(Bangkok, Thailand) — Before the green tea bottles and mass-market advertising, Tan Passakornnatee’s business life began in considerably less glamorous surroundings. He worked as an employee, saved money, and eventually opened a bookstall. That early venture gave him something more useful than a prestigious title: direct experience of selling products, managing cash, and understanding what customers were prepared to buy. His later career would span restaurants, beverages, and other ventures, but the underlying pattern remained recognizable. He repeatedly entered businesses by finding a market opportunity and building an operation around it.
Tan’s beginnings matter because Thailand’s consumer market can look deceptively easy from the outside. A growing urban population, busy shopping districts, and a strong culture of eating and drinking away from home create opportunities for entrepreneurs. Yet retail and food businesses are unforgiving. Rent arrives whether customers come or not, inventory can lose value, and competitors can copy a successful idea quickly. An entrepreneur who survives these conditions learns to pay attention to small commercial details: product placement, customer habits, price points, and the speed with which working capital returns to the business.
Tan did not move directly from the bookstall to a national beverage brand. His business experience developed through a succession of ventures, including restaurants. In 1999, he established the Oishi restaurant business, which became associated with Japanese-style dining in Thailand. The venture gave him a foundation in food-service operations and consumer branding. Restaurants required him to manage customer expectations, location economics, staff, ingredients, and the challenge of maintaining quality across a growing operation. These were practical lessons in how to turn a commercial idea into a repeatable business.
The Oishi name later became closely associated with bottled green tea. The shift was significant because packaged beverages operate according to a different commercial logic from restaurants. A restaurant sells an experience at a particular location; a beverage brand must win space in shops, supermarkets, convenience stores, and distribution networks. It needs consistent manufacturing, reliable packaging, broad availability, and a reason for consumers to choose it among dozens of alternatives. The product must travel farther than the entrepreneur can personally supervise.
Thailand’s ready-to-drink beverage market offered room for companies that could combine familiar flavors with modern distribution. Green tea had cultural associations that could support consumer interest, while bottling and mass retail made it accessible to customers who did not need to visit a specialty establishment. Tan’s commercial instinct was to treat the beverage as a branded consumer product rather than merely an extension of restaurant dining. That distinction helped open the possibility of a business whose sales could grow through distribution rather than the construction of a new restaurant for every additional customer.
The Oishi business expanded around a recognizable brand, a growing retail presence, and marketing designed to attract attention in a crowded market. Tan became known for promotions that offered prizes and other incentives to customers. Such campaigns made the product more visible and gave consumers a reason to notice it amid the clutter of competing beverages. Marketing alone could not guarantee long-term success, however. Promotions had to be supported by product availability, manufacturing capacity, and distribution strong enough to turn attention into repeat purchases.
Tan’s career also illustrates the value of understanding the relationship between a brand and its founder. His public persona became closely linked to the products he sold. In consumer markets, that association can make a company more memorable, particularly when advertising budgets cannot match those of the largest multinational competitors. Yet founder-led branding carries a risk: the business must eventually stand on its own reputation, product quality, and management systems. A recognizable entrepreneur can open the door, but a sustainable company needs customers to keep coming back for reasons beyond the founder’s personality.
After building Oishi, Tan moved into a new phase of entrepreneurship. He founded Ichitan Group in 2010, creating a separate beverage company focused on ready-to-drink products. The decision meant returning to the challenge of building a business rather than relying solely on the momentum of an established brand. Ichitan needed production capacity, retail relationships, brand positioning, and the resources to compete in a market where consumers could switch easily between products. Tan was not starting his commercial life again, but he was applying accumulated experience to a new corporate vehicle.
Ichitan became a listed company, with its shares trading on the Stock Exchange of Thailand from 2014. Listing brought access to public capital and greater visibility, while also placing the company under the expectations of public-market investors. Revenue growth, margins, cash generation, and corporate governance became part of a formal reporting framework. For a founder whose early experience had involved small retail ventures, the transition demonstrated how far his entrepreneurial activities had moved into the world of institutional finance.
The company’s 2024 results offered a clear measure of its scale. Ichitan reported sales revenue of 8.5944 billion baht, with net profit of 1.3063 billion baht. Sales rose 6.8 percent from the previous year, while net profit increased 18.7 percent. Those figures put the business comfortably above the US$100 million revenue threshold, demonstrating that the bookstall entrepreneur had built a sizeable consumer-products company. They also show that revenue alone does not tell the whole story: profitability and cost management determine how much of each baht in sales remains available to support the business.
The following year brought a more complicated picture. Ichitan’s official business overview reported 2025 sales revenue of 8.0862 billion baht, down 5.9 percent year on year. Domestic sales accounted for 91.5 percent of revenue, while exports represented 8.5 percent. The decline is a reminder that even established consumer brands must contend with changing demand, competitive pressure, and the limits of their distribution footprint. The company remained substantial, but its results demonstrated why entrepreneurship cannot be measured by growth in only one direction.
The domestic concentration of sales presents both an advantage and a strategic question. A strong home market can provide deep knowledge of consumer preferences, established retailer relationships, and lower operating complexity than a scattered international network. At the same time, dependence on one country makes a company more exposed to local economic conditions and shifts in consumer spending. Export growth may offer diversification, but international expansion requires the company to adapt its products, pricing, distribution, and marketing to markets where its brand may be unfamiliar.
Beverages are also a business of operational discipline. Production lines must run efficiently, ingredients and packaging must be sourced consistently, and products must reach retailers before demand moves elsewhere. A popular brand can lose shelf space if supply becomes unreliable or if competitors offer retailers better economics. In this industry, success depends on the coordination of marketing and operations. Advertising creates demand, but the supply chain must fulfill it at a cost that leaves the business profitable.
Tan’s path shows the value of experience accumulated across different kinds of enterprise. The bookstall taught him retail fundamentals; restaurants introduced the complexity of food service; packaged beverages required a broader system of manufacturing, distribution, and brand management. Each stage brought a different scale of operation and a different set of risks. His later success cannot be reduced to one clever marketing campaign because the business depended on years of learning how consumer products are sold and delivered.
There is a temptation to present self-made entrepreneurs as people who succeed through instinct alone. Tan’s career suggests a more practical explanation. Instinct can identify an opening, but it must be translated into an operating business. A beverage company requires capital, factories or manufacturing partners, distribution contracts, quality control, and a management team. These capabilities take time to assemble, and they become more important as the company grows. The founder’s judgment matters most when it helps the organization develop systems that continue to work at scale.
His story is particularly relevant to entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia because it begins in ordinary retail rather than an industry that demands extraordinary technical infrastructure. A small shop can expose an entrepreneur to the fundamentals of commerce: buying well, selling consistently, controlling expenses, and retaining customers. Those fundamentals do not guarantee a national brand, but they create a practical education in how money moves through a business. The challenge is to preserve that discipline when the operation becomes larger and more complex.
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