Tai Sun turns 60 as third-generation leader Esther Loo helps modernise the homegrown snack brand
Long before Esther Loo was spearheading big decisions on how Tai Sun should look, sell, and stay relevant to a new generation of snackers, she was spending her school holidays at the family factory, sticking product labels onto bags of nuts.
Back then, the homegrown snack brand’s production was still housed in Singapore at its Pandan Loop premises, with fryers, machinery, and production workers filling the space downstairs.
Manufacturing has since shifted to its Malaysian plant, although the building remains the company’s local base, containing its warehouse, distribution centre, and offices, including the one belonging to Ms Loo, who now works as Tai Sun’s Head of Sales and Marketing.
Over the past 16 years, she has helped reshape a brand that’s been in her family for three generations, and that work has taken on added significance this year as Tai Sun marks its 60th anniversary.
Gained experience outside before returning to the family biz
Tai Sun’s story began in 1966, when Ms Loo’s late grandfather and grandmother, Madam Han Yew Lang, set up a small snack operation from a shophouse, with production downstairs and the family living above.
“When they finished, the neighbours would come over to help with the packing,” she told MS News. “Even preparing the peanuts was done by hand. They had to soak them and rub the skins off, so it was all very labour-intensive.”
Source: Tai Sun
That modest setup is a far cry from the company today, which has grown into a regional snack business with manufacturing in Johor Bahru, more than 45 snack creations, and a portfolio spanning its flagship Tai Sun brand, Nature’s Wonders, UCA, and Treatz.
Ms Loo may have been quite literally born into the business, but that didn’t mean she was going to breeze straight into a cushy family role after graduation.
She remembers her mother, Sandy Lim, who is now Tai Sun’s Head of Operations, being firm about one thing: “We needed to go outside and get some work experience first, so there was something we could bring to the table.”
So after studying Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Ms Loo spent about five to six years working in advertising and marketing, largely in the beauty industry.
Food may have been an entirely different category, but the experience gave her a grounding in processes, planning, and structured decision-making, lessons that would prove useful when she eventually returned to Tai Sun in 2010 as Marketing Manager.
Making eating nuts cool again
By then, the brand was ready for a refresh.
Much of the business still followed a traditional retail model, with products going onto shelves and far less direct engagement with consumers than the social media campaigns, collaborations, influencer outreach, and larger launches used today.
Image courtesy of Tai Sun
That gave Ms Loo a clear brief: take what she had learnt outside the family business and find a way to make Tai Sun feel more relevant to a new generation.
While consumer research, including blind taste tests, suggested the products themselves were well received, the bigger issue was perception.
People were familiar with Tai Sun, but younger consumers tended to associate it more with an older generation than with something they would actively pick up for themselves.
“They’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I know Tai Sun. I see it at my grandmother’s house when I go over for Chinese New Year,'” she said. “And I’d be like, ‘I’m not only selling to your grandma!'”
That became the starting point for a broader overhaul, from refreshing the logo and standardising its packaging to creating a more consistent visual identity across the range.
The brand has continued to evolve since, with a more recent packaging refresh aimed even more deliberately at younger consumers, down to making sure the packs look contemporary enough that trend-conscious shoppers might actually consider them “cool” to carry around.
Image courtesy of Tai Sun
Making Tai Sun louder, younger, and more experiential
But changing the look was only part of it. The way Tai Sun launches and markets its products has also become much louder and more experiential over the years.
“In the past, when we changed a pack, we would just put it in stores and run some promotions,” Ms Loo recalled. “It was much quieter.”
Getting there took some convincing. When she first pushed for bigger marketing investments, from more in-store materials to taxi advertising, there was understandable scepticism over spending on brand-building without an immediate payoff.
Over time, however, as those efforts began showing results, the family became more open to trying new things.
These days, launches can involve brand collaborations, media events, younger KOLs, product seeding, social media activations, and on-ground experiences.
In 2025, for example, Tai Sun partnered with the Museum of Ice Cream around its refreshed packaging and newer snack mixes, complete with oversized nut plushies that tapped into the soft toy craze.
For its 60th anniversary this year, the brand has continued in much the same spirit, teaming up with homegrown ice cream label Creamier on flavours such as Salted Vanilla Almonds and Peanut Toffee, alongside mini pouch blind bags inspired by different nuts.
That same push to stay current extends to the products themselves, although Ms Loo is the first to admit there are only so many ways to reinvent the humble nut.
So the brand looks for other ways to stand out, from creating its own combinations such as Deluxe Mix and Sambal Mix to catering to health-conscious snackers through Nature’s Wonders, which focuses on high-quality nuts with no added salt, oil, or sugar.
Source: @natureswonderscosg on Instagram
Education has also long been part of the strategy, particularly when the product itself needs little introduction.
“A pistachio is a pistachio, and a cashew is a cashew. There’s only so much you can say about that,” she mused. “So we focused more on educating people about why they should eat nuts, such as what’s good for your heart or your brain, rather than just listing the vitamins they contain.”
Ms Loo’s 90-year-old grandma still drops by to ‘spot check’
Ms Loo and her mother are far from the only family members still involved in Tai Sun.
Her mum and two uncles make up the second generation, overseeing areas including operations, finance, sales, and production, while seven of the nine members of Ms Loo’s generation have also joined the business across functions such as sales, IT, and finance.
Even the first generation still makes its presence felt. At 90, Madam Han is no longer involved in Tai Sun’s day-to-day operations, but she still drops by the office regularly to keep tabs on how things are going. Or, as Ms Loo joked, to “spot check”.
That can mean walking around the premises, chatting with family members, asking about the business, or looking over the stock downstairs to see what the younger generations have been up to. Outside the office, she remains just as active, and still drives and swims.
In spite of how much Tai Sun has changed around her, Madam Han’s advice has stayed relatively simple: protect the quality of the product, enjoy the work, and keep communication open within the family, even when those conversations are uncomfortable.
With so many relatives, plus their spouses, involved in the business, it’s perhaps unsurprising that work talk doesn’t always stay in the office.
“My mum will question us all the time,” Ms Loo laughed. An idea might occur to her mother over lunch and, just like that, a family meal turns into an impromptu work discussion.
Part of that, Ms Loo reckons, comes down to how invested the older generation still is in the business.
“They’re really very passionate about what they do and how we do it,” she said. “I think they’re also trying to teach us to have that same sense of ownership. If you take something on, you see it through.”
Preparing Tai Sun for the next generation
That sense of ownership is something Ms Loo is now thinking about for those who may come after her, even if succession is still a long way off.
She has three children, aged 15, eight, and four, while the rest of Tai Sun’s fourth generation ranges from teenagers to babies.
Growing up in a world of AI, online shopping, streaming, and almost anything available on demand, however, has shaped a very different sense of pace and patience.
Her eldest son once encountered free-to-air television and was baffled by an advertisement he couldn’t skip, prompting Ms Loo to joke that perhaps they could use a taste of something a little less instant: “We should ask them to come back and do stickering, like what we used to do.”
Still, she has no intention of pushing any of them into the family firm. Nobody in her own generation was forced to return either, and she believes the choice has to come naturally.
What matters more is making sure there is still something worth returning to.
Source: Nature’s Wonders
She describes her generation’s role using the Chinese term “shou ye”, or preserving what has been built, after her grandparents’ generation built it from scratch (“chuang ye”).
And while that has meant keeping up with the times through refreshed packaging, oversized nut plushies, buzzy collabs, and interesting new products, there is one part of Tai Sun that Ms Loo is adamant should stay exactly the same:
Our quality is something that doesn’t change. We don’t compromise on quality over price.
For more information on Tai Sun and its products, visit the official website.
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Featured image by MS News (photography by Ian Zailee), courtesy of Tai Sun, and adaped from Tai Sun.
