Zaw Min Oo, 43, recalls the trouble his family’s business faced back in 2003 when U.S. sanctions hit their garment export business. Suddenly, their Crocodile Trading Company that specialized in making garments saw a dramatic drop in foreign orders. It was a problem that affected a lot of export-oriented businesses as the United States and other Western countries used sanctions to express their disapproval of the military-run government in Myanmar.

“Our company found it hard to maintain the garment business,” Zaw Min Oo told M-ZINE+, recalling the problems as the Crocodile Trading Company’s income plummeted. He said he considered other businesses and went in as a sleeping partner with his uncle’s Myanmar Ah Hla Construction Company. But he found that growth in the construction business at that time was not as good as he had expected.

“So I wondered what sort of business I could start, run efficiently, and that might grow during those days,” he said.

Then the idea of setting up a branded restaurant came to him. The economy was moribund but he recognized that people need to eat and that there was a market for an upmarket fast-food brand that sold a mix of local and foreign food, including Korean dishes and hamburgers – though focusing on cuisine not divorced from Myanmar’s home-grown staples of rice and noodles.

Moon Bakery was the answer, he said. “I set up Moon Bakery on April 2, 2003, and I have already expanded to 15 branches in Yangon, and separate branches in Mandalay and Naypyitaw.”

It was a step-by-step process, looking for good restaurant locations and running a restaurant business that provides quality culinary faire.

He explained that the expansion of the restaurants did not fit a specific time framework. “I made the decision to operate more branches across Yangon and the other cities based on finding an ideal location, and how this fit in with the overall business plan,” he said.

Moon Bakery proved a success and this prompted the Lotteria fast food chain to contact Zaw Min Oo in 2012
to become the local representative for the Korean-Japanese brand.

Today, Zaw Min Oo is managing director of Lotteria Myanmar, the local branch of the South Korean wing of the East Asian fast food restaurant chain. The original company was founded on February 1972 in Tokyo, Japan by a Korean businessman, Shin Jun Ho. Seven years later it was set up in Seoul and later spread to China, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Korean culture is popular in Myanmar, and Korean and Japanese food is “in”. Lotteria is the number one fast food restaurant in South Korea. The company has twice the market share of American brand McDonald’s in South Korea, a success made possible by Koreanizing fast food including even selling a kimchi burger …