Grandmother Ngau Ngau Finds Her Path in Business after Retirement

Wong Pui Lan, who everyone calls “Grandmother”, is the founder of Ngau Ngau in Macao. Initially, Grandmother Wong only intended to make belachan for her friends, relatives and family to enjoy. However, the simple, ordinary and unpackaged belachan was unanimously well received; giving her the confidence to start her own business after retirement, and the belachan was later packaged and sold in bottles. She was said to have the first roadside stall selling belachan in bottles at that time.

Belachan is a shrimp paste or prawn sauce which is a fermented condiment commonly used in Southeast Asian and southern Chinese cuisines. It is primarily made from finely crushed shrimp or krill mixed with salt, and then fermented for several weeks. They are either sold in their wet form or are sun-dried and either cut into rectangular blocks or sold in bulk. It is an essential ingredient in many curries, sauces and sambal. Shrimp paste can be found in many meals in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is often an ingredient in dip for fish or vegetables.

Ngau Ngau’s Belachan

Wong Pui Lan

Entrepreneurship achieved, winning acclaim across Hong Kong and Macao

Grandmother Wong returned to Macao from Myanmar (formerly Burma) in 1971 and worked as a janitor at a local school for over a decade. After retirement, she hoped to realise her lifelong dream and start her own business with her family recipes for mohinga (fish soup noodles) and belachan. During the naming process, she thought of “Ngau”, which symbolises hardworking oxen in Chinese, and thus she named her business “Ngau Ngau”.

Pioneering in Macao with entrepreneurial talent

Grandmother Wong is a talented entrepreneur. Many years ago, Japanese-style ramen was not popular in Macao, and her granddaughter always asked her family to take her to have Japanese tonkotsu ramen. Grandmother Wong was extremely curious about how to make “tonkotsu”. After repeated attempts, she found this kind of meat texture in the flaky cartilage found in a pig’s chest. Adding Burmese special spices to the soup base and cooking with the Burmese-Chinese fusion method, she successfully developed Burmese curry pork cartilage noodles as one of Ngau Ngau’s signature dishes.

Grandmother Wong recalls that she started her own business in Rua do Bispo Medeiros in Macao with a roadside stall in the late 1980s, when the economic environment was unstable, and she had to move around and frequently change her pitch. However, thanks to her hard work, her business picked up through word of mouth. After Ngau Ngau became famous in Macao, many Hong Kong and mainland foodies made a special trip to the stall, and some merchants even took Ngau Ngau’s belachan to sell in Hong Kong and mainland souvenir shops.

Selecting garlic slices

Deep frying garlic slices

Dedication in every gramme of belachan

The process of making belachan seems to involve simple techniques that every Burmese can follow, but in fact it is not easy to master the essence, and Ngau Ngau has honed it to perfection. In Myanmar, belachan is mostly made into a half-dry shrimp mash from dried shrimps, dried onions, garlic, chilli and shrimp paste. Ngau Ngau insists on using the best ingredients and following the family recipe and the traditional production techniques, and the process starts with raw onions. They are sliced, drained and deep fried in the wok, and the cost is rather high it takes on average of four catties of raw onions to make one catty of dried onions. The garlic slices have to be rinsed, selected, deep fried, and smashed. Every bottle of belachan is full of heart and dedication. After insisting on running the business personally for years, she suffered from spondylolisthesis, a disorder of the spinal cord in which one vertebra slips onto the vertebra below it. This causes pain in lower back or legs, due to overwork. In order to continue the brand of Ngau Ngau, the second-generation successor Lei Io Wa resolutely resigned from his job in 2007 to take over the business and has been operating Ngau Ngau ever since.

The second-generation successor Lei Io Wa

The store located in Rua da Erva, Macao

Family brand taken over and expanded by the children

Hong Kong and Macao are currently the major markets of Ngau Ngau. Seeing the many business opportunities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in recent years, Grandmother Wong’s children said they are planning to develop the mainland market by first introducing the brand’s belachan. Lei thanked Macao Ideas of the Commerce and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM) for their assistance, saying that the many business matching sessions and business seminars organised by Macao Ideas are very important for the development of SMEs, and the various expos and fairs held by IPIM can help Macao products and brands enter the mainland market. He hopes that Ngau Ngau will ascend to new heights with the assistance of IPIM in the future.

At present, Grandmother’s daughter Lily Lei is responsible for the marketing and promotion of the Ngau Ngau brand in the mainland market. In order to give the brand more exposure, she has not only adjusted the flavour of belachan to cater to the market, but has also participated in various expos and fairs, live commerce sessions hosted by Internet celebrities, and new media promotion campaigns, thereby attempting to build a reputation for Ngau Ngau in the mainland.