BY NAOJI SHIBATA
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN (Japan)
The morning assembly begins. The employees, about 20 of them, all in uniform, fix their attention on the group leader as he reviews the business at hand. The shipment of goods from Phnom Penh will have to be sorted, the bags made ready for filling. Personal inspection follows: Is everyone's hair in order? Are everyone's nails trimmed?
The company's president, Sachiko Kojima, steps forward. "Your probation is finished," she tells a novice. "Do you want to continue?"
"Yes!" comes the reply.
Kojima, 35, stands 170 cm tall. She's a head taller than the men on her staff.
Her establishment is a combination of souvenir cookie shop and cafe, the Cafe Puka Puka, situated on the national highway five minutes by car from Angkor Wat. The kitchen where the baking is done is a 10-minute drive away. Here 40 employees are busy from 7 a.m., kneading cookie dough and shaping, baking and bagging the cookies. Almost everything is done by hand.
Kojima gets out of bed just after 5 a.m. Shortly before 7 she looks in on the bakery-kitchen, then proceeds to the shop. The local work ethic, she knows, tends to be a bit lax. If she's not at work early it sets a bad example.
Every customer entering or leaving gets a full-throated greeting in Japanese: "Irasshaimase! (Welcome!) Arigato gozaimashita! (Thank you very much!)" This is important, and would-be employees who can't learn to greet customers with enthusiasm--it's not easy in a country where it isn't customary--don't make the cut. Kojima is constantly after the novices to do better. "Louder!" she cries, urging them on. It sounds a bit like gym practice.
Nuan, the longest-serving employee, has been with Kojima since the beginning. She's 45, from Kompong Cham originally. Even after sending money home to her parents she was able to buy a $1,000 (105,000 yen) motorbike. "She's strict at work," Nuan says of Kojima, "but kind. Her cookies are getting famous. That makes me very happy."
From December to March, the busiest season, the bakery-kitchen is in operation 12 hours a day. Employees earn overtime pay and bonuses. The starting salary is $80 a month--not bad in a country where a typical civil servant earns less than $50. They sometimes get paid $230 for a month. Given that many among the staff barely finished elementary school, the pay is remarkably generous.
The operation is part Japanese, part Cambodian. Hygiene, shop displays, service and welfare benefits are all Japanese-style. But the baking ingredients are exclusively local.
Back in her days as a student at Yokohama City University, Kojima watched older schoolmates move on to jobs with banks and trading companies, and decided that was not the path for her.
"In my third year," she says, "I traveled the Yangtze River with a friend who knew China well. I felt very strongly that I wanted to work abroad. I took a year off from school and qualified as a Japanese language teacher. Twice I tried to get in with the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers Program, but I didn't make it. If they'd hired me, I probably wouldn't be what I am now. My friends say, 'You're free, I envy you.' What I don't have, though, is stability."
It was chance that brought her to Cambodia.
"I saw an ad in Japan for a job opening for Japanese in Siem Reap. Back then, all I knew about Cambodia was that Angkor Wat was there. It turned out to be the place that suits me best. While I was teaching Japanese I opened a coffee shop, and the local staff made off with all my equipment. A 1.5 million yen investment, down the drain! But even that couldn't make me dislike the country."
Before her stint as a Japanese teacher, she worked as a tourist guide, taking visitors around the Angkor ruins. "Aren't there any souvenir snacks?" the tourists would ask her. She heard they would buy souvenir chocolates in Bangkok, instead, since they couldn't find any in Cambodia. "What a waste," Kojima thought.
She taught for two years, then returned home. By September 2003, she was back in Phnom Penh, armed with $5,000, cookie molds, and a package a friend had designed for her as a going-away present.
Every day she'd make the rounds of the markets, looking for the right ingredients. She tried peanuts, soybeans, cashew nuts. Using the only local flour available, sweat streaming off her face as she struggled with a second-hand oven, she came up with a way to produce a suitable cookie crust. Every day she ran her motorbike over bad roads in search of suppliers. She procured local pepper, local coffee, local coconut sugar. Slowly her product line took shape.
In April 2004, Kojima set up a company: Khmer Angkor Foods Co. It sold coffee, lotus tea, and "Angkor cookies" shaped like the ruins. Her brand name is "Madam Sachiko."
"We sell as much in a day now as we did in a year then," she says. "In 2004, we were earning $1,000 a month. Yesterday--in just one day--we earned $13,000. We get 400 customers a day, on average--on good days it's 800. We've started exporting to Japan. I started out with two employees; now I have 60. I have one Japanese staff member in each department--production, sales, and the cafe."
Each day brings its own challenges, and Kojima has no time to rest on her laurels. Still, she finds it satisfying to have come this far. "It was a question of looking out for something that this country didn't have--of asking myself, 'What would tourists want?' and then getting it together with the Cambodian staff," she says. "Of course, the tourist boom helped," she adds.
In 1999, Cambodia hosted 370,000 foreign tourists; in 2007 the figure was 2.02 million. Once there were five hotels in Siem Reap; now there are about 100. The city shows all the symptoms of an economic bubble--in the past three years the price of land is said to have soared 10-fold.
Angkor cookies having shown the way, Siem Reap is now awash in snacks aimed at Japanese visitors. There's nothing quite like it on the Asian tourist circuit. Does the competition worry Kojima?
"We're not taking a back seat to anyone," she declares.
The boom mentality creates problems of its own. Some of her products are packaged in cylinders made of palm tree bark. Lately, however, delivery of the cylinders has slowed as farmers discover they can make more money selling their land than selling their labor.
The heightened flow of tourists notwithstanding, Kojima is not interested in expanding. If she did it would be that much harder to keep a personal eye on quality considerations like sanitation and service.
"People tell me I should mechanize, but labor-saving devices and mass production are not why I started this company," she says. "I'll stick to handmade. I'm more interested in seeing my staff grow and develop than I am in purely business goals.
"I get people coming in for job interviews who can't speak up in front of other people. Some have never seen a calculator before. I see these people growing every day. My goal is to one day leave the company in the hands of the locals--hopefully by the time I'm 40."
It won't be easy.
"How do you make kids who've never eaten Western-style cakes understand concepts like sell-by dates and inventory control? Often you go through all the trouble of training people only to have them quit on you. You get people you trusted pilfering from the cash register. There are times when it really gets me down. Whenever something like that happens I tell myself, 'A year from now I'll tell people about this and we'll all get a good laugh out of it.'"
Many of her employees are women in their 20s. They get married and get pregnant. Kojima offers three months' childbirth leave with pay. Child-care leave is six months. There are various options, with pay ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent, depending on the number of working hours a new mother chooses to put in.
"Having no experience in this area myself," Kojima says, "I always ask would-be mothers what they want. Sometimes my house in front of the bakery-kitchen turns into a kind of day-care place."
Kojima makes it clear that she is first and foremost a businesswoman, not a volunteer running a support organization.
"Many of the foreigners in this country are aid workers and people from NGOs. I'm not saying they're not needed, but the longer I'm here the more I doubt the wisdom of simply giving people handouts. In many cases it discourages independence. What I try to do is offer a workplace to people with the will to work, and pay them in keeping with their labor. If they work hard, they earn more. I turn down almost all requests for charitable contributions. It's more important to me to pay my taxes and get on with planning my next venture."
The next venture is a general store and cafe slated to open in a new shopping center in June.
"This will be a store aimed at Cambodian customers. I'll be using only local ingredients. Also, eventually, I want my staff to take charge of the current operations. Beyond that, I'm thinking about starting something different," Kojima says.
The company's president, Sachiko Kojima, steps forward. "Your probation is finished," she tells a novice. "Do you want to continue?"
"Yes!" comes the reply.
Kojima, 35, stands 170 cm tall. She's a head taller than the men on her staff.
Her establishment is a combination of souvenir cookie shop and cafe, the Cafe Puka Puka, situated on the national highway five minutes by car from Angkor Wat. The kitchen where the baking is done is a 10-minute drive away. Here 40 employees are busy from 7 a.m., kneading cookie dough and shaping, baking and bagging the cookies. Almost everything is done by hand.
Kojima gets out of bed just after 5 a.m. Shortly before 7 she looks in on the bakery-kitchen, then proceeds to the shop. The local work ethic, she knows, tends to be a bit lax. If she's not at work early it sets a bad example.
Every customer entering or leaving gets a full-throated greeting in Japanese: "Irasshaimase! (Welcome!) Arigato gozaimashita! (Thank you very much!)" This is important, and would-be employees who can't learn to greet customers with enthusiasm--it's not easy in a country where it isn't customary--don't make the cut. Kojima is constantly after the novices to do better. "Louder!" she cries, urging them on. It sounds a bit like gym practice.
Nuan, the longest-serving employee, has been with Kojima since the beginning. She's 45, from Kompong Cham originally. Even after sending money home to her parents she was able to buy a $1,000 (105,000 yen) motorbike. "She's strict at work," Nuan says of Kojima, "but kind. Her cookies are getting famous. That makes me very happy."
From December to March, the busiest season, the bakery-kitchen is in operation 12 hours a day. Employees earn overtime pay and bonuses. The starting salary is $80 a month--not bad in a country where a typical civil servant earns less than $50. They sometimes get paid $230 for a month. Given that many among the staff barely finished elementary school, the pay is remarkably generous.
The operation is part Japanese, part Cambodian. Hygiene, shop displays, service and welfare benefits are all Japanese-style. But the baking ingredients are exclusively local.
Back in her days as a student at Yokohama City University, Kojima watched older schoolmates move on to jobs with banks and trading companies, and decided that was not the path for her.
"In my third year," she says, "I traveled the Yangtze River with a friend who knew China well. I felt very strongly that I wanted to work abroad. I took a year off from school and qualified as a Japanese language teacher. Twice I tried to get in with the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers Program, but I didn't make it. If they'd hired me, I probably wouldn't be what I am now. My friends say, 'You're free, I envy you.' What I don't have, though, is stability."
It was chance that brought her to Cambodia.
"I saw an ad in Japan for a job opening for Japanese in Siem Reap. Back then, all I knew about Cambodia was that Angkor Wat was there. It turned out to be the place that suits me best. While I was teaching Japanese I opened a coffee shop, and the local staff made off with all my equipment. A 1.5 million yen investment, down the drain! But even that couldn't make me dislike the country."
Before her stint as a Japanese teacher, she worked as a tourist guide, taking visitors around the Angkor ruins. "Aren't there any souvenir snacks?" the tourists would ask her. She heard they would buy souvenir chocolates in Bangkok, instead, since they couldn't find any in Cambodia. "What a waste," Kojima thought.
She taught for two years, then returned home. By September 2003, she was back in Phnom Penh, armed with $5,000, cookie molds, and a package a friend had designed for her as a going-away present.
Every day she'd make the rounds of the markets, looking for the right ingredients. She tried peanuts, soybeans, cashew nuts. Using the only local flour available, sweat streaming off her face as she struggled with a second-hand oven, she came up with a way to produce a suitable cookie crust. Every day she ran her motorbike over bad roads in search of suppliers. She procured local pepper, local coffee, local coconut sugar. Slowly her product line took shape.
In April 2004, Kojima set up a company: Khmer Angkor Foods Co. It sold coffee, lotus tea, and "Angkor cookies" shaped like the ruins. Her brand name is "Madam Sachiko."
"We sell as much in a day now as we did in a year then," she says. "In 2004, we were earning $1,000 a month. Yesterday--in just one day--we earned $13,000. We get 400 customers a day, on average--on good days it's 800. We've started exporting to Japan. I started out with two employees; now I have 60. I have one Japanese staff member in each department--production, sales, and the cafe."
Each day brings its own challenges, and Kojima has no time to rest on her laurels. Still, she finds it satisfying to have come this far. "It was a question of looking out for something that this country didn't have--of asking myself, 'What would tourists want?' and then getting it together with the Cambodian staff," she says. "Of course, the tourist boom helped," she adds.
In 1999, Cambodia hosted 370,000 foreign tourists; in 2007 the figure was 2.02 million. Once there were five hotels in Siem Reap; now there are about 100. The city shows all the symptoms of an economic bubble--in the past three years the price of land is said to have soared 10-fold.
Angkor cookies having shown the way, Siem Reap is now awash in snacks aimed at Japanese visitors. There's nothing quite like it on the Asian tourist circuit. Does the competition worry Kojima?
"We're not taking a back seat to anyone," she declares.
The boom mentality creates problems of its own. Some of her products are packaged in cylinders made of palm tree bark. Lately, however, delivery of the cylinders has slowed as farmers discover they can make more money selling their land than selling their labor.
The heightened flow of tourists notwithstanding, Kojima is not interested in expanding. If she did it would be that much harder to keep a personal eye on quality considerations like sanitation and service.
"People tell me I should mechanize, but labor-saving devices and mass production are not why I started this company," she says. "I'll stick to handmade. I'm more interested in seeing my staff grow and develop than I am in purely business goals.
"I get people coming in for job interviews who can't speak up in front of other people. Some have never seen a calculator before. I see these people growing every day. My goal is to one day leave the company in the hands of the locals--hopefully by the time I'm 40."
It won't be easy.
"How do you make kids who've never eaten Western-style cakes understand concepts like sell-by dates and inventory control? Often you go through all the trouble of training people only to have them quit on you. You get people you trusted pilfering from the cash register. There are times when it really gets me down. Whenever something like that happens I tell myself, 'A year from now I'll tell people about this and we'll all get a good laugh out of it.'"
Many of her employees are women in their 20s. They get married and get pregnant. Kojima offers three months' childbirth leave with pay. Child-care leave is six months. There are various options, with pay ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent, depending on the number of working hours a new mother chooses to put in.
"Having no experience in this area myself," Kojima says, "I always ask would-be mothers what they want. Sometimes my house in front of the bakery-kitchen turns into a kind of day-care place."
Kojima makes it clear that she is first and foremost a businesswoman, not a volunteer running a support organization.
"Many of the foreigners in this country are aid workers and people from NGOs. I'm not saying they're not needed, but the longer I'm here the more I doubt the wisdom of simply giving people handouts. In many cases it discourages independence. What I try to do is offer a workplace to people with the will to work, and pay them in keeping with their labor. If they work hard, they earn more. I turn down almost all requests for charitable contributions. It's more important to me to pay my taxes and get on with planning my next venture."
The next venture is a general store and cafe slated to open in a new shopping center in June.
"This will be a store aimed at Cambodian customers. I'll be using only local ingredients. Also, eventually, I want my staff to take charge of the current operations. Beyond that, I'm thinking about starting something different," Kojima says.
1 comment:
Kojima offers three months' childbirth leave with pay. Child-care leave is six months. There are various options, with pay ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent, depending on the number of working hours a new mother chooses to put in.
3 months paid maternity leave is really a bonus. Hope to see more company follow this example.
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