John Cheng and the unexpected afterlife of a sugar factory

The young banker arrived at the sugar factory with a useful disadvantage: he did not know how things were supposed to be done. John Cheng joined his family’s business in 2008 and began asking questions about manufacturing. How long did a process take? What went into a batch? How many bags came out? The answers were not always written down. For a company selling an everyday ingredient, there was a surprising amount left to experience.

He had worked at HSBC, looking at internal operations. Now he was timing work in a business his grandfather had started in 1947. The distance between banking and rock sugar sounds considerable. In Cheng’s account, the connection was practical: both had processes, and processes could be examined. Before he helped other entrepreneurs bring unfamiliar foods to market, he spent years making a familiar business easier to understand.

A surname is no operating manual

Cheng Yew Heng had been part of his childhood long before it became his responsibility. School holidays could mean a visit to the factory or accompanying his father to see customers. He remembered those trips fondly, while admitting that television had seemed an attractive competing appointment. His father’s fallback advice after a disappointing exam was that he could always come and knock rock sugar. Career counselling in the family had a rather literal edge.

After studying business management at Singapore Management University, Cheng went into banking. He graduated in 2007; a year later, he joined the family firm. His academic interests had included operations management and marketing, two disciplines that would become unusually close neighbours in his working life. First came the question of how to make the product reliably. Later came the question of how to persuade a different generation to want it.

The family name did not supply instant authority. Experienced workers had their own reasons for trusting established methods. Cheng has joked about the reversal of a Chinese saying: they had eaten more sugar than he had eaten rice. The joke contains a management problem. Someone can inherit a position much faster than they acquire the judgement that makes people listen.

His response was patient and operational. He described spending his first five years strengthening the foundations. Production measurements, records and clearer processes gave the business something firmer than habit to work with. He also moved the company from a six-day week to five, consolidating deliveries during the difficult trading conditions of 2008 and 2009. It was a change employees could feel on the calendar.

“But I learnt from scratch. I had no proper training.”John Cheng, on joining the family business

The sugar stick with a second career

Rock sugar is not an obvious candidate for a makeover. It is an ingredient, often encountered as part of something else. Cheng approached it as a product with possibilities of its own. Jewels Rock Sugar Sticks put flavoured crystals on a stick that could stir a drink, moving something associated with traditional cooking into the territory of gifts, cocktails and a small personal treat.

By 2020, the range included 15 flavours, and the sticks had reached more than 160 outlets across mainland China, Japan and Hong Kong. Those are historical figures, but they explain the direction of travel. The business was learning to meet consumers directly, alongside its established work serving other businesses. A familiar material acquired a different occasion for being bought.

The experiment also involved asking for help. Cheng worked with educational institutions on production and product development. Singapore Institute of Technology contributed work on sugar crystallisation; the Institute of Technical Education and Singapore Polytechnic were involved in improving processes and packaging. Singapore Polytechnic also helped formulate the sticks. His progress depended partly on knowing which expertise the factory did not already possess.

There is a useful modesty in that detail. The founder story often reserves its best lighting for the lone inventor. Here, the interesting work crossed organisational boundaries. A manufacturer brought the problem, teachers and specialists brought knowledge, and a retail product emerged from the exchange. Cheng would later build a business around making those exchanges easier for other people.

What else could the factory make possible?

The idea for Innovate360 grew partly out of a commercial question. Cheng was building retail channels and exploring innovation, including on a trip around Europe with Enterprise Singapore. Startups might develop products that his family’s business could distribute. They could use facilities and relationships that already existed; the established company could find new products and new reasons to grow.

Innovate360 began in 2018. By April 2019, Cheng was describing plans for the accelerator and the sugar business to occupy the same new building. Startups would have space for research and development, with help on warehousing and logistics. The old business supplied a base for experiments whose ingredients and methods might look very different from its own.

That arrangement gives his story its particular texture. A food founder may need advice, but a product also needs somewhere to be made, tested, packed and stored. Those needs take up space. They have delivery schedules. Cheng’s background gave him experience with the unromantic things that must happen between an interesting idea and a customer receiving an order.

In 2019, he described Innovate360 as playing a “big brother” role. He was looking for startups with connections to one another’s work, including businesses using fermentation. An accelerator could bring those founders close enough to exchange knowledge, while the manufacturing and distribution network offered a possible route beyond the laboratory. Collaboration had a physical address and a commercial purpose.

Today, Innovate360 describes support for more than 100 agri-food technology startups since 2018 and three manufacturing facilities, alongside shared laboratories, test kitchens and coworking spaces. The point of those facilities is straightforward: founders can draw on infrastructure and people while working out how to scale. Cheng’s early lessons in measuring production have acquired a much wider audience.

An introvert with a crowded diary

For someone whose work depends on connections, Cheng has described himself as an introvert. That is a more interesting combination than the familiar picture of the relentlessly outgoing entrepreneur. His public work involves founders, universities, manufacturers, public agencies and investors. The ability to assemble that company need not require a taste for being the loudest person in it.

His interests away from manufacturing offer a lighter surprise. In a 2018 profile, he talked about Parisian cafés and visiting Louis Vuitton boutiques in Paris. It is a pleasingly specific alternative to the usual executive hobby list. The person thinking about packaging machinery also appreciates a beautifully presented object. One can enjoy the contrast without pretending a shopping preference explains an entire business.

The people question had practical consequences at the factory, too. As automation took over work, he discussed developing product lines that could provide jobs for affected employees. Machinery could change the operation while the company still considered where its people would fit. That is a more demanding exercise than simply counting how much faster a machine can run.

The business beyond the family

Cheng co-founded and chairs Feed 9 Billion, a platform built around cooperation on food sustainability. Its name expresses an ambition framed around feeding nine billion people by 2050. It is a statement of purpose, rather than a claim that one organisation can produce an answer on its own. The platform has helped launch the Singapore edition of the Good Food Startup Manual with the Good Food Institute.

He has also taken on roles at the points where enterprise meets institutions: the Pro-Enterprise Panel, the Singapore Food Story evaluation process and the board of Science Centre Singapore. Such work extends the range of conversations around a new business. A founder’s next difficulty may involve research, a regulation or an introduction as readily as another investment pitch.

His university remains part of that circle. He helped establish the SMU Business Families Alumni Group, a place for people confronting the peculiar mixture of inheritance and entrepreneurship. He participated in the university’s Imagine Better fundraising project in 2019 and joined its alumni philanthropy work. Since 2017, his community involvement has also included Club-100 at North West Community Development Council.

In 2021, he launched foodculture.sg to help food businesses engage consumers and sell online. It extended his attention from making products to finding buyers for them. A factory, a shared laboratory and an online shop might seem like different enterprises. In his career, they sit along the same route a product must travel.

The next trip starts with the old lessons

His recent public activity keeps that attention on routes to market. In September 2026, Innovate360 participated in S-Tron China in Shanghai. Cheng described visits to partners, businesses and distributors, including Bright Food Group. He also reported hosting members of the Pro-Enterprise Panel at Innovate360 for a discussion about the business environment and a tour of its facilities.

A filmed conversation published on 19 October 2026 returned to family succession and the trust required to introduce change. Eighteen years after joining the sugar business, those subjects still belong together. A new process can be drawn neatly on paper; persuading the people who will operate it requires another kind of work.

Cheng’s career has steadily enlarged the circle of people for whom he does that work. There were factory colleagues, then product-development partners, then founders looking for somewhere to begin. The continuity is in the questions: what is already available, what needs improving, and who could help? For a former banker who once had to learn how the sugar was made, they remain useful questions to carry into the next room.