An Interview With Martita Mestey
Gratitude (Mindset): I’m a student of Stoicism, and one of the key values is gratitude. Gratitude helps me shift my focus away from the obstacles. No matter how many times life throws a lemon at you, you must learn to receive it with gratitude and make the most delicious lemonade out of it.
As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Norma Chu.
Norma Chu has two passions in life — finance and cooking. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she moved to the US with her family at the age of 11. After graduating from the University of Washington, she returned to Hong Kong to embark on a financial career and became the Head of Research of HSBC Private Bank in 2010. In 2012, inspired by her girlfriends at home who could not cook, she turned her other passion into a business, starting DayDayCook and bringing it to Shanghai, China, in 2015.
Under her leadership, DayDayCook has grown to become a leading cooking and lifestyle content platforms in China with 60 million active viewers and 3.4 million paid customers.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
Thank you for having me participate in this feature!
I was born in Hong Kong and moved to Seattle at the age of 14. It was during my years living there that I developed my hobby of cooking. My first parttime job was in the food industry — as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. I wanted to make some money and do it in an area that was of interest to me.
I went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business and Finance from the University of Washington. My two passions in life — cooking and stocks — were strengthened during my college years. After graduation, I opted to focus on the former and began working at a bank. But eventually, I was drawn back to cooking and launched DayDayCook in 2012.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
When I came back to Hong Kong after college, I noticed most of my friends were intimidated by cooking. This led me to begin making videos to show that cooking can be simple and fun. I uploaded these videos onto social media to share them broadly. The “ah ha” moment happened when I started to see my following surge and began hearing from people around me how much they appreciated my videos. This remains DayDayCook’s mission today, which is to spread the joy of cooking to younger generations.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?
I have seen many friends who got into food & beverage because they are very passionate about the industry. And I’ve seen them become obsessed with their vision and stop listening to opposing messages that the market is telling them. I think one of the most important things for a founder to do is keep an open feedback loop to help them continually adjust and refine their product and positioning.
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Create a prototype and put it out to test quickly.
Make sure to test the product with paid customers, only then will they tell you their true opinions.
Keep refining and testing until you have a reasonably solid product, but don’t become overly obsessed with perfection
Stay lean and grow organically.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
I would reflect on my own company and how we have translated a good idea into an actual business. At DayDayCook, we talk a lot about our culture which focuses on happiness, strength and resilience. I think these three factors are integral in being successful.
For anybody needing encouragement, I would share the below:
- It’s important to know that success is extremely rare on the first try.
- Protect the seed of happiness that prompted you to start your business in the first place… You have to be happy to be able to keep loving what you do every day.
- The entrepreneurship journey is a test of a person’s strength and resilience. Keep trying, listening, learning and adjusting, relentlessly. If you are persistent enough, you will succeed eventually.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
I do not think it is necessary in the early stage for two reasons.
- Following the ideation stage, the founder should focus on experimentation (described above) You don’t need a consultant for that.
- For nearly all industries, try to run the business as lean as possible in the beginning. If you need advice or a pair of fresh eyes, seek a trusted friend and an industry veteran. Many entrepreneurs have benefited from the generosity of others who provided assistance at no cost when they were just starting out. Likewise, they are often more than willing to support emerging entrepreneurs when the opportunity arises.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
Good venture capital will bring many tangible and intangible values to the table in addition to the capital. The challenge is to be able to tell which VC is the right fit for YOU. There are also many expectations that come as a package with VC money, so be sure to have a game plan and backup plans before you take on that money.
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?
When sourcing a good manufacturer or co-packer or finding a good broker or distributor, it is important to find partners that share the same value as you do so they will respect your standards, processes, and values.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
I think these 5 things are critical to creating a long-term successful brand.
- Authenticity (Who): Consumers today seek authenticity in the brands they support. They want to connect with the person behind the products and understand the genuine values the brand represents. Embrace your unique voice and values, not everyone will resonate with it, but those who do will become your most loyal supporters.
- Obsession (How): The food industry is highly competitive, with ever-changing consumer tastes. Success demands a relentless focus on every aspect of your business. Be obsessive about innovation and improvement to stay ahead. For instance, at DayDayCook, our commitment to healthy, nutritious food has driven us to become one of the pioneers in offering clean-label instant noodles by utilizing freeze-dried technology, which has kept us at the forefront of the market.
- Purpose (Why): Purpose-driven marketing is gaining momentum, and it’s crucial for brands to have a clear sense of purpose and communicate how they are creating positive societal impact. Beyond the brand’s purpose, founders should also define their personal purpose. While passion may fuel the early stages of entrepreneurship, a deeper understanding of your purpose is essential for creating a sustainable, cross-generational brand, which is our goal. With DayDayCook, my purpose has remained the same since the beginning — to spread the joy of Asian cooking to the world — and this has been instrumental in guiding and supporting me throughout my 12 year journey.
- Persistence (Tenacity): Every entrepreneurial journey is fraught with challenges. At DayDayCook, we have faced numerous near-death challenges before we finally reached the milestone of our IPO in November 2023. For instance, during COVID in China, there was a period when many parts of the country were under lockdown, and our goods had no way of reaching our customers. Cash was depleting rapidly. During the crisis, the team came together to solve problem after problem until we could resume normal operations and ensure the survival of the business. Persistence, embedded in our company culture, played a pivotal role especially in times of crisis.
- Gratitude (Mindset): I’m a student of Stoicism, and one of the key values is gratitude. Gratitude helps me shift my focus away from the obstacles. No matter how many times life throws a lemon at you, you must learn to receive it with gratitude and make the most delicious lemonade out of it.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
I believe in the continuous iteration of our products to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. Once you have this commitment and dedication of putting in years of efforts and resources into crafting the best products for your customers, you will win them over. Have a mindset and mental toughness to build a sustainable business rather than aiming for launching one-hit-wonders.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
On the company level, DayDayCook creates products that make cooking more accessible and fun to everyone. Through cooking, we believe that you can share your care and create joyful moments with loved ones and make the world a happier place.
On a personal level, I try to give back and support entrepreneurship organizations in my hometown of Hong Kong by sharing my experience with and mentoring budding entrepreneurs. I hope that through my company and our work, we can help sow the seeds and inspire our future generations to dream big.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would like to inspire a movement where each day we all wake up and start the day by counting our blessings and being grateful for all the goodness in our lives before we head into facing the obstacles that we encounter face each day. Knowing that we are already blessed can give us a tremendous amount of positive energy and the world needs more positive vibes these days.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Norma Chu Of DayDayCook On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.