Legacy, Innovation, and the Future of ASEAN Agri-Food w/ Ho Ren Hua, CEO of Thai Wah PCL

About this episode

Ho Ren Hua discusses transforming a legacy starch business into a sustainable agri-food platform.

The future of food and climate resilience in Southeast Asia is being shaped as much in cassava fields and starch factories as it is in boardrooms. In this episode of Billion Dollar Moves, Ho Ren Hua, CEO of Thai Wah Public Company Limited, joins Sarah to unpack how he is reinventing a 77-year-old family starch business into a regional agri-food and bio-materials platform built on “innovation and sustainability from farm to shelf.” We go inside his operator playbook: leading 3,500 people through crisis with the principle “I can lose money, but I cannot lose a life,” transforming legacy vermicelli and tapioca products into higher-value ingredients and using distribution as a moat across Asia and beyond. For investors, founders, and family-business leaders thinking in decades, this is a rare look at what long-term, values-led execution really takes. Timestamps/Key Takeaways02:10 – Legacy, trees & being “rooted”06:10 – Stepping into a 77-year-old family business12:32 – F4 framework: Farm, Factory, Family, Food15:15 – Making circularity real: factories, water, solar & biogas19:48 – Managing talent across China & Southeast Asia + AI workforce23:24 – From noodles & starch to…

People in this episode

Host: Sarah Chen-Spellings

Guest: Ho Ren Hua

Topics covered

• agri-food
• sustainability
• innovation
• family business
• climate resilience
• Southeast Asia

Keywords

• cassava
• starch
• circular economy
• biomaterials
• innovation
• family business
• sustainability
• Southeast Asia

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Thai Wah PCL, Rockefeller Foundation

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