Vivien Wong grew up in the Nineties spending her weekends and school holidays in her parents’ bakery in Wembley, which sold desserts to Chinatown’s restaurants. She would help with local deliveries and packing boxes of traditional mochi — steamed rice flour balls — which she and her brother, Howard, loved to eat too.
Then Howard landed an internship in New York, Vivien visited and the pair tried mochi combined with ice-cream. “We both loved it — the combination was magic, and we thought, ‘one day let’s bring this to Europe’.” They returned to London “and had careers for eight years,” until, in 2008, Wong quit her job at Barclays Capital.
“Working in finance didn’t set my world on fire,” she says. “That coupled with my father being diagnosed with cancer brought home the fact that life is short, so I seized the opportunity.”
The siblings — Vivien is now 43, Howard is 37 — fulfilled their earlier pledge by starting their Little Moons mochi ice-cream business.
Fast forward 15 years and Little Moons sells £50 million-worth annually of ice-cream balls wrapped in rice dough in 30 countries. They come in 15 flavours, including strawberries and cream, honey-roasted pistachio, passionfruit and mango and iced latte coffee.
“It sounds fast, but it was years of very hard work,” Vivien Wong explains. The pair spent two years between 2008 and 2010 perfecting the recipe with their dad at his Wembley bakery. “It’s quite challenging trying to wrap hot dough around ice-cream and we didn’t have food technologists or process engineers.
“But once we were happy with our product quality, we attended trade shows in Olympia and pounded the pavements trying to meet chefs to put mochi ice- cream on their menus. Consumers were unfamiliar with the product and wouldn’t have taken it off the shelf in a supermarket, so we decided to sell to restaurants first to build a market.”
Some were dismissive: “One distributor told me that it wasn’t worth their effort listing us as our business wouldn’t be around in six months.” But soon the duo were sold in Yo Sushi, Nobu, and Sushi Samba, then in restaurants in Spain and Germany. “I remember standing waving the container truck off to Spain and really hoping it stayed frozen,” Vivien says.
By 2015, Little Moons was stocked in Whole Foods Market, and the pair opened pop-up shops in Old Street, Bond Street, at Taste of London and Selfridges to spread the word.
Little Moons launched with £50,000 from the Wong siblings’ savings, and the same contribution from their parents’ bakery. Growth was self-funded for 12 years, before the Wongs sold a minority stake to US private equity firm L Catterton last year, which valued the business at £100 million.
During lockdown — which was an initial disaster for Little Moons, as half of its turnover came from suddenly shut restaurants — the brand went viral on TikTok. More than 400 million have now viewed the myriad videos of shoppers hunting down Little Moons’ mochi in supermarkets as a lockdown entertainment trend.
Turnover hit £50 million last year, when the Wongs launched in Australia, Little Moons’ 28th international market. Celebrity fans of their mochi ice- cream now include Harry Styles, Brooklyn Beckham and Kendall Jenner.
Yet Wong admits starry fans don’t drive her ambition. “I am quite nostalgic for the time when our business was smaller and we saw both our parents at work every day,” she admits. “Trying to scale the business quickly to keep up with the demand generated by going viral on TikTok put a huge amount of strain on our team and on me personally; it was difficult to manage.
“But I couldn’t have done this business with anyone else but my brother. You can stop being a business partner, you can stop being friends, but you can never stop being brother and sister.”
