How a Taiwanese chemist built a soy empire in Australia

Taiwan-born Eric Hsu never imagined his hard-earned chemistry degree would be put to use making tofu and soy products in Australia. “In Taiwan, I was working for international companies like Dow Chemical,” says the now 72-year-old pioneer, who immigrated to Australia in 1986. “At that time, I couldn’t find the same kind of job, so I was looking at whatever opportunities I could.” Hsu recalls one of his friends joking that they wanted to eat tofu, but there was “none on the market”, and that he should try his hand at making it. “I ate tofu, but I didn’t know how to make it,” Hsu says. “Anyway, after researching, I realised, ‘Oh, it’s actually easy. It is just chemical reactions.’” In the beginning, Hsu and his wife Rachel started small, working from their garage and selling hand-pressed tofu to local grocers and Asian customers across Queensland. He made the tofu, while Rachel handled the business. Now, the Hsus are behind one of Australia’s biggest soy-based food creators, King International. Their range of dairy-free, soy-based yogurt products was recently introduced to Hong Kong, sold under the brand Kingland. Curds and away It has been 38 years since their first big break came in 1988, when Brisbane hosted the World Expo. Seemingly every Asian food booth in every pavilion wanted to serve tofu, and Hsu suddenly became everyone’s de facto source for the product. “The Japanese, Singaporeans and all others attending the World Expo had kitchens that needed tofu, so I supplied them all,” Hsu says. “I was so busy. Every day, I only had three hours of sleep to fill all the orders.” In a way, Hsu’s story is similar to those of many Taiwanese immigrants at the time. He was the youngest of seven brothers and sisters. After one of the sisters married an Australian, his parents decided to make their way Down Under for a visit – and their minds were blown. “They were so impressed by their first impressions [of Australia],” Hsu says. “My parents were farmers. They thought Australia had a lot of land, not many people and the air was so fresh. They told my brothers and sisters, ‘When you graduate, you all go to Australia, don’t stay in Taiwan.’” Today, the entire Hsu family lives in Brisbane. When he decided to uproot himself, Hsu was already married and working. He just did not realise a new life would mean starting a new and different career as well. But being at the forefront of soy-based food development was lucky. Health-conscious, plant-based eating was a popular revolution starting to germinate in the late 1980s and 90s. At the same time, Asian cuisine gained a foothold as a fashionable new trend. Non-Asian chefs were also fast discovering the versatility and diversity of tofu, soy milk and soy sauce. Hsu realised that for his company to grow, he needed to expand his customer base from just Chinese grandmothers and Birkenstock-wearing vegetarians. He wanted supermarkets to start stocking his product. However, his first meeting with a buyer for one of Australia’s biggest grocers did not exactly go to plan. “The guy was actually half Chinese … but when I presented the tofu to him, he asked me, ‘What is that? What is tofu?’” Hsu says. “He had never seen it, had no clue at all.” As an independent tiny producer, the initial consignments failed to make any headway. But months later, a tofu competitor with a proper distribution network approached Hsu to be their tofu producer, too. It seems the company had financial issues because they later asked Hsu if he wanted to buy out their business completely. Hsu agreed, and his King International soy products became commonplace on shelves across Australia. “Once you’re in one supermarket, then the other supermarkets follow,” Hsu says. Culture shock He had grander ambitions yet. What other food products could he make? One obvious direction was to use soy to create alternative dairy items, since he observed that Australians consumed plenty of milk, cheese and yogurt, while many Asians are lactose intolerant. “I thought after making tofu, I could use the by-product to make soy milk,” Hsu says. “After that, I studied the possibility of making soy cheese, yogurt and other dairy-alternative products.” “At that time, there was no internet. So I went to the library,” Hsu says. “But there is no history of anyone ever making cheese or yogurt from soy milk. I tried to add different bacterial cultures to soy milk, but it never succeeded. It all failed because there is no lactose.” Instead of giving up, Hsu stubbornly decided to go all in. He contacted his local university and sponsored PhD and master’s students to experiment with thousands of bacterial cultures to find one that could replicate the function of lactose in dairy but for soy milk. “You just have to find the right one for soy milk fermentation,” he says. “In total, I would say it took me 10 years to perfect this process. You can make tofu or soy milk at home, no problem, but not soy yogurt. “It’s still a natural fermentation, but the microbiotic product works totally differently from dairy proteins.” It is all an elegant metaphor for Australian cross-cultural amalgamation – adapting an Asian ingredient to make yogurt, which became a popular Western dairy product by way of Central Asia and Mesopotamia. “I’m just a simple industrial chemist, but you know, after 38 years, a lot has changed,” Hsu says, reflecting on Australia’s evolving tastes and demographic. “Before, if I saw someone Asian on the street, I would say hi because we were so rare. But now, there are so many of us. “We can have noodles, dim sum, dumplings, all kinds of Asian food.”

How a Taiwanese chemist built a soy empire in Australia

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Eric Hsu put his chemistry degree to good use, turning his garage-based business into one of Australia’s biggest makers of soy products

Eric Hsu put his chemistry degree to good use, turning his garage-based business into one of Australia’s biggest makers of soy products