A Singaporean founder built her US healthy food business on her own. Now it’s going global

Photo credit: Love With Food.

Aihui Ong is excited. Her voice, traveling all the way from California to Singapore on a Skype connection, sounds jovial as she talks about Love With Food, the company she has built from the ground up over the last four-and-a-half years. The startup has announced its international expansion today, and Aihui’s native land Singapore is part of it.

“It’s a personal milestone for me,” says the US-based entrepreneur.

Love With Food is a subscription-based service that sends you a box of healthy snacks.

Things didn’t look as promising before Love With Food was born. Aihui, a computer science graduate from the National University of Singapore, had what others might consider a pretty sweet deal. While working as a software engineer at Singaporean IT group NCS, she was headhunted by US companies.

Back then, there was no startup ecosystem to speak of in Singapore – even in the US, the 2001 dotcom crash was a couple of years away.

Once she was Stateside, Aihui worked on financial software for several international companies, including General Motors and Sony. But the combination of an unfulfilling professional environment and upheaval in her personal life gave her a new mission.

Opening the door for small producers

Love With Food was born in 2012, after Aihui saw a friend’s food business fail because it wasn’t able to find distribution for its product.

“In the US and a lot of countries, a consumer can discover food through grocery stores, supermarkets, and so on,” Aihui tells Tech in Asia. “The problem with them is that there’s limited shelf space. Because of that, a lot of new products will get rejected, as shelf space is reserved for bigger brands.”

The startup is a subscription-based service that sends you a box of all-natural, organic, and gluten-free snacks. Everything in the box comes from smaller food brands that want to get their product in front of customers.

More importantly, the startup captures data on consumer preferences, feedback on specific products, and other useful information. It then sells that data to companies looking to benefit from these insights.

Founder and CEO Aihui Ong. Photo credit: Love With Food.

This was key to the company’s mission from the beginning. “Coming from a financial engineering background, I knew [how important data is]. A lot of food companies call us for consumer insights on steroids,” Aihui laughs.

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