Mouthgasm, Small Bite into Big Bite

12 JANUARY 2022

Hidayah Hishamly, Izzul Nazaruddin, Mardhiah Zainal, Maya Kusuma, Syamira Liana

Mouthgasm Crunchy is one of the top local snack brands that was established in February 2020. It is a snack-based mocha chocolate that currently is in high demand and managed to expand the market within a year until now.

With a large number of followers on Instagram, Mouthgasm Crunchy has built its brand throughout these two years, standing on top of the snack brand in Malaysia. Its headquarters was located at Seri Iskandar, Perak.

Shahrul Shafiq Rosni, 27, the founder of Mouthgasm Crunchy who previously studies architecture at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Seri Iskandar.

Shahrul Shafiq said he started this business with his wife, Nabilah Nur Adriana, asking her to help him in production while he managed marketing.

Who could predict with a small amount of RM1,500 as a starting capital to build a brand could generate a profit of more than six figures.

Mouthgasm Crunchy started with low modal, small business teams, hence no factory to produce and manufacture their products.

He also hired three graphic designers from UiTM Seri Iskandar to design packaging for Mouthgasm Crunchy.

In the journey of designing packaging, he tried to find the differences in packaging. He wants the audience curious about the product that he sells.

During the first production, Mouthgasm Crunchy produced 200 jars only but the demand was over the supply. Shahrul Shafiq said they needed to produce the same amount of choco jar for three months without taking any profit.

“In three months of making business, we did not take any profit but we used it as a rolling modal to grow this business,” he added.

Currently, Mouthgasm Crunchy has two main departments which are management and production, and has more than 20 employees.

That is the fact of how he grew his business and now Mouthgasm Crunchy could produce 30,000 jars per month.

Mouthgasm Crunchy Deserve the Trophies

After two years in the world of business, Mouthgasm Crunchy and the founder received two awards which are, the company received an Award of Industry Leadership (Food and Beverages Chocolate-based product) 2021.

Meanwhile the founder, Shahrul Shafiq received an Award of Excellent Entrepreneur 2021.

The company has RM300,000 assets of production and RM100,000 assets of marketing.

In addition, the best-selling of their product is the mocha flavor that has sold more than 500,000 jars.

Shahrul Shafiq also expressed his gratitude that his business became distributor retail at 100 Petronas’s outlet around Klang Valley and penetrated overseas markets.

“There are three countries that we have penetrated their market which are Thailand, Singapore, and Brunei,” said the founder.

With a mission before 2025 to become a snack manufacturer brand chocolate-based that has a market value in Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

​​From Zero to Hero, Steps Taken to Become a Successful Entrepreneur

Shahrul Shafiq was very passionate about becoming an entrepreneur and decided to step into the business industry with no prior training, thus zero knowledge in business.

Sharing his journey as a businessman, he faced failure two times before becoming a young entrepreneur. He started his business by opening a western food restaurant in Seri Iskandar.

However, due to his lack of research and understanding of the market, it has cost the business to suffer and fail.

“I did not do proper research on what time I should operate the restaurant. I should study the audience’s time and at what time people are looking for food,” said Shahrul Shafiq.

His passion for business did not make him give up, he decided to move to another business selling beverages which are boba milk tea in Seri Iskandar. This time he went for a food truck business concept.

This business was well-received as he managed to sell 1,000 cups per day. However, he experienced a downward trend in the business because of the TeaLive opening in Seri Iskandar, a popular beverages brand in Malaysia.

Demand from the audience getting slow, made him move into another business with a new strategy.

After he failed twice in the business industry, he finally could establish Mouthgasm Crunchy and keep relevant until now after almost two years of operates.

Following the Trend, Social Media as a Marketing Strategies

The company uses social media marketing as a strategy to promote its brands, connect with audiences and increase sales. The platform that was mainly utilized by the company is Instagram and Facebook.

Badrul Hisham, 25, Sales and Marketing Executive at Mouthgasm Crunchy said that the highest engagement from audiences was on Instagram and Twitter.

However, TikTok nowadays has been conquering all the social media platforms hence making mouthgasm audience engagement shift to TikTok.

“To expand our business, currently we are still exploring how to run YouTube Ads and Google Ads to promote our products,” said Badrul Hisham.

The founder said that marketing was the core of making money in all businesses, it requires a lot of money to make the marketing efforts profitable. Using local influencers is cost-effective and can be a very big marketing budget.

“Usually, we spend about RM10,000 monthly on average to pay for influencers, however, it depends on what type of influencer that we approached,” he added.

Mouthgasm Crunchy started to spike in sales in the year 2020 which was during the early stage of pandemic COVID-19. However, it led to a problem in sales and marketing after the pandemic. They then shifted the trend-making and change to a new marketing strategy.

Four Steps, Producing a Great Final Product

Production is the method of turning raw materials into finished goods or products in a manufacturing process with the use of labor or machinery upon completion the business sells to a customer.

Saiful Bahri, 26, Production Manager at Mouthgasm Crunchy, the one who is in charge to make sure production work runs smoothly from the number of raw materials, dealing, and negotiating with suppliers to handling the packaging.

“For now, we are using semi-automatic which means for filling, we still do it manually using labor force while for chocolate cooking and pouring it in a jarring process, we are using machines.

“We still do it manually for labeling too but we are looking for a labeling machine to make our work easier,” said Saiful Bahri.

The production team will be segregating general workers into four stations and four persons each station. Some of them execute on filling, cooking the chocolate, pouring the chocolate, and packaging.

Usually, the filling will be done by every general worker since the period of cooking the chocolate is taking quite some time around 30 to 45 minutes.

In the meantime, they will do the filling and once the chocolate is cooked, general workers are split into groups, four persons for pouring, four persons for capping, and two persons for sealing. The total would be 10 people.

Labeling will be done after the cooling period to settle down the temperature and to avoid any changes in the bottle. After labeling and packaging, the final product will be put onto the rack accordingly.

Mouthgasm Crunchy has four different types of flavors at the moment and they are Mocha, Macchiato, Kookiss, and Mocha Salted Caramel. There is a new flavor coming which the product is still under development.

The production in a day will produce a minimum of 50 cartons and the maximum is 200 cartons depending on the production rate. In a year, they produced around 200,000 bottles.

Since the products are selling quite fast, they will make sure to have a minimum of 100 boxes for each menu. For every 100 boxes is equals 2,400 bottles.

Saiful Bahri said that they used to not achieve the production’s target in a day due to high demand from customers and the production team cannot afford to produce more products. The problem comes from the machine affecting the production too.

There are 3 ways for delivery options. They have their agents, self-pickup by customers, or through courier service.

"If through courier, we will prepare the product and at around 3 PM to 6 PM, whether CityLink or J&T will pick up the product and send it to customer.

“We also do delivery by lorry for our stockist. Stockists will need a minimum of 50 boxes so we will first collect orders from the stockists and deliver it at 600 to 800 boxes,” he added.

There was one time during products’ delivery, J&T courier had an accident at Kuala Lumpur and they compensated Mouthgasm Crunchy with the full amount of the product loss. That is one of the risks that the company has to take.

The quality of the product is taken care of by following the procedure of cooking, fillings, net weight, the taste of the chocolate itself, and the consistency of chocolate cooked at the right temperature and time.

They also follow the guidelines from the Food Safety is the Responsibility of the Industry (MeSTI) and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP).

Inflation rates increase every year and the price of items increases too. According to the production manager, there are three ways to resolve the problem. It is either revising the quantity of the product, revising the price by raising prices, or making some changes in the ingredients.