CEO, JR Group.
CEO, JR Group.
If anyone has the secret recipe to success, it’d be Jocelyn. Having grown up in poverty in the ’70s, the businesswoman overcame the odds and made millions as the managing director of Sin Hwa Dee Foodstuff Industries, a large-scale manufacturer of bottled sauces. She also heads JR Group, which focuses on catering for hotels and airlines. Perhaps her greatest culinary risk was her idea to dispense hot food from vending machines, dubbed Chef-inBox. “Everybody says to me now, ‘Congratulations, you saw this coming before all of us.’ Yes, I smelled the business opportunity early, but making it happen is really about persevering through the challenges,” she says. When the company launched its first machine dispensing hot meals in 2008 at a hospital, the machine could not keep food fresh for an extended period of time, and wastage was high. Still, Jocelyn soldiered on and the company has since launched 100 standalone hot food vending machines in army camps, universities and industrial offices, before the first Vend Cafe was rolled out last year in August.
WORDS TO LIVE BY: “Never give up, and allow yourself to adapt to change, in order to be competitive.”
