
We meet Vivien Wong, the creator of dessert brand Little Moons
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Rahul Tandon
Hello, I'm Rahul Tandon and welcome to meet the founders from Business Daily on on the BBC World Service. This is where we speak to innovators around the world about the ideas, risks and realities behind starting a business. Today we meet the creator of a Japanese ice cream treat business. She grew up helping in her parents bakery, later faced a family loss and eventually channeled those experiences into building a company. Around mochi, a traditional Japanese rice cake and in this case wrapped around balls of ice cream, we learn how a sudden social media craze helped turn a niche treat into a global brand.
Vivian Wong
We've had 500 million views of our hashtag Little means.
Rahul Tandon
It was a very difficult period, but it was a period that changed your company.
Vivian Wong
Yeah, I mean it's a good problem to have when you can't make enough product.
Rahul Tandon
That's Vivian Wong, my guest today. But before Little Moons became a global brand, it was a family story.
Vivian Wong
My mum started her own bakery back when I think I was 5 years old when my younger brother Howard, who I started Little Moons with, was born and it was just a great place to learn to watch how she ran a business and was a mother. And I learned a lot from her.
Rahul Tandon
She's my role model as a kid. It must be really cool to have your mum running a bakery.
Vivian Wong
I think so now, but I'm not sure I thought so.
Rahul Tandon
You didn't at the time?
Vivian Wong
No, I didn't. I mean, we're children of immigrant parents, so we were dragged into the business on every opportunity. Weekends to help, school holidays were definitely, you know, good. Six to eight weeks in the. In our bakery. I learned so much from it. Absolutely formative years.
Rahul Tandon
Was there a lot of talk about business? When you would sit and have dinner, would your parents be talking about business?
Vivian Wong
Yeah, there was natural conversation about their bakery, but there wasn't conversation like now. I've met people from generational businesses where they've really learned the ropes from generations of running the same business. But I definitely found an interest in business from just listening to my parents casually discussing their day or what was coming up. And they weren't necessarily talking about it. So we would learn. It was just natural conversation.
Rahul Tandon
You would know from those family businesses, many of which were set up around that time with people coming in from different parts of the world, that sometimes there was an expectation that the kids would get involved in that business later in life. Was that ever a path for you?
Vivian Wong
No. My mother wanted me to become a chartered accountant and then I went into banking after that. She always advised me to think about my career for. From a mother's point of view. Cause she found it very hard to be a mother and to have a career as well. And so naturally going into banking made it more difficult for myself. But there was never an expectation for me to continue running her bakery.
Rahul Tandon
He's such an important part of this business. He is the other founder, Howard. And we'll talk about. I don't think I could. I love my sister. I don't think I could possibly work with her and I know that she would not want to work with me from a young age. Did you and Howard get on pretty well?
Vivian Wong
Yeah, we were incredibly close and we still are. Because my parents worked such long hours. It was. I had to take care of my brother. I was responsible for making sure that we did our homework together. And I was five years older than him. So from a very young age, we spent every moment together. And for better or worse, we have, I think, successfully built a business together, despite the fact of us being complete opposite.
Rahul Tandon
Do you think the fact that you came from an entrepreneurial family, your family had a business of their own, is something that has helped you later in life. Would you have looked at it so much if you hadn't seen that growing up?
Vivian Wong
I think it's been absolutely instrumental in me starting Little Moons with my brother. They're just things that you learn watching how your parents problem solve, which is ultimately what entrepreneurship is, solving a million problems a day. And so when I meet new entrepreneurs who haven't had that experience, many of the questions that they ask me are very much like, how do you start? What happens if something goes wrong? Because I've seen my mum just fix problems, I've realized that it is exactly what you need to do. And I don't have that fear of jumping into that industry.
Rahul Tandon
You didn't start there, so you do your chartered accountancy. You had a pretty good firm. Life's good, I presume. Comfortable, you've got good prospects ahead of you. What makes you then think, hey, this isn't for me?
Vivian Wong
I think my father getting diagnosed with cancer made me realize how short life is. That was in 2004, and I didn't leave Barclays Capital until 2007, 2008, but it took time for me to formulate the idea. But it was then that I realized that I wanted to start my own business. And, yes, I had a great career ahead of me, a very stable career, potentially having done accountancy, but it didn't set my world alight. It just didn't bring me joy. And I'd look at some of the people who are 20 years ahead of me in their careers, and I didn't necessarily want to be them. I didn't want their lives. And so that's where I decided I wanted to do something a little bit more creative that moment.
Rahul Tandon
And I've lived through that moment when my dad was diagnosed with cancer. It's a really difficult moment for you, isn't it? Stirs so many emotions and we have different ways of dealing with it. You wrote a list, didn't you?
Vivian Wong
Yeah, I wrote a bucket list. And the first thing was to start my own business, and the second was to get a dog. I did both of those things on the same day.
Rahul Tandon
Did it become very clear the minute you wrote that down that this has to be the path moving forward? Because we write lists and we always think aspirationally we might do them, but often we don't.
Vivian Wong
I think lots of people can write lists, but that impetus, that real reason for a call to action, was how short life is. And I really like the phrase we have two lives and the second one begins when we realize we only have one. And honestly, it just, it changed my mindset so dramatically when I realized that my father might potentially die. He lived for another 10 years because it was a slow growing cancer, but it was a huge gift if you look on the bright side of it, Just the gift of seizing life.
Rahul Tandon
So there you are, you decide, right? I want to set up my own business. That's a wide thought, isn't it? So what business and why this business?
Vivian Wong
So my brother and I had tried mochi ice cream when we were in Japan and America. So mochi is a traditional Japanese rice flour dough. It's steamed and pounded with rice. So it has a very sticky feeling. It's a very sticky texture. It's almost like if you mince cooked rice between your fingers, it gets a little tacky. So what we've done is we wrap that around Italian style gelato. And so my brother and I had tried this product when we traveled through Japan, we traveled through America and no one was making it in Europe. Japanese food was increasing in popularity, but the dessert offering was somewhat.
Rahul Tandon
It wasn't good, was it? I remember those days.
Vivian Wong
It was just like a green tea and matcha brownie and matcha muffin.
Rahul Tandon
You just wouldn't have it.
Vivian Wong
And so this is where we saw the opportunity to help with that offering.
Rahul Tandon
You go to set up a company, it's mochi ice cream. I suppose the next thing is how do you get the recipe? How do you get it right? And this is where you spend some time with your dad?
Vivian Wong
Yes. So it's really difficult to wrap hot dough around frozen ice cream. And it was the shelf life testing. So back in the day, I had no idea that food technologists exist. So it was just my father and I testing a product, putting it in the freezer and trying it. After, say three months and our dough had degraded, so we had to start again. And so it took us two years to get the dough right.
Rahul Tandon
What was that like working with your parents? We all love our parents, but sometimes it can be difficult.
Vivian Wong
My parents definitely knew more, but I also knew that they knew more, but they also respected the areas that I brought expertise. So I had worked in a corporate. I could see how HR worked well there with the people team. My mum and dad respected the knowledge that I brought to the business, which is why we worked so well together.
Rahul Tandon
When you said to them your idea of what you wanted to do, mochi ice cream what did they say at that moment? Did they say this is a good idea? Were they a bit skeptical of whether it was going to work or not? Because they know that food industry.
Vivian Wong
I think they're very encouraging for us to go into that business. Whether it worked or it didn't work. I think they would have supported us anyway. And if I. And if it failed, I could have gone back into accounting. So my mum was very supportive of me giving this a go.
Rahul Tandon
And that is important, isn't it, that you have things that you can fall back on in life.
Vivian Wong
Absolutely. But I also think it's really important to surround yourself with people that support you.
Rahul Tandon
You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
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Rahul Tandon
I'm Rahul Tandon and today in Meet the Founders, I'm talking to Vivian Wong, the creator of the dessert brand Little Moon's Mochi. At what point did you begin to take it out to restaurants? Initially?
Vivian Wong
So my brother and I had always wanted to sell this product into grocery stores, but we knew that the market wasn't ready because no one knew what mochi was. So I think it's one job getting your product on shelf, it's another one getting off the shelf and the market just wasn't there. So we thought, how do we sample this product? And what's the greatest way for us to get as many people to try this product as possible, but also get paid for it? And we just thought Three restaurants. Because people go to restaurants to go on a journey, they want to be taken on a culinary journey. They want to try new things, they're open minded. And so we thought if we can get this onto the dessert menus of Japanese restaurants and Mayfair or across the whole of Europe, which is what we ended up doing, it would mean that we were educating our consumers about mochi.
Rahul Tandon
Was that hard? Because you've got to convince chefs, I suppose, and restaurant owners as well, and distributors.
Vivian Wong
It was difficult. The chefs got the product immediately and I think it's a very difficult product to make in the kitchen. And so if you manage to manufacture it to a high standard, which we did, the chefs were very happy to put that onto their menu. It also helps them with staff costs. It's another dessert. They do not have to make anything to make their lives a little bit easier. So they were, they were all for it. Distributors was harder to get to. They would look at us and think, you are such a small business. I look like a very young woman. They said to me, your business isn't going to be here in six months time. So they wouldn't want to put me on the books. But when Yosushi put me on the books with 100 restaurants, the distributor had to take me on.
Rahul Tandon
Do you think age was a fact? People would look at you being so, so young and think, yeah, like the idea, she's just too young to do this. And has that changed?
Vivian Wong
I hope I still look young.
Rahul Tandon
You do look quite. You do look young. Isn't that a good thing?
Vivian Wong
Absolutely. I definitely did feel that slight prejudice, but it's just another problem that you need to get around. You know, you've got to make sure even more so you know what you're talking about and you come across as credible.
Rahul Tandon
So people are taking you seriously now. You're in some pretty well known chains. Yosushi. People may not know it across the world, but it's very well known here in the uk. And has your brother by this stage quit his job and are you working together?
Vivian Wong
Yes. When we got listed by a couple of restaurants across Europe, we realized that we had a business. And so my brother did leave and joined and we started working together.
Rahul Tandon
How was that?
Vivian Wong
It was great.
Rahul Tandon
I mean, you paused for a minute.
Vivian Wong
I didn't know how to say it. I guess it was just like any partnership, you had to get used to who was doing what. And to begin with, we all tried to do the same things and things fell through the cracks and we got annoyed with each and so we brought on a ned, a non executive director who advised that maybe we split our roles and so there's clear accountability. And we also did a personality test and the test came back that we were complete opposites in personality and so we learned how to work better together.
Rahul Tandon
Had you ever realized how different you were before that?
Vivian Wong
Not at all. No way.
Rahul Tandon
Quite a shock then.
Vivian Wong
Yeah. Because I'd always seen my brother as my little brother and not as a business partner.
Rahul Tandon
Yeah. Which I'm sure for him was annoying.
Vivian Wong
And I'm sure I was annoying for him as well as a business partner because you don't put that pressure on each other to perform in this different way. We were always just siblings, so it was definitely a learning experience.
Rahul Tandon
Do you think we should use or people, when they're setting up a business, particularly if they're working with families, should do more of this?
Vivian Wong
I think working with family or working with any business partner, you should do this insight test. In fact, everyone at littlemoons does an insight test and we put their personality profile on their emails.
Rahul Tandon
Because you use executive coaches as well, haven't you? You found that very, very helpful. In what way?
Vivian Wong
As your business grows, you have to grow as well. Otherwise I think that you become redundant from the business. And so I found coaching incredibly helpful to take me through the different stages of our business. We've grown from zero to over 50 million in revenue. So as the team has grown in size and caliber, I've also had to change.
Rahul Tandon
Yeah. And you must be proud of that.
Vivian Wong
Incredibly proud.
Rahul Tandon
Your business is doing well. You're getting into restaurants. The next stage is to try and get into retail supermarkets. Did you know at that point that social media was going to have to play such a big part in your business?
Vivian Wong
Not at the time. In 2015 when we started going into the grocery stores, Instagram had just sort of starting in popularity. Everyone had a sort of look and feel of Instagram, so we knew that we'd have to be involved. And we had an Instagram page, but TikTok wasn't around yet. So I don't think we had any inkling how much social media would play in our journey.
Rahul Tandon
Were you a user of it yourself? Did you sort of. Were you using Instagram and TikTok quite early on?
Vivian Wong
Yes, on a private account. Just messing around with my friends.
Rahul Tandon
Which is important, isn't it? I think, because if you want to understand something for a business purpose, it's harder if you just come to it and you've never used it.
Vivian Wong
Totally. I. And this Is this. Is it? So this is why I think we were quite unusual as a business, because we were on TikTok quite early on and that's, I think, what allowed us to become viral on TikTok by purely being on the platform. And so we. I love hanging out with younger people. They've got great ideas, you learn so much from them. And we had Charlie, our intern, who was working with us, who asked to join TikTok and a few other platforms, and we just said, you know, go for it.
Rahul Tandon
During this period, it's difficult, isn't it, because the pandemic happens, which for your business when you're in restaurants is extremely difficult. And so having those products in supermarkets is really important because that's the only way you're going to get revenue at that time.
Vivian Wong
Yeah, and we weren't even sure of that either. So we had lost 50% of our revenue through restaurants. When we had lockdown in March 2020, I wasn't even sure that supermarkets were allowed to be open. So obviously there was a couple of weeks of absolute blind panic from businesses just trying to figure out what to do. I mean, we just moved into a new factory six times the size of our other one, so our rent had just gone through the roof. It was a risk that we were willing to take, but not to shut down two months later.
Rahul Tandon
You have that moment, don't you, when suddenly, and it's not because of something that you've posted, the Little Moons goes viral. Just tell our listeners what that video was and who posted it.
Vivian Wong
So we weren't ever able to identify who was the first person to post the video because TikTok doesn't have that sort of chronological order ability. But it was of a younger adult walking into a big tent, Tesco's on an adventure, looking for little moons. It wasn't just about brand awareness. She went to the shelf, she took it off, there was a call to action. She paid for it. She filmed herself paying for it, took it to her car, tried it in the car and gave it 10 out of 10. For some reason, this just captured the imagination of so many people who were bored, locked up at home, and the only permissible place we could go to was a supermarket for some adventure. And so everyone just jumped on the bandwagon and started looking for little Moons.
Rahul Tandon
I remember this because my daughter was one of those who watched that video.
Vivian Wong
We've had 500 million views of our hashtag Little Moons.
Rahul Tandon
You can't buy that publicity, can you?
Vivian Wong
No, it would cost a lot.
Rahul Tandon
How did you deal with that because you had your factory in West London, don't you? And suddenly could you provide what was needed in such a short space of time?
Vivian Wong
We absolutely couldn't. It was again, in the middle of COVID so all the containers were in Europe rather than Asia, so we couldn't import our flour from there. We couldn't import any new machinery because all the factories were closed. There was a cardboard shortage, if you remember, because everyone was buying off Amazon and PPE was using up a ton of cardboard. So it was a really difficult time for us to produce. And also we had to socially distance everyone in our factory so we couldn't just throw more people into the factory.
Rahul Tandon
It was a very difficult period. But it was a period that changed your company.
Vivian Wong
Yeah, I mean, it was. It's a good problem to have when you can't make enough product.
Rahul Tandon
And here we are now. You are working in many countries, aren't you? Your products are seen in many parts of the world now.
Vivian Wong
Yeah, we're in 38 different countries. And what I love the most is if I get a photo sent to me from a friend who's traveling in, I don't know, somewhere I've not been, like Cortina, they find it in a little store there. I just. That's just incredible that my little moons are in a place that I've never been.
Rahul Tandon
Let's go back to that moment where you decided to leave being a chartered accountant and set up your own business. It's there on the. On the list. Did you have that belief that you would be where you are now?
Vivian Wong
I had no idea. And I had no ambition for our business to be as big as it was. I just found so much joy making really delicious desserts and working on the recipe with my dad and really caring about our product. I never dreamed that it would be as big as it is today.
Rahul Tandon
Have you enjoyed it?
Vivian Wong
Really enjoyed the journey? There've definitely been some low periods and they've definitely been some highs. But it's such a fulfilling business to run and it continues to be. So.
Rahul Tandon
I've always wondered because I've seen so many family businesses, as the business evolves, the relationships within the family evolve. You lived with Howard at one stage, didn't you, when you. I mean, how you do that and run a business, I'm not sure.
Vivian Wong
Again, that was a difficult period, but it was, you know, but we made it through. And. And now that we have our CEO, Joanna Allen, she runs the day to day for us. And so my brother and I's relationship has definitely gone back to more sibling, which is lovely. He's just had a baby. My mum's obsessed with her grandchild. I'm obsessed with my, you know, my nephew. And it's just lovely being able to hang out as a family again. Like not having to talk about business.
Rahul Tandon
You're in the food business and food is changing so much. People are a lot more concerned about what they eat, levels of sugar, how products are made. Is that a challenge for you, do you think?
Vivian Wong
I relish that. Consumers are far more educated about what they eat now. We use real milk, we use real cream, we use real fruit puree and I love that people check the back of our packs to check all these things. But also they read about us as a business and because we're B Corp, we really care about people and planet as well. So this is another element that I welcome consumers to research the businesses that they're buying products from.
Rahul Tandon
What have you learned along your way since setting up the business? What's the one thing that you've taken away from it now? If you had to advise somebody else who's starting out out like you did,
Vivian Wong
it's really about people and product. You've got to care about your team and the team take care of you. I couldn't have grown this business without my team. And equally when it comes to people as well, it's our consumers. We've really got to care about what their needs are, what they want to eat, what flavours they would like. The product has to be delicious.
Rahul Tandon
That was Vivian Wong. That's it for this week's edition of Meet the Founders with me, Rahul Tandon. The producers were Niamh McDermott, Victoria Holland and Jay Baruzi. To listen to more conversations like this one, search and subscribe to Business Daily wherever you get your podcast.
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Business Daily – “The baker’s daughter bringing mochi to the mainstream” BBC World Service | Host: Rahul Tandon | Guest: Vivian Wong (Co-founder, Little Moons) | Date: May 7, 2026
This episode of Meet the Founders on Business Daily spotlights Vivian Wong, co-founder of Little Moons—the dessert brand responsible for making mochi ice cream a mainstream treat across Europe and beyond. Host Rahul Tandon explores Vivian’s journey from her family's bakery roots, through the challenges and turning points of building an innovative business, to the global success that followed a viral social media moment.
Vivian Wong’s story is one of resilience, innovation, and the strength of family bonds—a testament to reimagining tradition for a new generation and seizing unexpected opportunities. The viral rise of Little Moons mochi is as much about a love for food as it is about adaptability, teamwork, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship. The episode offers practical lessons for would-be founders: embrace both challenges and change, never overlook the power of digital trends, and always keep people and product at the heart of your business.