The hard work of two university students from Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) has paid off after they managed to earn a six-figure salary by selling their homemade oden paste.
Wan Azehan Helmi Wan Abdul Halim, 24, who is an Entrepreneurship and Business faculty final year student, said the inspiration came from a popular Japanese convenience store franchise chain, which he developed with his partner, Imer Jibril Mohd Nasir, who graduated last year.
He said when their business first started early last year, they prepared their own recipes and sold oden served with fish balls, crab meats, sausages and others to campus students, reported BERNAMA.
“The idea to start a business arose when the oden joint became a favourite food hunt 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,” he told reporters at his King Oden shop in Jalan Salor Lama.
“Alhamdulillah, our online strategy using Facebook and Instagram paid off when we were able to earn about RM500 sales in a month at that time as we were only processing the oden paste manually without a machine at home.”
The duo also managed to help their fellow uni-mates at UMK earn a side income by hiring about 10 of them to help out in the business, which is one of their marketing and sales techniques.
“At present, we have 500 agents nationwide, and there is demand for the paste from neighbouring countries such as Indonesia,” he said.
“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.
Wan Azehan Helmi and Imer Jibril are now proud owners of a processing plant in Bachok which started operating in March. Their goal is to reach their target sales of RM1 million by the end of the year.
“We hope our success will inspire more entrepreneurs students to venture into business,” he said.
For more information, you can check out their Instagram and Facebook page.
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