Liz Kang: Founder & Co-CEO of Mamame Whole Foods
Episode 632
In this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we sit down with Liz Kang, the inspiring Founder and Co-CEO of Mamame Whole Foods. Liz shares her incredible journey of building a brand that bridges heritage and health, transforming her mother’s traditional tempeh recipe into a revolutionary snack product now available at major retailers like Sprouts and Erewhon.
Liz opens up about the challenges and successes of disrupting the snack space with Mamame Tempeh Chips, the importance of honoring cultural authenticity while innovating for modern consumers, and the lessons she’s learned as a female entrepreneur. We also discuss how Mamame is addressing the growing demand for nutrient-dense, sustainable snacks and why their mission is about more than just food—it’s about community, connection, and redefining what’s possible in the natural foods industry.
Whether you’re a snack enthusiast, a budding entrepreneur, or someone passionate about cross-cultural innovation, this episode is full of insights and inspiration. Don’t miss it! Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show!
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Transcript
Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. I am super, super thrilled to introduce you to an amazing entrepreneur, Liz Kang, who is the founder and CO CEO of Mamame Whole Foods is the company, but it’s known as Mamame Liz, is on a mission to bridge Heritage Health and global snacking through her innovative and delicious ready for this tempeh chips? Did I pronounce it right? Liz, yeah, that’s perfect. Okay, awesome. Drawing on her background in production and commercial partnerships at CNN, where she was at we have that in common, I guess, although I was many, many moons ago at CNN, but Liz has combined her passion for storytelling with her love for culturally rich, yummy, nutrient dense foods to create this brand that’s truly one of a kind. I love that she co founded the brand with her mother, Alvina Chan, taking a family recipe for tempeh chips and transforming it into the powerhouse snack that it is. It’s brand new, so if you have not experienced it, you definitely have to head to stores like sprouts and air, one in particular to grab hold of this incredible, incredible, tasty snack. So without further ado, welcome Liz, super excited to have you here.
Liz Kang 2:13
Thank you so much. Kara, I’m so happy to be here. Really excited,
Kara Goldin 2:17
absolutely. So how would you describe Mamame to anybody who is coming across the brand? Well, so Mamame
Liz Kang 2:27
is a woman owned and family run business. It was conceptualized initially by my mom, who was a stay at home mother for 27 years, and during COVID, actually, she started thinking of different ways that she might be able to bridge her passion for food with something entrepreneurial, and my brother, myself and my dad, we all really tried to support her on that journey, but it was really born out of my mom’s love for us and love for food and desire to bring something that is culturally relevant to our lives, to the rest of the world. And you know, our upbringing was very much a cultural Patchwork, a quilt, if you will, of different backgrounds, different cultures. Were Korean by birth. I grew up across like Canada, Japan, Indonesia. We my brother and I went to university in Evanston, Illinois, and then we, you know, moved back to Hong Kong, moved to Singapore. We’ve just been kind of all over the place. But the place most year to our family, and we’ve lived there the longest is Indonesia. And Indonesia is, you know, a massive country that actually the world knows about, but is, I think, you know, slower in adapting to the cultures and trends of then we will really see a pickup in that in the next 10 years. We believe, and tempeh is just one of the super foods around the world that are like yet to reach the international audiences. And I like to kind of compare it to like a kombucha or an acai. Like, you know, these are locally, culturally relevant super foods that never really cross the ocean until, you know, maybe one or two decades ago. And so we’re really trying to play that role with Tempe, which is Indonesia’s national super food.
Kara Goldin 4:20
So how would you describe tempeh and sort of the benefits of it, I guess what? What is it that that maybe your mom saw early on? Moms always know best, right? So
Liz Kang 4:31
absolutely, my mom definitely has a very keen eye for these things. And tempeh is so for those of you who don’t know, it’s a cousin of tofu. So it’s also a bean based alternate plant based protein source. But the difference is, it’s actually fermented with the whole bean retained in the process. So what it kind of looks like, typically, if you go to the grocery. Store you go to the freezer, or like the chilled section and midst, like tofu seitan, you’ll see a block of tempeh, and that typically looks like, you know, it could be like a cube, or it could be like little cylinder, and it’s basically fermented soybean most of the time. And what it does in that fermentation process is it the soybeans cake together to create a very protein and fiber and nutrient dense cake of sorts. You can stir fry it. You can put it in a burger. What we’ve done, we make all of our tempeh in house with non GMO Black Eyed Peas so they have no soy. So it’s a non soy tempeh. And what we do is we slice it and cook it in coconut oil. But the benefits of tempeh are really, like, 1000 fold. It’s just, I usually tell people this, like, if you ask someone on the streets like, Hey, do you know what tempeh is, people will typically be like, I don’t really know what that is. I’ve heard of it. I’ve seen it out at, like, a vegan restaurant, like my office sometimes gives it to us. Or if you ask someone, you know, what’s tofu? You know, 99% of people will know. And the reason is that tofu was much more transportable in terms of refrigeration, you know, shelf life. You know, there are a lot of additives, and tofu a lot of the time, but tempeh, because of its natural fermentation process and the fact that it has no preservatives, the shelf life is only like three to seven days. So to take it from Indonesia to like, you know, shelves in Whole Foods in the US is just too far a distance. And so because of that, it’s been slower to reach global audiences. But the benefits of it are really incredible. Tempeh is para probiotic, which also means that, you know, typically, when you cook a probiotic product, the probiotics will die, but Tempe retains that throughout the process. So not only does a tempeh chip, which is cooked in coconut oil, have high protein, have high fiber, it also retains all of the probiotic properties of tempeh.
Kara Goldin 7:11
That’s amazing, because a lot of times when you cook something, yeah, you know that, that then the benefits of it actually go away. So that’s terrific that you’re able to still keep those as as part of it. So where does the name Mamame come from?
Liz Kang 7:28
Okay, that is a really good question. I came up with it so I take full credit. It was in actually one of our family zoom brainstorming sessions during COVID. I was in Hong Kong, my brother was in Chicago, my mom and dad were in Jakarta, and we would do these weekend zoom calls. And we were really brainstorming different ideas, and I kind of took the name like derived from Japan, which was also another place that we grew up. And so mama, in Japanese as mother and mom a and Japanese is beans. So when you see like edamame, that’s just the type of bean. And so Mamame is a combination of mom and beans. So it’s plant based snacks made with my mom’s Big Love.
Kara Goldin 8:16
I love it. So you launched in the US not too long ago, about a month ago. I love your story that you launched in March of this year, internationally. So you’re actually based, as you mentioned, in Singapore. So often you see brands, especially in the snack category, launch in the US and then do the reverse. But I should say, but you’ve done the reverse, which is terrific. So how did you decide that you would go international so quickly and and how’s it been so far? So
Liz Kang 8:55
we launched our first market was March of 2023, and that was in Korea. And after that, it was Japan. And then we started with Asia, because it was just naturally our home ground. We’re based our plant is in Indonesia. I’m based in Singapore. My mom still is based in Jakarta, and we kind of shuffle back and forth and see each other. So actually, the concept of tempeh is, you know, very much, like household in Indonesia, you can see it on the streets. You can, you know, you’ll see, like a rickshaw selling like little bags of tempeh chips on the streets. It’s very common. And so we always knew that our product was, you know, our intention with the product was to act as a vessel to introduce it to other markets and other customers around the world. And our first kind of immediate market was Korea, because, you know, my mom and I, neither of us have a food background or an entrepreneurial background, and so we were like, Let’s stay in our comfort zone. And you know, I never got the chance to. Properly live there. But my mom grew up there, so she knows it very well. And we took our products to South Korea. And there are very much a trendy, like, you know, forward thinking, really, like, you know, nutritionally literate people, and so they’re really on top of the trends. And, you know, in Korea, Tempe is not household, so people don’t know what it is. It’s the same as the US. And that kind of exposure was really, really interesting, because it was a very good case study of when you put this bag of chips in front of people who’ve never had it before and who are much more familiar with potato chips, or, you know, sweet potato chips, or popcorn or tortilla chips. How do they play out? And we thought it was really fascinating how even in a market like Korea, where people aren’t familiar with Tempe at all, they were really responding positively to the benefits of it. You know, nowadays, all it takes is a quick Google of what tempeh is. And so the barrier to entry into people’s minds, and you know, getting that first hook in has been much easier. And so after our success in Korea, I think my mom was actually the person who kind of felt like, Maybe we should try to attend these international trade shows see what the response is. And like, the first show that we attended was in Japan, and it was food X, and it was a phenomenal show. It was the first big food X after COVID. And so we really lucked out, because all of the buyers that wouldn’t have otherwise traveled were there because they wanted to be outside. And there, that was where we met a lot of the senior buyers from the US, and that’s how this all kind of got started. And at the time, I wasn’t even I didn’t even leave my CNN job yet, and I hadn’t left, and I was doing it full time. It took a couple days off to go help my mom, and I think that was when we really quickly realized that the product is designed to be suited for everyone, and that was kind of the ethos that we were going to carry forward, even from the product level. My mom always really wanted to promote inclusivity in terms of age. She wanted kids to be able to eat it. She wanted elderly people to be able to eat it. There are no allergens. We don’t have any soy. We’re cooked in like, you know, coconut oil, rather than palm oil or seed oils. So that kind of attitude kind of carried us forward into this journey, into launching in 10 countries over a year and a half.
Kara Goldin 12:38
Wow. And 10 countries, wow. That’s, that’s amazing. I mean, this must have been so new to you, definitely dealing with grocery retailers and distributors. I mean, this is, you know, it’s scary, scary stuff. Did your mom have experience with this? Or Did anybody else? Or were you just kind of learning as as you went along? It was really the
Liz Kang 13:01
blind leading the blind. We were clueless. And I’m sure, like, you probably had, like, a similar trajectory as well, with founding of hint we we were really kind of figuring it out as we went along. I think the real benefits that we carry through. My mom was just, you know, she was a stay at home mom for 27 years, and before that, she was a writer on for television and radio in Korea. And, you know, I think in the 27 years when she was raising me and my brother, she frequented grocery stores all over the world, and that kind of like, you know, first hand empirical data is so invaluable. And, you know, I think even you know, people who’ve worked in this industry for, you know, 10 years, that can’t really compare to people who’ve been going in and out of every grocery store every day for the past 27 years. And so true. Like, I love to say that, like, you know, my mom is incredible in the fact that she’s never been an entrepreneur before, but it just is so natural to her. You know, there’s no better person to run a business than someone who’s run a household, and I really feel like those kind of instincts of, you know what works at a grocery store, what products are new, and what are the trends? What do you know? What do moms like to buy those insights really advised us throughout the process. And as for myself, like I did, work in commercial partnerships, I was at in ad sales at CNN for a couple of years. But beyond that, I think I lucked out in the sense that I’m really shameless in terms of asking the questions to people that are strangers. And I say, what is that? Or, you know, how do I do this? And I think those questions, you know, can be bothersome, but oftentimes are endearing to these experts. And we’ve been helped colossal. Lead by all of our partners in our different markets, our distributors. You know, when we started out, I didn’t even know what a palette was and like how shipping worked, and I was clueless on a lot of things, and especially in a market like the US, where the distribution network, the different regions, the different buying structures are so complex, it was really, really a huge benefit to us to have the right partners in place that helped us through it.
Kara Goldin 15:28
How has Mamame evolved? I guess, since, since starting in March of 2023, if you had to think back on maybe you’re sharing a story with another entrepreneur who feels like, you know, they’re really screwing things up and and you know you you want to share that, oh, our here’s what happened to us when you know we had our first run, or maybe the packaging needed to change. We had no idea. I mean, there were so many for for us, I remember those early days, but is there one story that kind of stands out that shows how you’ve evolved as you know, and even in the short amount of time?
Liz Kang 16:11
Wow, there’s, there’s so much like you. You said it’s, it’s really quite fascinating. How, how many errors you need to make in order to make the right decisions, especially at the very beginning. One of the big things that was a was a big barrier last year, was the fact that we, we did not have a food tech background or know how to run a factory and a plant, and you know, where we do everything in house? And that was a choice that we made from early on. We didn’t want to, like, work with a, like, a third party manufacturer. We wanted to do this recipe and do it right. It really started with me, my mom and our nanny in Indonesia, who had raised me and my brother and helped you know, she’d been with us for 20 years, and it was just the two of them in the kitchen for the first, like few months. And I think from that to creating a fully operational production line and hiring 35 people, that process was probably like as hard as, you know, hitting your first 100k in revenue, and like, you know, that’s secondary, like the foundational element of building, you know, buying the right machines, getting them commissioned, hiring an engineer, especially for a product that has never been manufactured automatically before that was very, very challenging. And like, huge kudos to my mom, because she is so resilient. And, you know, she sourced all of her machines from different suppliers around the world. She would like go on, you know, Alibaba, for suppliers in China, for, like, frying machines. She would go on different websites to, like, find machines from India. And, you know, she would reach out to them using Google Translate in their local language. And the first, the funny story is that we got our first fryer, and it was a continuous fryer, and that it would be cooking our tempeh chips for, like, however, amount of time, and then it came, and we realized it wasn’t working very well. All the chips were breaking. Tempeh is quite fragile. It’s not like a whole piece of, like potato, for example, where it’s just, you know, it’s one chunk. But, you know, Tempe is fragmented into tapioca flour the beans, and it’s quite easily shattered. And so we got someone in to, like, look at the machine and tell us what’s wrong. And they were like, This machine is for chicken nuggets. This is not for something and we wouldn’t have known that. And we, my mom, had to, basically, like, recommission the machine locally and have people come and rejig it to suit it to our needs. But it was just kind of a strange and funny situation, but one that was really, really interesting for us to go through and adapt with.
Kara Goldin 19:12
That’s That’s wild. So are you still manufacturing everything you’re not co packing with anyone? Yeah, wow. That’s, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. But on the other hand, if you ever, I’m sure you’ll continue to scale in the US, you’d be able to set up your manufacturing here as well, if need be. So that’s, that’s wild. So when you think about, well, first of all, how many SKUs did you actually launch with? And is there one SKU that is kind of the runaway bestseller today?
Liz Kang 19:48
Yeah. So we launched with six, and it was original, chili, sea salt, Rosemary cheese and barbecue and the best. Color has actually we predicted it to be original, but hot chili has been huge for us. And I think it’s just because there’s a general like, you know, keenness towards trying something that’s super spicy, and our chips are medium spicy, it’s very manageable and tolerable, even for spicy limps. And it’s just been, like, the top seller, and a lot of people are surprised by Rosemary, because it’s really difficult, yeah, combination, but savory, yeah, it’s really good. It’s the sweet and savory of the kind of herviness. We love it, but it’s not in the US yet, so we’re trying to get that across soon.
Kara Goldin 20:44
When you think about brand design and like the esthetics, I guess of the of the product, I think that you don’t have to have it all perfect from day one out of the gate, but definitely it’s as important as what’s inside the package pretty quickly after after launch, would you agree? And sort of, what have you learned about that?
Liz Kang 21:10
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so actually, the the brand packaging was the the bags were designed by my brother, and so we kept everything in house. And he is a student. He still study. He’s in university. He’s in his final year, and so he also has no background in package design. So all of us kind of started with a blank slate, and then we decided to build this together. I think the first iteration that we made, you know, we didn’t even really like, I think the photo, the image on the bag, was taken on an iPhone, so it wasn’t even, like, officially, you know, done. We try to keep it cheap and good. And my brother did a really good job. I would think, I think it’s the bright colors and, you know, the way it looks on shelves, really great. I think throughout the the kind of logistical elements of, how do we palletize this and how do like, what should the sizes look like? Um, especially in the US, even right now, like this past month, when I was at Erewhon, we only have one SKU there, and it’s the sea salt, and we have the 3.5 ounce bags. But our 3.5 ounce bags are quite like tight, just to, like, you know, pack all of the chips into, like, a small, compact bag. But I realized that on shelves because all of the other like popcorn, for example, like 3.5 ounces of popcorn for like, lesser evil, it’s like this big because popcorn so light, but because our chips are so dense and they’re there, they have substance there, there’s a lot less volume. It looks like volume so on the shelf, it just kind of looks like, oh, this giant bag of popcorn. And our Tempe chips are so small, and so we’re rethinking how to re measure and kind of expand the size a little bit to, like, really represent how much is in the bag. Because I think customers, that’s the first thing that they notice, right? And so a lot of trial and error, but it’s it’s definitely important. I do think our colors stand out quite well and biased because my brother designed it, but
Kara Goldin 23:26
I love it well. I remember when we first launched, we had a clear label, and to your point about who we were sitting next to, if we were sitting next to a vitamin water that was like, bright pink, yeah, we would just get lost on the shelf. And I really felt like launching a water we should have, uh, we should have a clear label so we could talk about, you know, the clean ingredients, you know, the clear but when we were forced actually to go, they ran out of stock on on clear labels, and we had to make a quick change in our label when there was a bottle deposit in New York. And so we decided, well, it’s not perfect, but let’s just go with the white labels. And all of a sudden, everything popped on the on and our sales went up 10x like, within a couple of weeks, we were like, Wait, what is going on? Like, you know, we didn’t have any, like, special promotion going on or anything. We were like, Whoa, what happened? And it was, it was the label. So I think once you actually get on the shelf trying to, you know, see kind of, what’s going on, where do you fit on the shelf, typically, what category, but also the lighting, all of these factors, I think, definitely have some sort of impact on it. So consumer stories, I always say that those are the stories that make founders know that they’re doing something right, right? Is there any story that is really. It out to you from or, I should say, message or that ends up being a story that a consumer has shared with you about your product that has made you smile, made you continue, because it’s hard, it’s tough being an entrepreneur. For sure, absolutely.
Liz Kang 25:21
I think there are quite a few of them. That one that really stands out to me was last year when we had first kind of launched into Europe, and we were like, in between seasons of like, sending our shipment to, you know, to the to Europe, and the the in between is quite long, because the distance is also from Indonesia to Europe is quite far. And we would get these messages on Instagram from a group of moms, and they would like, Heckle us in the comment section. Be like, what are you guys back? You know, my kids will only eat these. And it’s typically moms that, like, really, really, they find the joy in and satisfaction and giving their kids something that they really enjoy, but also, like, as a mom, like, know that is healthy for the child. And so because of that, like, there are a lot of people who are like, actually suffering from celiac disease and need to eat gluten free. Or people who are like, really, you know, they do not tolerate seed oil as well. There are definitely different subsections of audiences, those with soy allergens. There are lots of people who reach out to us, being like, Thank you. Thank you for making this for us so that we can eat it. And you know, there are other snacks out there. I think all the snacks and the salty snack aisle belong there. And there is a snack that is needed for any type of moment. And you know, sometimes you crave a potato chip, sometimes you crave a tortilla chip, like, and we just want to make sure that sometimes you crave a tempeh chip, and that that moment is, you know, to your benefit, like to the consumers benefit and their health and their family’s health, I guess. Yeah.
Kara Goldin 27:18
So thinking back last question. So thinking back on the you’re getting ready to start, you’re so worried, you’re you’re trying to figure out how this is, you know all going to happen, and maybe sharing some inspiration with another founder who might be sitting there in those early days, given what you’ve built so quickly in the last, you know, year and a half. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty, pretty incredible. But what would you what kind of inspiration would you share with another founder or somebody thinking about going and doing this? Well,
Liz Kang 28:03
I think it’s, oh, that’s very hard. I don’t feel like I am in the position to be giving advice. I’m busy receiving it still. But I think if you did use the word inspiration. So I think the thing that I would say is was my biggest learning and my biggest inspiration was really the opportunity and the power to step into myself and to expand the version of my identity beyond what was originally my career path. And I think when we think career path, it can be in many different shapes and forms. And I was at CNN, and I had been there for five and a half years, and when my mom asked me to join the company full time, I was really conflicted, because I was like, you know, I’ve been working on this path for so long. I’ve built so much equity here. You know, everybody like, likes me. I like all the people I work with. I love my job. And then what like can I make this jump and will it? Will I be good at it? And also, like I was, I was young. I was, I was, it was last year. I mean, so I was a year younger. I was 27 and in my mind, I was like, What am I if I don’t have like, CNN as my job and my identity? Like, when I go to a party, what am I going to tell people? Like, hey, Liz, what do you do? Like, Oh, I I sell tempeh chips. And that in itself, the entrepreneurial journey, it had never been a dream for me. And I think that’s also why I kind of was trying to diminish the meaning of it. But then one of my my co workers at the time who I like, you know, she she reached out to me. She was like, Hey, I heard you’re leaving. And I was like, Yeah, I’m really worried about it. And she was like, You are so much more than your job. Like, you know, you’re like, adult. Daughter, you’re a friend like you’re, you know, a sister, and you can be whatever you want to be, and this doesn’t have to define you. And I think when I carried that along into this role there, it was so rewarding, because I was learning so much, and at the same time, I was also messing up so much, and none of it felt like a huge, like burden to me, because I was like, I’m I’m beyond this, and this is a part of who I am, and I am learning from this experience, and I’m drawing so much from this experience, but I’m just here to give and do whatever it takes to grow with the company, and I don’t have to be so hard on myself for it, because that’s not the complete form of who I am. Yeah.
Kara Goldin 30:54
So great. Well. Liz, thank you so much for sharing the journey thus far, and of course, Mamame you guys have done an incredible job out of the gate. I’m so excited to watch this brand grow. And definitely, if you’re in the US, check it out now. It’s sprouts and air one and other natural grocers nationwide, very, very soon. And as Liz mentioned, it’s global, so this is really one that you you for sure need to check out. So Liz Kang, founder and CO CEO of Mamame. Thank you again. Everyone. Have a wonderful, wonderful afternoon. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you, too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey. I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. You.
