David Tan of Vismark Food Industries

David Tan runs two food companies which consist of Vismark and TopChoice. TopChoice Food Industries was founded in 2000 together with his elder brother, Tan Eng Lai who comes from a broadcasting background at a startup cost of $1.4 million. TopChoice has developed into manufacturing ready-to-serve Italian and Mediterranean sauces and frozen products and these activities are somehow related to his “occupational disease”.

David was born into a family of 7 siblings. His father came from a village in Nan’An county in Fujian province and started his life in Singapore selling Hokkien Mee at the New World Amusement Park before becoming a foreman at a construction firm. As his family was poor back then, the Tans even operated a stall selling rice dumplings at their old kampong house in Lorong Tai Seng, doing a small-scale business and earning a smaller income.

David has been working from a young age since he was not academically inclined. At the age of 17, he became an electrician and accompanied his boss in installing electric cables and appliances. He started to gain interest in the food industries in his early 20s while he was an assistant manager of a chocolate factory. His energetic and diligent character has found his assistant job as boring and decided to sell fruits instead. His fruit stall may seem unattractive, however, his business started to pick up with accumulated experience and he managed to acquire some tricks of the trade. Therefore, he founded Vismark in 1984 with food manufacturing and distribution as its core businesses and in 2000, he co-founded TopChoice with Eng Lai.

Mr David Tan, Chairman and Managing Director of Vismark Group of Companies and co-founder of TopChoice

David has been highly sentitive towards the texture and taste of food. He would often drink hot soups from the chain stores of some Western restaurants and found out that the taste of the soups are totally different from a few different branches. Hot soups are produced through the same central kitchen. The only difference is that the amount of water and seasonings used in some branches are not the same. That is why he has thought of manufacturing high quality soups to be distributed to hotels, restaurants and supermarkets.

Today, most of the sauces produced by Vismark are of local Nanyang taste. With 30 types of Nanyang-style sauces, 20 trucks containing these sauces would be delivered daily to clients who have placed their orders with them. As Vismark is a wholesale business, of all customers who have purchased their sauces, hotels consist of 60%, restaurant clients consist of 20-30% and the remaining percentage has been distributed overseas such as Hong Kong, Mauritius and Dubai.  

Black Pepper Crab in retail pack that Vismark sells as one of its products

In recent years, an increasing number of hawkers also ordered 3-5 kilograms of Vismark sauces on a regular basis due to convenience, manpower and maintaining high quality in their dishes. Some of Vismark’s popular sauces include satay, mee siam and laksa. David said, “We have our own research in the mixture of our sauces and required genuine products in our production. We do not get involved in cut-throat competition by reducing prices as when we like, and we are open to feedbacks from our clients and consumers. I oversee procurement matters and Vismark does not have employees specializing in marketing. Therefore, other than being a boss, I am also a salesperson. We are a small company and I have to settle everything by myself to ensure that the procedures of our production and distribution are in order.”

Vismark has 9 factories all over Singapore. Most of the raw ingredients are procured in Johor and with cleaning and washing, each truck of products are delivered to every production plant in Singapore. The SARS outbreak in 2003 has been a lesson for Vismark to learn that never to put all eggs in one basket when making business investments and for them in putting food safety as their top priority, they should be planning to diversify the location of production so that in the event of a sudden disruption, their production would not be severely affected.

Exporting Vismark's products to overseas customers

60-year-old David always described that his company earned meagre profits although the food manufacturing industry has achieved breakthroughs consistently because they supply whatever their clients wanted and even they order lesser bottles of sauces, the company still have to deliver the orders on time. Although he is in the food processing business, he said that the best customer service is still Vismark’s top priority and he will continue to research on his products and sell new sauces for consumers to sample from time to time to suit their taste and not just sell their best-selling sauces.