SEEING the need for premium meat products, three Rugby mates pulled their resources to set up Victoria Crest Sdn Bhd, a 60% wholly-owned Bumiputra company manufacturing European-style comfort food.

The homegrown company producing Halal-certified premium sausages, traditional meat pies and burger patties, is already looking to expand its foothold to east Malaysia and the Asean region by next year.

Co-founded by Fuad Abdullah in 2009, the former banker who attended boarding school in the UK, felt that there was a niche market for high-quality European-style meat products especially catered to the Muslim community.

“I left my job to start up the company with my rugby friends because we shared a passion for good food and we believe there is a demand in this growing market,” he said in an interview.

Apart from the Halal certification from the Islamic Development Department (Jakim), Fuad said their meat products only uses 100% chicken breast sourced locally while the prime cuts are imported beef and lamb from New Zealand.

“It is our principle that we use high-quality ingredients as we have a strict policy of not using unhealthy nitrites or bulking agents that can compromise the quality standards,” he said, stating that most of their sausages and burgers are lean meat with fat levels less than 10% and some even 98% fat free.

Produced at their factory in Glenmarie, the company currently retails its products to several high-end hypermarkets, independent supermarkets including several hotels in the Klang Valley, Johor Baru and Penang, he said.

Being the sole competitor in this field, he explained the company is optimistic towards expanding its business organically and via joint-ventures with interested parties in growing markets like Indonesia and Singapore.

With sales target to hit RM2 million within the next year, he said the company that is running at 30% of its current production capacity, reported sales of approximately RM1.2 million last year.

Victoria Crest are homemade original recipes — comes in seven varieties of premium sausages, two types of meat burger patties and four traditional meat pies, Fuad said.

Among its fast-selling item is the “Chicken Dynamite Chilli” sausages infused with local flavours like birds-eye chillies and red-chillies, he added. The pricing of the products ranges between RM15 and 30.