Peranakan heritage food biz Tiap Tiap began selling on a Facebook group, now it’s a full-fledged shopfront
Most food businesses start with a business plan. Peranakan heritage food brand Tiap Tiap started with a pandan cake and friends who wouldn’t stop asking Sophia Yeow to cook for them.
Six years on, what began as a two-product home-based operation during Singapore’s circuit breaker has grown into a brick-and-mortar shopfront on East Coast Road in Joo Chiat. It’s a fitting location for the brand, rooted in the Peranakan heritage of the neighbourhood where Sophia grew up.
Vulcan Post spoke with Sophia, 55, and her daughter, Nicole Lian, 29, about how a small family business grew into a brick-and-mortar brand, and what it took to get there.
An accident that changed everything
Sophia launched Tiap Tiap in 2020 when an accident sent her to the hospital and prompted a reckoning with what she actually valued in life.
She had previously spent two decades in senior marketing and communications roles alongside running a child enrichment centre in Bukit Timah with a friend.
What was important to me was family. So I stepped away from everything.
Sophia Yeow
Sophia sold the enrichment business, gave six months’ notice at her corporate job, and spent time travelling with her parents and cooking for people she loved.
With encouragement from her friend, Sophia began posting in a Facebook group called Singapore Home-cooked Delights. She started with just three products: a pandan chiffon cake, radish kueh, and yam kueh. She wasn’t sure anyone would buy.
To her surprise, strangers not only placed orders but also shared reviews in the group, helping word spread organically.
Soon, banks and other organisations looking to support home-based businesses during the pandemic began placing orders. At one point, Sophia was coordinating deliveries to 150 locations across Singapore over two days, juggling production and logistics on her own.
Today, Tiap Tiap has set up a 500 sq ft central kitchen in Bedok, while its production capacity has increased by 500% from its early pandemic days.
A mother-daughter business
In 2021, MediaCorp, having spotted her Instagram account where she shared food, travel and snippets of daily life, reached out to ask if she’d consider joining MasterChef Singapore.
Despite having no experience, she did it anyway, reaching the top 24. The experience led her to a subsequent cooking competition for home cooks, the Lee Kum Kee Supreme Chef Cooking Competition II, which Sophia won that same year.
The competitions gave Sophia greater visibility, but to her daughter, Nicole, her talent had never been in doubt.
Nicole grew up watching her mother set the family table differently from everyone else. Sophia would host themed dinners regularly. Indonesian night meant banana leaves and matching crockery; a trip to Athens meant Mediterranean food for a week, served on pieces Sophia had brought back specifically for the occasion. Besides the food, the whole experience surrounding the food was equally important to the family.
“As a kid growing up, I kind of knew there was something special in her cooking,” Nicole said.
So when Sophia started Tiap Tiap, Nicole naturally recommended the brand to friends and colleagues—she already believed in what her mother was making.
After COVID-19, Nicole noticed that while many home-based businesses fell away as restrictions eased, Tiap Tiap’s orders kept coming. This pushed Nicole to leave her corporate career in 2024 to join Tiap Tiap as Managing Director.
Nicole brought operational structure to what her mother had been running on instinct and craft by creating a system of orders that made organising and fulfilling orders simpler.
Sharing Peranakan heritage
By that point, Tiap Tiap had grown beyond cakes.
The brand also hosts Butterfly Table, a private dining experience held in Sophia’s home.
The weekly three-hour dinner combines Peranakan cuisine, storytelling and Sophia’s collection of antique crockery, giving guests a deeper appreciation of the culture behind the food.
Butterfly Table was born after a senior executive who had tasted Sophia’s cooking invited her to cater for Temasek and its board of directors for a month.
That opportunity led to her first private dining session at home—a Peranakan tok panjang for the current Singapore Ambassador to China, Peter Tan, who later told her it felt like coming home.
A measured expansion
Opening a physical store wasn’t an impulsive decision.
Before committing to a permanent retail space, Sophia and Nicole spent two years testing demand through pop-ups, allowing them to gauge customer interest and learn how to scale the business without taking on significant overhead.
Their first pop-up at Takashimaya in 2025 regularly sold out within 10 minutes of each restock, with customers queuing for the next batch of cakes to arrive from Tiap Tiap’s central kitchen.
At Boutiques Singapore, vendors from around the venue reserved cakes before the doors even opened, leaving little stock for the general public by 10AM.
The pop-ups confirmed what years of online orders had already suggested: demand for Tiap Tiap had outlasted the pandemic. Today, around 40% of its customers are repeat buyers who have supported the brand since its home-based days.
With that validation established, the team spent time at the central kitchen refining SOPs, building the team, and working out how to scale production reliably before making the retail commitment.
The shopfront at 374 East Coast Road eventually opened in late Jun 2026. Actual costs came in just under S$500,000—entirely self-funded, with no external investors.
Taking it one step at a time
Today, Tiap Tiap’s East Coast Road store operates as a takeaway concept, offering a range of sweet and savoury Peranakan fare.
The sweet treats are made on-site, while the savoury range and delivery orders continue to be prepared at the brand’s central kitchen in Bedok.
Although Sophia and Nicole still drop by the shop almost every day, Nicole’s immediate goal is to build the business to a point where it can operate without either of them being physically present.
After six years, neither mother nor daughter romanticises the leap from corporate life into entrepreneurship. Passion, Sophia said, is important—but it has to be matched with an understanding of what customers want.
Passion without appreciating what the market wants will eat you up very quickly.
Sophia Yeow
Featured Image Credit: Veronica C via Google Reviews, Tiap Tiap
