FORGET Charlie's Angels. Two Singaporean women who call themselves 'Snack Angels' have set up a business that sets out to combine great tasting tidbits with good health.

Christine Lim and Chia Bee Luan run San SeSan Global, the company behind the popular seaweed snack Tao Kae Noi.

San SeSan, which operates out of 8,000 square foot premises in Jalan Ampas, mainly develops snacks for the local market with the selling point: 'Angel snacks' are healthy and tasty.

Christine says that the company works closely with the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority to ensure the 'healthy' tag on its snacks is not just a marketing gimmick. 'We send our products to the lab to test various properties before we market them,' she says.

While San SeSan has been around since 1981 as a party supplies distributor, it got a facelift when Christine and Bee Luan bought it from the sole proprietor - a fengshui (geomancy) master, magician and ventriloquist - in late 2003.

'We looked at the network and it was good,' says Christine. 'We wanted to use that network to bring in more products and develop new products.'

Since then, San SeSan has more than doubled the size of its network of local retailers.

The recipe for star product Tao Kae Noi was developed in collaboration with a Thai factory, where it is still manufactured for 'cost reasons'.

The snack was field-tested in Singapore for almost nine months, after which a six-month marketing blitz helped make it a mainstay on convenience store shelves all over the island.

'For the first six months after launching something, it has to be seen everywhere. It must be very prominent,' says Christine, who applies this strategy to all San SeSan products.

Two years after it was launched, Tao Kae Noi remains 'front-of-store' in many shops - again due to marketing savvy.

'We may pay a premium sometimes for our products to be placed there,' says Christine. 'Or we might run an island-wide contest that leads people to buy our products, so retailers have to put them up front.

'I think of it as continual branding - having more and more products, different variations, different tastes, different pack sizes - a lot of ongoing additions and extensions.'

The two partners have clear roles. Christine is in charge of getting San SeSan products off the shelves, while Bee Luan works to get them on the shelves.

Trained as an accountant, Christine dabbled in the media as an infographics artist with a newspaper and an advertising firm, and says that all her past work experience has helped her run her own business.

'For example, you need to see the financial side of things, you need to see the creative side of things, you need to know how to bring out messages - the marketing, the branding, the strategic development, that sort of thing,' she says.

With 25 years of experience in the retail industry and with established brands such as 7-Eleven, Guardian and Cold Storage, Bee Luan definitely is an old hand in the retail scene.

'I'm quite fussy,' she says. 'After a while, you taste so many things and you tend to be very selective.'

Bee Luan has good help when it comes to field-testing products. 'Our staff are all food critics,' she says of San SeSan's 16-strong crew. 'The first question we ask them at the job interview is: Do you like to snack?'

Bee Luan sees the rise of parallel importers bringing in Tao Kae Noi as a positive sign that San SeSan is doing things right.

'Normally, they only parallel import Pringles, Coca-Cola, the big brands like Cadbury chocolates, where there is a demand,' she says. 'We take it as a compliment that the product is so popular, so we invite these imports. Singapore is a free port, so you can't stop them.'

But the success of Tao Kae Noi did not come without challenges. According to Christine, the high cost of ramping up retail coverage, coupled with low revenue from a small initial product range, meant San SeSan did not earn enough to pay for its warehousing, logistics and manpower.

But still, the two women decided to keep going. 'We ruled out the option of outsourcing the distribution as we believed we could do a better job,' says Christine. 'After all, the product was our own and our commitment to succeed was strong.'

San SeSan experienced a cashflow squeeze in the early years. 'We bought our supplies using cash and sold with 90 days credit terms,' she says. 'So the higher the sales, the bigger the cash needed. This involved more than a million dollars by the second year.'

From an initial $50,000 investment, the company has grown every year and now boasts an annual turnover of $5 million. It is also diversifying. 'We hope to add three product lines every year,' says Christine. 'We should be looking at 20 products in five years' time.'

San SeSan has also begun to import Korean snacks, which fall into the 'Angel snacks' category, to spread its revenue stream.

At present, the revenue split between its own products and imports is 70:30, but the eventual aim is 90:10.

In the medium term, Christine expects to roll out more 'Angel snacks' such as low-fat cassava (tapioca) chips and baked cereal sunflower seeds.

'Our strategy is to launch in Singapore, then branch out to the region, then to the world,' she says.

As for taking San SeSan public, that will only be considered when 'our products are established overseas'.

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NINE finalists have been unveiled for the inaugural Emerging Enterprise Award 2008. They are:

• AG Delta Pte Ltd

• Aldon Technologies Services Pte Ltd
  

• KinderGolf Pte Ltd
  

• McCoy Components Pte Ltd
  

• OAAG (S) Pte Ltd
  

• San SeSan Global Pte Ltd
  

• Scrawl Studios Pte Ltd
  

• Sparkfury Creative Consultants Pte Ltd

• Wang Jiao Group Pte Ltd
  
  

Today, we continue our daily series on the finalists with the spotlight on San SeSan Global.

Emerging Enterprise 2008 is jointly presented by The Business Times and OCBC Bank, which is also the sponsor. It is supported by Spring Singapore, HP Singapore, RSM Chio Lim and NUS Enterprise.

The new award honours promising young enterprises with an annual turnover of between $1.5 million and $10 million, which have been operating for at least three years but not more than seven years.

But this is not just another award - the three winners will receive not only a trophy but also $380,000 of interest-free loans, grants and business services.

OCBC will contribute a $150,000, five-year interest-free loan to each winner. The bank also has the option to invest in the company. Spring Singapore will give a $150,000 grant to each winner to meet half the expenses of selected business projects. The other three partners - HP Singapore, RSM Chio Lim and NUS Enterprise - will contribute a total of $80,000 of IT, consultancy and education packages.

This article was first published in The Business Times on May 15, 2008