhouse launched a same-day grocery delivery service within two hours, absorbing goods earmarked for cancelled events and reducing waste. The team also developed Express Weddings, an all-inclusive format for ceremonies with 30 to 100 guests covering food, drinks, venue, décor, and planning — a product that helped more than 50 couples marry during the two years of the pandemic. A further collaboration produced Cloud Weddings, a platform offering live-streamed ceremonies with virtual tables, chatrooms, photo albums, and interactive guestbooks.
Achievement
As of March 2022, Brickhouse Group had plans to open three additional outlets in the second and third quarters of 2022, including an expansion of Pokok.KL into central Kuala Lumpur, a physical store for the online brand Ello! Pita, and a new Australian-influenced brunch bistro concept with an Indian design element. The group runs its workflow through digital tools including Typeform for lead capture, Trello for project management, and cloud-based accounting and HR software.
Why It Matters
Bong’s trajectory from a casual investor in a single campus café to the operator of a multi-format hospitality group illustrates a model that many Malaysian F&B founders find difficult to replicate: knowing when to abandon a concept that has reached its ceiling and building an entirely new revenue vertical rather than scaling a failing one.
Ryea and Lekha Sankaran — Co-Founders, Fresco Grano Organic Bakery & Store
Role
Sisters Ryea and Lekha Sankaran co-founded Fresco Grano Organic Bakery & Store, producing organic bread, cookies, cakes, and granola in regular, gluten-free, and vegan formats. The business grew out of a personal decision to feed their children organic food, then expanded into supplying retail chains including BIG, Jaya Grocer, and Village Grocer, as well as specialty organic stores and home delivery. Both founders have backgrounds in finance.
Contribution
Entering a market where established bread brands already held significant shelf and consumer recognition, Fresco Grano’s founders positioned their products around affordability within the organic segment — a deliberate differentiation from premium-priced natural food imports. They built customer awareness through a combination of their own website with an integrated online store, and active social media engagement including recipe sharing and competitions.
During the pandemic, when some conventional bread brands faced supply disruptions, Fresco Grano maintained its supermarket deliveries. This gave the brand exposure to consumers who had not previously considered organic alternatives, and the company reports retaining a meaningful share of those first-time buyers.
Achievement
After six years as entrepreneurs (as stated in the March 2022 source), the Sankaran sisters had placed their products in mainstream grocery retail and built a digital sales channel alongside in-store distribution. Their forward plans at the time of publication included expanding to states beyond Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, collaborative marketing with other Malaysian brands, and consumer workshops on healthy living.
Why It Matters
Fresco Grano demonstrates that a niche health product can move into mainstream retail without losing its identity, provided the founders have both product knowledge and the commercial discipline — in this case, rooted in finance experience — to navigate grocery buyers and manage scale.
Chef Melba Nunis — Restaurateur and Cookbook Author
Role
Chef Melba Nunis is one of Malaysia’s most identifiable practitioners and advocates of Kristang cuisine — the culinary tradition of the Portuguese-Eurasian community of Malacca. She opened her restaurant Simply Mel’s in 2011, operated it until the end of 2016, and subsequently spent two years at The Majestic Malacca continuing to introduce Kristang dishes to a wider audience.
Contribution
Nunis uses every public-facing format available to her — the restaurant, guest chef spots, a supper club called Dine with Mel (small private dining groups at her home), guest appearances including a Kristang Seafood Feast at Tiffin at the Yard, and a cookbook — to document and promote a cuisine she describes as “relatively unknown because our community is so small.” During the pandemic, she shifted Dine with Mel to takeaways and deliveries, drawing on her existing customer database rather than acquiring new marketing channels.
Achievement
As of the March 2022 source, Nunis had guest-chef connections reaching the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley and was planning to launch a rempah (spice paste) product line alongside resuming her supper club. Her work as a cookbook author is noted in the source; specific titles are not stated in the supplied material.
Why It Matters
Kristang food occupies a fragile position in Malaysia’s culinary landscape — practised by a small community, not widely documented commercially, and at risk of disappearing from mainstream dining. Nunis’s sustained work as restaurateur, supper-club host, and author creates a record and an audience that would not otherwise exist.
Su San Huen — Founder, COOKHOUSE Malaysia
The source article includes Su San Huen and three additional entrepreneurs whose full interview responses were not included in the material supplied for this rewrite. The individuals’ names and their association with COOKHOUSE Malaysia and other ventures are noted in the source (Prestige Malaysia, 8 March 2022), but the detail required to produce complete, evidence-supported profiles for each is not stated in the supplied sources.
What These Leaders Share
Across the three fully evidenced profiles and the broader context of the source article, several patterns are consistent. Each entrepreneur identified a specific gap — under-served catering formats, affordable organic baked goods, an underdocumented regional cuisine — rather than competing directly with established players on price or volume. Each also demonstrated a willingness to restructure the business model under pressure rather than simply reducing costs: pivoting to grocery delivery, expanding into wedding-format products, maintaining supermarket supply when competitors could not, or shifting a private dining club to takeaway operations.
Digitalization features prominently across every account: not as a buzzword, but as a practical infrastructure shift — online stores, workflow automation, social media as a primary customer-acquisition channel, and virtual event platforms built during the pandemic and retained afterward.
Why Malaysian F&B Leadership Looks Like This
Malaysia’s F&B sector is intensely competitive, with high operator turnover, complex supply chains, and — as the pandemic demonstrated — extreme sensitivity to external shocks. The leaders profiled here are not simply business owners who survived; they are founders who used disruption as a forcing function to build more resilient and more differentiated businesses than the ones they started with.
Their collective record — measured in retail listings gained, couples married during lockdown, a culinary tradition documented and extended, and systems rebuilt for digital efficiency — represents the kind of contribution to Malaysia’s food economy that compounds over time. That is what makes them influential, and why their work extends beyond their individual brands.
