The inspiring story of Khairul Aming: RM14 million sales for “sambal”

Food influencer Khairul Aming continued to make great strides by announcing his second factory in Kota Bharu.

The 30-year-old entreprenuer released a video update on the announcement and recalled the success of his first factory in making his fiery ready-to-eat sambal paste known as Sambal Nyet Berapi.

The Kota Bharu native, who’s real name is Khairul Amin Kamarulzaman built the factory from ground up.

“We started with eight staff producing 200 bottles per day,” said Khairul in the video.

However, over the months, our team has grown to fifty people, and now we produce 5,000 bottles daily from the first factory.

According to Khairul, the factory produced 1,000,000 bottles of Sambal Nyet Berapi with a gross sales of RM 14 million.

Khairul also aims to produce a new product through the new factory.

“I am also pleased that the factory here in Kota Bharu will help the local economy,” said Khairul.

Humble beginning

Khairul launched his sambal paste in early January 2021 with the sale of 10,000 bottles online.

He recalled how it took ten days to pack 10,000 bottles.

With limited space, he had to rent another lot to pack his product for the launch.

Following the launch, he sold 10,000 bottles within 50 minutes on a local e-commerce site.

According to Khairul, between 6 January 2021 and 6 January 2022, he sold 540,000 bottles, equivalent to gross sales of RM 7.5 million.

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He also recalled all the mistakes he made in his bittersweet journey.

“I bought the wrong machine, bought the wrong material, made the wrong layout, and so on. But from there, we learned,” said Khairul.

However, he admits that it is part of the learning curve in becoming a successful entrepreneur.

According to Khairul, in the initial period, he reinvested almost 80% of his profits to expand his business.

Today, he owns a 14,000 sqft factory in Kota Bharu with imported machines and a local workforce.

Sambal Nyet Berapi has become so popular that many imitations have found their way to the marketplace.

Original recipe from Khairul Aming

The sambal paste is an original recipe created by Khairul through trial and error. 

The main ingredients of the paste are shallots, chilli, garlic, cooking oil, sugar, salt, flavoured pepper and MSG. The bottle comes with a net weight of 180 grams of sambal.

Khairul also employs very stringent quality control on his product. In February, he threw away almost 3,000 bottles because the quality was not up to par.

Following an investigation, Khairul realised an issue at the bottling stage that caused the paste to turn rancid and spill.

However, he said there are no more issues with a new bottling mechanism.

Support from his followers

Khairul expressed his gratitude to his followers for supporting Sambal Nyet Berapi from the start of its launch.

He only had some 800 followers at the start of his Instagram. The numbers grew when he started posting recipes and cooking tips.

Today he has 2.8 million followers on Instagram alone. The number of views on his video reaches one million effortlessly.

Many of his follower’s comments reflect a sense of appreciation for his honesty and sense of humour.

Besides growing in business, Khairul continues to inspire many to follow in his footsteps.