The subject that I will be profiling on Prima Food Pte Ltd otherwise many know them as Prima Deli. Prima Deli is managed by them. My report will be covering about Prima Food Pte Ltd. The aim of this report is to get to know more about in detail. Basically, this study is to get to more in depth of this Prima Food Company. The objective of this profiling:
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Prima Food Pte Ltd consists of Prima Food, Prima Group as well as Prima Taste. Prima is founded by Mr Cheng Tsang Man whom he himself has no prior experience in the industry line. He first started this business in Singapore in 1961. Fortunately, with his past business experience, together with his entrepreneurial enthusiasm, he was determined of the company’s success.
Mr Cheng was already in the business industry in his twenties. A few years later, he set up his own business in Indonesia, Ujung Pandang, which his business progressively became successful and that lead him to expand his business beyond Ujung Pandang, proving himself as a popular dealer in wholesale goods.
As I have mentioned earlier on, there are 3 subs or rather members of the Prima family.
Firstly, Prima Food is basically is an online portal for customers to order food online – be it PrimaDeli’s Frozen Dough or Ready-To-Cook pastes and premixes with accompanying garnishes. Prima Deli also falls under Prima Food. Prima Deli is managed by them.
Secondly, Prima Group is more on its Prima Flour products. As many of us know, they produce different purposes of flour. For an example, all purpose flour, which the packaging is in blue and the self-raising flour in red. Not only that, they have bread flour, cake flour, superlite flour, top flour, wholemeal flour and lastly, semolina flour.
Different flour is suited for different bake or cooking purposes. Like their tag line suggest: “Each to suit specific needs as only THE RIGHT FLOUR MAKES THE BEST.”
Thirdly, Prima Taste is then developed and introduced in the food service industry in 1998. Prima Taste offers ready-to-cook pastes. A specialty is that they offer to suit with Singaporeans taste buds. Just to name a few, they serve pastes like Laksa, Fried Hokkien Prawn Mee, Lor Mee, Singapore Curry, Bak Kut Teh, Mee Goreng and etc.
For easy referencing:
Prima Food Pte Ltd
Established
In 1961 in Singapore.
In 1969, Prima Limited was listed on Stock Exchange of Singapore & Malaysia as a public company.
In 1970, PT Prima Indonesia, their first overseas investment in Ujung Pandang (Makassar), Indonesia.
In 1985, Prima Limited went into a joint venture agreement with Yantai Cereals Oil & Foodstuff Industrial Corporation
Owner
Mr Cheng Tsang Man
V.I.P
Mr Cheng Tsang Man (Honorary Life President)
Mr Tan Eng Joo (Honorary Advisor)
Mr Cheng Chih Kwong, Primus (Chairman & Chief Executive)
Mr Kong Yong Yeo (Executive Director & Group Corporate Planner)
Mr Cheng Koh Yeu, Lewis (Executive Director)
Mr Cheng Koh Cheun, Bernard (Executive Director)
Industry
Food Services
Products
Cakes, Breads, Frozen products like premixes, paste, dough and Prima Flour.
SCOPE
There were a few limitations that I faced while doing up this report. One of them is to get as many people to participate in the survey that I have done up. I had wanted to get at least 80 survey response. However, I could only get 50 responses. Secondly,-. I hope the information that I have gathered are sufficient and also, I tried my best in achieving the outcome.
BUSINESS ISSUES
Strategic posture
Due to the health conscious people in Singapore, Prima Food has decided to build a healthy organization with healthier choice. They would also want to achieve their desired aim through a fair competition with the rest of their competitors.
Obstacles Faced and Lessons Learnt
As we all know, there was an incident that happened not long ago. Back in 2007, towards the end of the year, Prima Deli faced some issues regarding one of their products. Its chocolate cake was the hot topics back then. Prima Deli was asked to put their business on hold due to a bacterium called Salmonella that was confirmed by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Agri-Food Veterinary Authority (AVA).
These set of bacteria could lead to symptoms such as watery diarrhea, fever, vomiting as well as abdominal pain.
More than 100 people were reported getting food poisoning after eating the chocolate cakes. Some of those who had consumed the cakes had to be hospitalized as they were tested positive for Salmonella Enteritidis.
MOH, together with AVA, conducted inspections at Prima Food Pte Ltd where those chocolate cakes were being produced for all the outlets.
This issue is solved by ensuring its customers that this will not happened again. And they have also made some changes to their rules. Their set of protocols is stricter now.
More severe rules have been enforced now. Lab tests are now done on many occasions on the ingredients used for their daily confections as well as on the cream cakes. In the production areas, more cameras are now seen being installed to stay precautious. They do not mind spending a lot of such equipments as long as they could prevent this from happening again. “It is better to play safe than sorry”
Compensation wise, Prima Deli has forked out a total of $1 million to all its 23 franchises.
When business was able to resume as per normal, it was rather slow on the first few days of its reopening. However, on a brighter side, they received cake orders from customers during Chinese New Year. Therefore, business was back to normal.
Business was in fact better than before. When Christmas season arrives, even when all stores were closed due to the Salmonella incident, Mr Jordan Cheang, 36, owning three outlets in different location, claims that he received orders from corporate clients requesting for log cakes. There were also customers placing orders for Chinese New Year goodies. He also received a call from someone who wanted Prima Deli to bake a cake for their wedding even after their outlet has already been closed for a week.
Customers have come to accept and are not hesitant to purchase Prima Deli’s food product even when they have resumed their business. In fact, they get more orders now and many customers are seen to buy from them.
However with the entire acceptance that some customers have come to accept, there are still a minority of the public who are still paranoid about this incident, they claimed that they would not buy their cakes but they will buy their waffles instead.
Prima still have its loyal customers queuing up for its confections. Loyal customers gave endless support to Prima as customers now believe that their places are cleaner now and they are more precautious.
What do they do to attract the customers?
Although there are many competitors from other confectioneries or companies, Prima managed to sustain its business throughout the years even though they may face a few obstacles along the way. We also know that different customers have different taste buds. Nonetheless, people will still buy from them.
From a newspaper report, 16 June 2006, they stated that now Barney lovers can now enjoy their favourite TV character or even personalized their cake design. They will just need to place an order in order in advance or even dial their hotline.
Survey
Survey Analysis
I have done up a survey of 50 people. Surveyors are aged between 17 – 35 years old. They are people of different background. I chose this group of people to do a survey on because this group is mainly the young adults and also the working adults. They are people who would usually be the ones buying such food products. This survey is collected online through convenience sampling.
Survey Results
Question 1
This is my first question to my survey and as you can see from the pie chart above, many actually know about Prima Food Pte Ltd. To be precise -% knows about this company. With this high amount of percentage it leaves us of an impression that Prima is a well known company.
Question 2
As for question 2, out of all the three members that I have listed, many only know about Prima Deli and not the other two members which are the Prima Taste and Prima Group. This shows that only a minority know about all its three members. Therefore, Prima should do something about it.
Question 3
In question 3, we can see that “Neutral” has got the highest percentage among all the other choices. Also we can see that none of the public buys their food product that often. Although none buys from them that often, their business is still prospering. They still get a lot of customers coming to them to order cakes and buy from them.
Question 4
What makes you buy Prima products than buying from other confectionery like Polar Puffs & Cakes, Four Leaves, Bread Talk and etc?
Since this is an open-ended question, I’ll summarise what the customer’s answers were. Some of the factors affecting them to buy from them are:
Taste
Location
Its “Halal” certification
Wide range of varieties to choose from
Price
Quality
Occasion purposes
Aroma
Happened to pass by
Cravings
Question 5
Here, in question 5, you can see that many of them have given “No” as their answer. This shows that many of the customers still trust Prima and are still willing to buy from them. Only a % says that they will not buy from them
Question 6
Lastly, in question 6, you can see that few want Prima to manufacture new food products. However, there are minority that wants them to produce new food items such as fondant cakes, puffs and pastries. I believe it was a good suggestion. This may even help to boost the company’s image.
COMPANY ANALYSIS
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
Have varieties of products. (cakes, breads, frozen pastes, frozen dough)
Members of the group producing/selling different products.
Longest running Singapore food services in the industry
Are recognized by many
Support online services
Not many know about Prima Food Pte Ltd and its members.
Salmonella incident caused some customers to change their brand loyalty.
Opportunities
Threats
An alternative for the public to purchase cakes, breads or other frozen food from Prima other than confectionery like Polar Puffs & Cakes, Bread Talk and etc.
Partnership with SPRING Singapore enables them to have a better prospect of its business.
Many competitors are seen in this industry, producing unique and creative food products
There are other companies that also sell premixes and pastes where customers may choose over other brand products than Prima’s.
Mostly only know about Prima Deli
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRIMA FOOD PTE LTD
What the company can do to improve.
Reduce
Knowing that there are many similar confectionaries here in Singapore selling similar products, Prima should try to stand out from the others. Therefore, Prima should reduce the chances of producing similar products.
Advance
Prima should advance their steps in technology wise by regularly update their web portal. Prima Taste’s site is rather outdated. They should perhaps update their regular customers on their new or rather latest development. This will keep their customers updated and it will not let the customer have doubts on whether their products have its stock availability.
This will also show if the site is reliable and constantly updated. It will lead them to having a better publicity through the internet or rather viral marketing.
Create
Prima could consider adding in new food products. For example, as suggested from some of the surveyors, Prima could try adding in pastries like puffs, fondant cakes for weddings or engagement or even wedding anniversaries that customers can customized their own cake.
Since there are very few companies doing such service, Prima, knowing that it is quite well known here in Singapore, high chance that their successful rate will be high.
Prima should also do publicity on its frozen items such as the premixes and paste. Probably they are only well known to people who are in this line or to be precise, in the food industry.
Very few of the public know about the other two members. Therefore, Prima should consider doing an advertisement.
Eliminate
A minority of customers are still in doubt of their food products due to their Salmonella incident.
As such, they still do not have confidence in Prima. However, as mentioned by one of the business owners, business is actually getting better. It is boosting up.
Even still, Prima should eliminate such perception and attract those customers whom have yet to regain their trust in Prima food products.
Conclusion
I believe I have fulfilled the requirement or rather the objective of this profiling which I had stated earlier on in the beginning of this report. The first objective is to know more about its history and how it first started. The second objective is to analyze how this company has grown throughout the years.
The third objective is to find out more about the contributing factors to the success of Prima Food Pte Ltd. The fourth objective is to do a SWOT analysis to analyze and do a plausible study of the company. The fifth and last objective is to do a cross SWOT analysis and make some recommendations.
After doing this profiling, I learnt that it is not easy to manage a business especially when your company’s reputation were once tarnished regardless of whatever incident that happened.
It may not be a part of our fault but I’m sure customers will still be in doubt and may not trust us anymore. From then on, we have got to do something about our reputations or rather to get back our customers trust and loyalty.
In such incidents customers would probably not buy from us anymore and to change the customers perception is not an easy task.
The public also are not aware of the members of Prima Food Pte Ltd. Most of them know only about Prima Deli.
In order for them to overcome this issue of the public not knowing about its members and regarding the Salmonella, they first need to overcome their threat. I can see that the public response were not that bad. They would still buy food products that were manufactured by Prima Food.
Prima should consider advertising on its two other members that may after all attract more customers. Other than doing it via the online method, they could consider doing it traditionally. Perhaps they could advertise it in the newspapers, magazines or TV.
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