Success with Sauce

Long a favorite thirst quencher in the Asian tropics, fermented palm sap is said to have wondrous medicinal properties for combatting high blood pressure, whooping cough and a host of other maladies. Whatever its actual benefits, its many devotees drink the stuff as if their lives depend on it. Known most commonly as toddy,* the deceptively mild-tasting brew ferments naturally after it is tapped atop 40-ft.-high coconut palms by shinnying, surefooted natives. It is so potent a potable that in Singapore its sale comes under strict government regulation: because the beverage gets stronger with age, the island's six licensed toddy parlors must serve it the same day it is drained from the trees and at closing time destroy any that remains unsold.

Now, however, toddy is going after a wider market. Responsible is an enterprising Singapore businessman, Alan Yeo, 37, whose thriving food-products firm has started packaging a mild version of the drink for home consumption. The problem was to find a way to keep the stuff from continuing to ferment after canning, thus preventing it from picking up the punch it can acquire in just a few hours in a toddy parlor. Chemist Yeo finally turned the trick with the help of a secret additive. His breakthrough led to Yeo's Toddy, a canned beverage that has proved so popular among Singapore's sophisticated imbibers that Yeo plans to start exporting it to Britain, the U.S. and several Asian markets.

Prawns & Jack Fruit. Success with sauce of one sort or another is nothing new for Yeo, as the very name of his company--Yeo Hiap Seng Canning & Sauce Factory Ltd.--would suggest. The firm was founded by Yeo's father, a small soya-sauce manufacturer in the family's home village on mainland China. In 1930, a year before Alan was born, the elder Yeo, now 71 and still active in the business, moved his family to Singapore. Alan, who had been shipped off to England for his schooling, did postgraduate work at London's Imperial College, where the subject of his thesis was "The Chemistry of Alcoholic Fermentation."

While the younger Yeo was getting his education, the family business expanded into a $1,000,000-a-year operation, and when Alan returned to Singapore in 1958 he was determined to keep it growing. He first installed modern machinery, then opened a gleaming new factory near the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur and diversified into such local delicacies as Chinese pickled vegetables, curried prawns and jack fruit. With Alan as managing director, the firm now turns out some 70 canned and bottled products and enjoys annual sales of $2,500,000, nearly three-fourths of the business coming from exports.

No Sparkle. In introducing his latest product, Yeo has taken steps to make toddy palatable to unaccustomed Westerners. Besides holding its alcoholic content to 6%, he has eliminated much of the drink's natural milky appearance. As for the sweet, gentle taste, toddy tipplers have likened it to "champagne without the sparkle." Says Yeo himself: "It's as old as the sun, the sea and the swaying palm tree."

* No kin to Western-style "hot toddy," a hearthside concoction of whisky and sweetened hot water.

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