Ex-Fashion Ed Sells Keto Chilli Sauce & Pesto From Home, Felicia Chin’s A Customer

Esther Quek is possibly the most glamourous home cook in Singapore. The former fashion editor, 37, started an Instagram business in March this year selling her own homemade sauces. Called Simply Chilli, it currently offers two products with island-wide delivery: a Chilli Sauce with three levels of spiciness, and Pesto with green chillies. The sauces are keto-friendly as they do not contain sugar and gluten. While her business is only two-months-old, Esther has already garnered celeb fans like Felicia Chin and Chantalle Ng. She recalls, “Felicia buys [the sauces] for her friends, and Chantalle loves chilli.”

Before starting Simply Chilli, Esther was a fashion magazine editor “for a few titles in Dubai and Singapore” like Buro and Citizen K. She had been based in Dubai for six years before returning to Singapore, after her father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. “I felt I was at the peak of my career. I was working for a magazine and I enjoyed that. But as the eldest [child], I also felt guilty for being away for so long building my own career,” she shares with 8days.sg. When her dad passed away last year, Esther decided to leave her fashion job and its long hours to take care of her mum, “who is now alone”.

She also went into consultancy work, which is currently on hold due to Covid-19. Selling chilli sauce, however, was an unexpected “complete change”. The avid home cook had tried making her own chilli sauce after a friend, who usually sends her homemade chilli sauce, had to stop due to a work pileup. “So she told us [her recipe],” says Esther, who was previously on a keto diet and was searching for “healthy” chilli sauces at the supermarket to no avail.

To create a keto chilli sauce, she tweaked her friend’s recipe, swapping sugar for monk fruit sweetener and making the sauce gluten-free and low-carb. The early batches that Esther made “for fun” were well-received by her friends and even celeb chefs she sought feedback from, like Sam and Forest Leong as well as Eric Teo. She decided to go into business full-time for circuit breaker when she started getting more orders. “Everyone is cooking at home during this period and they want an extra dash of spice,” she reasons.

Compared to the usual watery chicken rice chilli, Esther’s chilli sauce is “a bit more textured and grainy” as she likes “a garlic bite”. Ingredients include Himalayan pink salt, fish sauce and fresh-squeezed lime juice. Customers can also choose between high oleic Australian peanut oil or Italian extra virgin olive oil for their chilli, and three spice levels: Mild (made with larger red chillies instead of chilli padi), Spicy and Extra Spicy.

Other than chilli sauce, Esther also introduced a pesto sauce spiked with green chillies. Don’t expect flamin’ pesto though — she adds just a little to spice things up, along with blended Holland basil, pine nuts, parsley, kale, spinach, garlic and extra virgin olive oil. “Our name is Simply Chilli, so everything will have a bit of chilli in it,” she says. Other than the usual pasta, Esther recommends drizzling the pesto over burrata. There’s also an upcoming “third product with chilli”, which she declines to reveal for now.

Esther’s pivot from fashion to sauce-making has its initial marketing challenges: some of her fashion followers on Instagram weren't necessarily the same folks who like, er, chilli sauce. “I’ve been in fashion for so long, all my posts are about OOTDs. When I posted about chillies, my following dropped,” she laughs. She now keeps her fashion posts to her personal account (@estherquek) and ‘saucy’ content to Simply Chilli’s IG (@simplychillisg), where it attracts a foodie following.

Esther says her one-woman-show chilli biz is currently “doing very well”, and she engages two friends to deliver orders to customers. She has plans to expand her operations by renting a central kitchen, and eventually stock her sauces in retail stores. “I seriously want to make this a permanent line,” she says, adding that she’s currently in talks with seafood, barbecue and steak vendors to offer bundle sets.

She also found a Workforce Skills Qualification school during circuit breaker, where she took a basic food hygiene course online and got certified to handle food professionally. She explains, “It’s not compulsory for home businesses. I just wanted to know. I wasn’t sure if [Simply Chilli] would be a thing, but when the demand is there, I feel like I’m responsible for the food I produce.”

But she reckons she has applied some skills from her fashion editor days to chilli sauce-making: “My prep work takes a long time. If a chilli is bruised, I chuck it. I’m very anal. When we do editing [for fashion magazines], every space and every paragraph has to be perfect. It’s the same with my chillies.” She also got tips from helpful customers on fine-turning her logistics. She recounts, “When I first did pesto, I delivered it at room temperature and the oil leaked. And some people said, ‘Oh, you should refrigerate it’. We learn a lot from our customers, and it’s something I haven’t done in a long time working behind a computer.”

To order, DM Simply Chilli at www.instagram.com/simplychillisg.

PHOTOS: ESTHER QUEK & SIMPLY CHILLI