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)
