An entrepreneurship and business faculty graduate, Wan Azehan Helmi Wan Abdul Halim, said the venture into the seasoning product business was inspired by a popular Japanese convenience store franchise, and was jointly developed with his partner, Imer Jibril Mohd Nasir, early last year.
The 24-year-old said in the beginning, they only sold oden using recipes that had been prepared by themselves and then served it with fish balls, crab meat, sausages and other ingredients at a stall on campus.
Oden is a Japanese soup mix consisting of several ingredients such as boiled eggs, processed fishcakes and light, soy-flavoured broth.
“The idea to do business came when the oden joint became a favourite food haunt for many students. However, the absence of students on campus due to the Covid-19 pandemic drove us to commercialise this oden paste online in April last year.
“Our online strategy using Facebook and Instagram paid off when we were able to get about RM500 in sales in a month at that time as we were only processing the oden paste manually without a machine at home,” he told reporters when met at his King Oden shop on Jalan Salor Lama here.
The duo tried various marketing and sales techniques including hiring about 10 agents comprising UMK students, which helped the students earn some income.
“At present, we have 500 agents nationwide, and there is demand for the paste from neighbouring countries such as Indonesia.
“To meet customers demand, we are also able to produce and market 30,000 to 40,000 packs of oden paste a month. We have three flavours – natural, spicy and Asam laksa (tangy and spicy), which are sold for RM10 per pack and have a shelf life of up to eight months,” he said.
The hard work of both Wan Azehan Helmi, who is a final year student and Imer Jibril, who graduated last year, has paid off and the two are proud owners of a processing plant in Bachok which started operating in March.
“We hope our success will inspire more people to venture into business,” he said, adding their target is to reach RM1 million in sales by the end of this year.