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The Touch of Gerry Chua to the Eng Bee Tin Food Business

(Febuary 9,2002)

Many Filipino upstarts in the world of entrepreneurship have one particular object of curiosity: how does a typical successful Chinese entrepreneur climb to the top or at least get significantly off the ground? Add to this, the question: what next? - meaning - how does he keep the enterprise up?

A very informal interview with a popular but very humble Binondo personality, in the fields of business and community politics - Gerry Chua -may give one an inkling relative to the above.

Gerry Chua of Ongpin, Chinatown, is not just an entrepreneur. He has been the longest-staying barangay captain of East Binondo's Barangay 289. He is also popularly known as a volunteer fireman and is the vice president of the Association of Philippine Volunteer Fire Brigade, Inc. which is nationwide in scope. Out of doing this type of' volunteer work, for which he was initially misunderstood by neighbors, Gerry derives much of his spirit to go on and on and a reservoir of goodwill and good karma which he feels yield more and more blessings even if he not in the least intends to cash in on any goodwill built.

People in the entire Chinatown community must know him. People in the city hall certainly know him. His friends are everywhere - high and low. (I noticed while walking alongside him on the street of Ongpin that he readily exchanged greetings with practically every "cuchero" and almost any other man or woman. I said to myself: "This Gerry has a very bright disposition towards life and people and it was just within a few minutes after that I learned of the intangible rewards that his*1 entation gives him.") "j"

It wasn't always easy riding and rosebeds for Gerry. He for years suffered what the other side of the coin felt like. At his worst point, he said to himself: "I will not'älways be at this rock-bottOm level." His whispered utterance proved prophetic but only after a string of travails in business. And at the end of it, he was vindicated because the man who squeezed the blood out of him while he was down there providentially got sacked from his mighty position and fell headlong in his community standing.

That was just about the same time that the part of the wheel which bore Gerry's name was already on the upside.

The story is all about Gerry Chua and the Eng Bee Tin Chinese Deli along Ongpin Street.

Eng Bee Tin was established in 1908 by Gerry's grandfather, Chua Chui Hong. It was passed on to his father, Benito Chua, from whose hands he wielded the reins of the business 13 years ago while his father's shadow still lurked right behind him. The first three years - from 1987 to 1990- were very difficult years financially and operationally. Gerry found the market unreceptive to his products and it was painfully difficult to make both ends meet. He knew how it was like to count money up to the last centavo and to pray hard for his cash to be augmented to enable him to honor the cheques then issued by his father on behalf of the business. He knew how it felt to be humiliated as he tried to borrow funds just to honor cheques, how to be sent away by the bank only because he came minutes after the clearing cut-off time. He experienced ridicule; he experienced being let down by "friends" who turned their backs upon discovering of his business' dismal financial standing. He thus discovered who his real friends were and as he persevered, he learned that indeed life is a wheel.

Gerry knows all the ropes of his bakery business - from R & D to production, to marketing, to finance. He personally experimented and developed his own formulation for each and every product that his business carried: mainly hopia and tikoy. He treated every product as a masterpiece - no ~ctimping on ingredients' quality and volume. He stuck only to grade A raw materials because he knew one thing: ONE HAS FIRST TO HAVE A GOOD PRODUCT - an undisputably good product. And where competition sets in, a SUPERIOR PRODUCT.

Thus was born the third-generation much-improved on hopia, no longer the tough version as in the original, crust just right, and the filling, definitely Gerry's masterpiece. He modified on the traditional Chinese mongo and evolved variations: red bean, baboy, piña (the latest), and of course, the cash cow: ube hopia.

Gerry's entrepreneural mind has always had a creative and innovative streak. For the ube hopia, his idea was to creatively work out a fusion of respective Pinoy and Chinese cultures. He succeeded in blending tl~e traditionally Chinese hopia delicacy with the Pinoy ube halaya. Thus was born the ube hopia. In the beginning, the popular saying which goes: "The proof of the pudding is in the tasting" applied exactly to the product which was totally an unknown entity years before the 1990s. It needed to be broken into the market - both local and export. Today, ube hopia has a throng of regular consumers not only in the Chinese community in Binondo but anywhere else in the Philippines.

The middle segment of the story coming in between the road of travails and the road of success speaks of Gerry's fine business qualities and attitudinal frame as well as his working habits and personal human relations. The rest of the story will be told but not in this issue. Watch out for it in the February 17 issue of the Advertising in Today's World. S Ed. (MV)

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