The owner of Tân Huê Viên – the largest pia cake processing company in Sóc Trăng – rose from humble beginnings as a hired laborer. He started his business making this unusual cake with nothing more than… a knife and a sheet of aluminum, and after more than 10 years became the “king of pia cake” in the Southwestern region of Việt Nam.

It is truly an impressive story, because for a long time pia cake was considered just an ordinary local specialty. Today, however, it has been elevated by a business to an industrial scale, with consumption reaching several hundred tons per year, distributed nationwide and even exported abroad.

Even more impressive, this is not the first time the director has worked directly alongside the workers. For nearly 20 years, Thái Tuấn has spent almost every day working in the factory until nearly 1 a.m.

Thái Tuấn was born in 1968 into a poor family in Sóc Trăng City. At the age of 12, he had to drop out of school and enter working life early, earning money to help support his family by repairing motorbikes.

After that, Tuấn applied to work without pay at a pia cake production facility in Vũng Thơm (Phú Tâm Commune, Châu Thành District, Sóc Trăng), dozens of kilometers from his home. There, the owner only provided him with daily meals and no wages like the other workers, because at that time Tuấn was only 14 years old.

Despite working tirelessly, Tuấn was constantly troubled by one question: “What must I do to change my life?” To find the answer, he diligently worked while learning at the same time.

One year later, he was assigned by the owner to mix the cake filling. The work was exhausting, requiring nonstop labor day and night, and the pay was not high, but Tuấn did not lose heart.

Many nights, lying awake with his arm across his forehead, he thought: “If others can do it, I can do it too. I won’t know unless I try…”. And so Tuấn quietly began to pursue his dream of changing his life with a bold decision: buying a sheet of aluminum and a knife to… open his own pia cake workshop.

He had the dream and the determination, but lacked capital. When his older brother got married, Tuấn boldly asked to borrow all of the wedding gift money as startup capital to buy flour, sugar, beans, and other ingredients to make cakes. Out of love for his younger brother, the elder brother agreed, allowing Tuấn to pursue his dream.

Source: Doanhnhansaigon