Hello, my dear fellow Hiver friends! I hope you're all doing well. I wanted to share a little glimpse into a typical day in our lives, especially the journey of how we got into the sausage business. Today was another busy day. After finishing my housework, my husband began preparing 30 kilos of minced pork for making sausages. We’ve been working on fulfilling an order for 100 kilos of sausages, and it’s always a team effort when we’re getting down to it. He started by preparing the Italian-flavored sausage, which is one of our best sellers. While he worked on that, he asked me to wash the intestines, which we use to make the sausage casings. It’s a bit of a messy job, but it’s all part of the process. After that, he set up the manual sausage filling machine, which we use to stuff the sausages. It’s not a fancy automated machine, but it gets the job done. Once the machine was all set up, we were ready to start. My husband weighed the meat once again to make sure we had the right amount, and then we jumped into action. He worked on filling the sausages, while I focused on tying off the ends and cutting them into perfect links. Each pack needed to have exactly 12 sausages, so I spent a lot of time measuring and packing them carefully. It’s a repetitive task, but there’s something satisfying about getting everything just right. We worked through the afternoon, and by 6:30 p.m., we had finished for the day. Afterward, we had some tea, and I took a well-deserved bath to relax a bit before starting on my article about sausages.
This picture edited by canva.
Now, let me share with you a little more about how we ended up in this business. It’s been a long road, and we’ve faced our fair share of challenges. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our lives took a huge turn. We were already struggling, but COVID pushed us to our breaking point. During the pandemic, we had to close down our construction business, which had been the backbone of our livelihood. Then, after the lockdown, we lost our hardware business as well. To make matters worse, we had invested everything into our farm, where we had over 5,000 chickens. Unfortunately, a virus wiped them all out, and then our ducks, also numbering around 5,000, became sick and died as well. It was a devastating blow, and we were left with nothing. At that point, we had to close the farm too, and with it went our last source of income. To make matters even more difficult, the bank took our house and my car. It felt like the world was closing in on us, and we had no idea how we would move forward. But my husband, ever the resourceful man, had his Hilux, a truck we used for business, and he started driving for Lalamove just to make ends meet. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to help us survive.
One day, however, he came to me with some good news. He had found a meat factory that offered very reasonable prices for small businesses. This was a turning point for us. After thinking about it carefully, we decided to start an online meat store. It was a huge leap, but we had nothing left to lose. We started small, but over time, things began to pick up. Eventually, we decided to diversify and offer Filipino sausages, something I knew my fellow Filipinos here in Malaysia would love. It didn’t take long before my husband came up with the idea to create 20 different flavors of gourmet sausages. We got to work, experimenting with different seasonings and meats until we found the perfect recipes. Now, years later, our small sausage business is still going strong, and we’re proud of how far we’ve come. One of the biggest milestones was when we started supplying one of Malaysia’s top grocery brands. They have 20 outlets, and we’re honored to be part of their offering. We’re not asking for much—we just want to keep doing things the right way and hope to make a living doing what we love. Looking to the future, we’re hopeful that one of our five kids will carry on the sausage business. We want them to do even better than we did and take it to new heights. It’s a dream of ours that one of them will find success and bring our family business to even greater heights, but for now, we’re grateful for how far we’ve come and excited about what’s to come. That’s our story. It’s
been a long, hard road, but we’ve persevered, and we’re proud of what we’ve built together. We hope our journey can inspire others to keep pushing forward, no matter how tough life gets.
