The story of the chilli oil really starts in the 1980's, when Yok Chan and her family were living in Leyton, East London. Yok Chan's husband would buy Chinese chilli oil from the local Asian supermarket in Hackney. This was the beginning of the chilli oil fixation, as he would go through a jar every three to four days, eventually buying twelve jars at a time.
THE CATALYST
This routine went into the mid to late 1990's until one day, when looking to save money, Yok Chan looked at the ingredients and decided to have a go at making it herself. She used similar ingredients to the shop bought version at first, but after a while started substituting ingredients with her own. Combining and utilising her influences from Chinese, Malay and Sri Lankan food, elevating it to her taste.. and thus the first Yok Chan's Chilli Oil was born!
THE EARLY STAGES
Around 1996/97 is when the chilli oil first ventured outside Yok Chan's household. She sold jars to raise money for the local parish charity cake stall, plus gave out jars to colleagues when she was a midwife at Homerton Hospital (the secretary there being the very first paying customer, who still buys jars to this day).
Over time Yok Chan finely tuned and tailored the chilli oil, perfecting it into what it is today. The chilli oil however was only known by a select few until 2013, when the idea to distribute it came about..
After Christmas 2012, Yok Chan’s son brought back a 500ml jar of the chilli oil back to his shared house. His housemates tried it and were blown away, using it on everything and brainstorming ideas, pushing for it to become a product. The jar was demolished in nine days.
It started off being casually sold to friends and Yok Chan’s son’s colleagues. Soon a brand name was created and a label was designed. Eventually more and more people started asking for it, telling their friends about it. It's notoriety took on a life of its own and we soon realised we had something pretty special in our hands.
We managed to get our product into a few local shops and had a brief and very fun stint on a market stall. We slowed down production for a while but then Covid came along, making it almost impossible to operate and source ingredients. We almost called it a day, but everyone kept asking about the product and encouraged us to keep going.
With Yok Chan's natural intuition, some re-evaluation on operations, plus A LOT of help and favours, we're slowly and steadily transforming Yok Chan's humble homemade chilli oil from a fun side hustle, into a fully-fledged small business.
