Today we’re interviewing Adwin Koh Hsin Win, Head of Food Innovation and Technology at Pizza Hut in Malaysia!
So a global company like pizza hut needs to adapt to local cultures and sometimes the franchise can take charge of developing local R+D flavors. Adwin is the man who gets that job done.
Adwin is a rockstar who’s worked in Lays, Mcdonald’s, Pizza Hut, and even smaller companies building out their menus. He’s super experienced and knowledgeable in his field.
One of the industries I don’t really have a good grasp on are Quick Service or QSR interviews. One, I personally love fast food, but two, it’s definitively a different beast compared to a lot of the companies I work for.
When we started looking into food service, I never realized how important the ease of use of a product has to be for it to be part of a large QSR channel.
I love QSR interviews, especially R+D ones and Adwin’s reminds me of a personal favorite, Missy Schapook from Taco Bell. Fun fact, I actually went to the headquarters of Taco Bell thanks to Missy and she showed me everything from the kitchen where they innovate products, the sensory room where they put you into a booth for you to try new taco bell products, and the marketing room where they track each and every tweet and post for positive or negative vibes.
Adwin brings more insight to the field and talks about how the Malaysia team works with Global. It’s a really fun interview. As always, I ask Adwin about the cool things in Malaysia and he adds to the ever-growing list if I come back.
What’s up with Adam
Busy week the past couple of days. We had a tasting on a project I’m working on and it was so good to meet friends from my industry trying something I made. Really good feedback and I can’t wait to share it with you.
What else, oh I got food poisoning two days later. I think it was from my birthday food. Big mistake. Haven’t gotten it in a while but it wasn’t fun. Best advice I have for food poisoning? Purge quickly and aggressively!
Finally, I spoke at Stanford! Well, it was just a graduate class with like 10 people but now I can officially say I spoke at Stanford. Thanks to my friend Soh Kim for posting the opportunity on LinkedIn. Had a super engaging crowd, and I just feel so good doing these. More of these are to come. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m getting these opportunities.
So a big portion of this interview is talking about the QSR model which is a lot different from say, a CPG or B2B (consumer packaged goods or business to business) businesses. QSR involves essentially fast food companies that require minimum wage workers, iron-tight supply chains, and super efficient processes. All of these were developed and refined to get your burger in a minute or less.
One strategy that always excites me is something called to talk about LTOs, or Limited Time Offers. This is a specific strategy used in companies. CPG products also do this, but I feel QSR LTOs are more exciting.
Pre-pandemic, I felt like QSRs went through a huge LTO phase where it seems every two weeks, there was a new item menu that ranged from the kind of simple to eyebrow raising interest. One example is say, the McRib, another is that chicken sandwich made of two chicken patties as bread. LTOs are super supply chain intensive and resource heavy so it takes a quick team of everyone to analyze what can be bought, or what’s in excess,
LTOs follow an aggressive schedule and anything can kind of intervene in the process such as say, a movie deal or in general, supply chain crunches. In fact, the pandemic really crushed innovation in that area because of a sudden drop in demand, and after that, a pummeling of supply issues.
Fun fact, I had a chance to interview at Carl’s Jr over in Santa Barbara when I was a senior in college and they showed me an X-men promotion of one of their burger and said “yea, we decided to buy a grill that can mark an X on the bun” you gotta do what you gotta do. LTOs in the QSR industry sound like a lot of fun.
Hopefully, this gives you some context into some of the conversations Adwin and I have this interview. Quick Service Restaurants is such an interesting industry in food and being part of the R+D is definitively one of my favorite jobs.
Links
Taylors University
Hannah Dressen
Exchange Program
Hawaiian Chicken
Pineapple means luck in Chinese
LTO-Limited Time Offers
Tealive boba tea
McDonalds Malyasia
Potato Crisis in Malaysia
Penang
Langawi Beach
Redang
KL CC Twin Tower in Malaysia
Malaysia Museum
Petaling Street
Adwin’s Linkedin
End of the Show
So trigger warning, I’ll be talking about the two mass shootings that happened in California during Chinese New Years. Both were Asian men in their 60s and they targeted their communities, also older Asians. I’m not going to give this any more oxygen, and I don’t want to make a lot of assumptions just because the information is still coming in.
This actually has me for a loop as this wasn’t a hate crime from a mass shooter, who we’ve seen as generally young, these are people like my dad’s age.
As I read a bit more, both men seemed to be lonely but didn’t seem to be violent.
How we as individuals cope with loneliness is really something. I think men from different cultures and different generations cope with it differently but generally, men don’t like to admit they’re lonely. And when they do feel lonely, they feel pathetic, they feel like a ghost and that leads to anger, to blame, and to a point, revenge.
Without a ballast to keep you in check when you do get angry, that festers, and it can lead to violence. That ballast can be a person, or a group, or something, a lot of people don’t have that. When you don’t have that, it eats away your ability to empathize.
We’re suffering from a loneliness epidemic, and it’s not just young people, old people are feeling it too.
I’m not very good at giving actionable advice on this. I just want to share my thoughts. Maybe the only observation I can give is that you truly never know how lonely someone actually is.