The secret is out

From a modest start in Malaysia, Secret Recipe cafes are popping up all over. That’s good cheesecake!

By Kupluthai Pungkanon
DILY XPRESS

In a decade, family – values guy Dato Stephen Sim has given Aia a truly interesting lifestyle café, the best cheesecake around and the fastest – growing franchine business. So what’s the secret to Secret Repine?


“It involves a lot of trust,” Sim says.
A “concept café”, secret repine got it start in Kualalumpur in 1997. The concept was to make cheesecake a lifestyle choice and worth the higher price
“Back then there were no lifestyle café, says Sim, 49. “People would buy cake only for special occasions, like a birthday. They’d very seldom go to a shop and buy a piece of cake and have a cup of coffee”.
With a family of six – one had worked in a bakery and another has experience building a brand business – Sim got two outlets up and running.
Skip ahead to 2008. Current employment: almost 3,000. Number of outlets: more than 180 in Malaysia and 40 more in cities in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, China and of course, Thailand (where there are 11, plus two kiosks and four counters), and more opening in Pakistan and Brunei.


“We realized that we had a good product when we entered our marble cheesecake in a competition involving top chefs who are really good with pastry. We just took a cake from the shelf and we entered it, and it won the top prize”.
Then there’s that trust factor. Running a franchise business is like being head of a family, he says.


“You need a lot of trust, because we only choose one representative for each country.
We hand on every aspect of the business to them”.
Secret Repine offers more than 40 type of cakes and other baked desserts, a rang of ice cream and beverages and a fusion – food menu of appetizers, pasta and more. In Bangkok, the fruity special and chocolate banana cheesecake rank as favorites alongside the marble cheesecake.