Sweet serendipity

It was about this time of the year in 2002 that Amelia Valenzuela treated her Amelia Sweet Products employees—20 regulars, 15 contractuals, and about 25 summer-only hires—to a whole day outing.

"It was a first of us. Business had been that good," said administration supervisor Danilo Salas.

Sometime during the day, however, Valenzuela got a call from her only customer, Chowking Food Corp., which was running low on halo-halo ingredients.

Halo-halo accounts for 25% of Chowking’s average P400 million monthly sales during the summer, which starts in the last week of February and ends in the second week of June. During the rest of the year, halo-halo accounts for only 10% of total sales.

For Amelia Sweet Products, this translates to delivering every day to the Chowking commissary the equivalent of five kilos each of 11 different halo-halo ingredients to each of Chowking’s 220 outlets nationwide. That’s 300 servings per store.

"We provide Chowking with 11 of the 14 ingredients that go into the making of halo-halo. The other three such as pinipig are made in house because the procedures involved are very simple," said Valenzuela.

Right time, right place

Valenzuela started out selling her bottled sweet stuff generically called minatamis in wet markets. In 1988, she found out that Chowking was looking for a supplier of halo-halo ingredients through a vegetable dealer in Arranque market.

"I asked the vegetable dealer, who was a friend of my mother, to introduce me to the purchasing officer the next time he visited the market," said Valenzuela. "Everything happened very fast after that. I received a call a week later. Within a month, I got an order to supply five bottles each of nine ingredients every day."

Volumes picked up three years ago when Chowking was purchased by Jollibee Food Corp. and JFC chief financial officer Rufino de la Rosa was named president.

"Aling Mely and I hit it off immediately. Coming both from Bulacan, which is the heart of halo-halo country, we both knew what a good halo-halo should taste like," said de la Rosa. "Bulacan became our benchmark and Aling Mely became our unofficial consultant."

Production

Amelia Sweet Products is based in a 322 square meter factory, a tricycle ride away from Valenzuela’s home in Tondo.

"We used to wake up and go to sleep with the smell of sweets cooking in the house," said Salas. "We knew we had to relocate the production site when almost every free space in the house was filled with raw materials and cooking equipment as well as with workers."

Amelia Sweet Products received a P5 million loan from Chowking to build its factory. The five-year loan has been repaid in two years’ time.

The factory is at its busiest during the summer months, with each ingredient having a daily production run of two hours. Deliveries by the company’s two trucks are done daily to ensure freshness.

"We don’t use bigger cooking equipment to meet increased orders. It would be harder to determine when to stop the cooking process to prevent mushiness," said Valenzuela who still personally supervises the production process.

Amelia Sweet Products sources its raw materials from specific provinces. For example, bananas must come from Batangas and Quezon and jackfruit must come from Cavite.

"Bananas from Batangas and Quezon are sweet and retain their firmness when cooked. I have three banana suppliers who deliver every other day and who give me a 15 to 30-day credit. I buy lots of bananas to ripen. Everyday, I go through the bananas that we have and I choose which one are in the right stage of ripeness to cook for the day," said Valenzuela.

Accreditation

More recently, Amelia Sweet Products has hosted and trained accredited halo-halo suppliers of Chowking for its Visayas and Mindanao operation.

"They came to Manila for a week to train. They still regularly call when they have problems. There are certain things that you only learn through experience," said Valenzuela.

"For example, there’s a trick to preparing chickpeas or garbanzos . The problem is the skin. If you boil the chickpeas too long, it will turn mushy. If you don’t boil it long enough, it doesn’t taste good."

"Chowking annually reviews the taste of everything in its menu. Since the last review, we can say with pride that we have the best halo-halo in town," said de la Rosa, whose plans to improve halo-halo this year focuses on adding new ingredients such as gulaman.

This is good news for Amelia Sweet Products, which is piggy-backing on Chowking’s targeted 20% growth in business this year.

With another good business year ahead, Amelia Sweet Products is planning another company outing. This year, however, the plan is to have fun after the summer months.