A thriving frozen Chinese food brand began as “kind of an accident.”
In 2018, when Jen Liao C’12 started MìLà, a modern Chinese food company that sells dumplings, noodles, and other treats that customers can easily prepare at home, it was supposed to be a side hustle.
She and her husband, Caleb Wang, who split their time between Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, had trouble finding some of the niche Chinese foods they loved growing up. So, they set out to make them on their own—in the scant time left over from their full-time jobs in health tech and finance, respectively. “If anything, we thought we could maybe create a night market stall or something,” Liao says.
Fast forward to today. Backed by more than $30 million in venture capital funding, MìLà products can be found in more than 2,500 stores across the country, including Whole Foods, Target, Sprouts, and Costco. The company has shipped more than 30 million dumplings nationwide and has expanded its offerings to include sauces, ice cream, dipping bowls, and chopstick sets. Delivered frozen, the bestselling pork soup dumplings are made with restaurant-quality ingredients and can be steamed in 11 minutes.
MìLà even has a celebrity employee. Last year the company tapped actor Simu Liu, who played a Marvel superhero in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and a Ken doll in the movie Barbie, as its chief content officer.
Liao still can’t believe it. “It was all kind of an accident,” she says.
Liao, who grew up in Seattle, must have had some early interest in food because in one of her college-application essays she “described Penn as being like a Starbucks because you can customize your education journey with so many different programs.”
Indeed, at Penn she participated in activities ranging from ballroom dancing to being a photo editor for the Daily Pennsylvanian. Coming from a medical family—her dad is a doctor and her mom is a research scientist—she studied biological basis of behavior (now the neuroscience program) with a minor in healthcare management. “I knew in the back of my mind that somehow being a doctor wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t know what else to do,” she says.
She liked some of her science classes, including “one lab course where we dissected a lobster and probed it with electrodes,” so after graduation she became a research technician in a Columbia University lab that was studying ALS using mice.
The process of scientific research fascinated her. “I started to think about all the inefficiencies of science research, how I was repeating a lot of the same things that someone else had also done experiment-wise,” she says. “I thought a lot about improving the system and about how funding works, how data capture works.”
She then moved to San Francisco and joined Evidation, a digital platform that allows users to track their health data through an app. There she worked with Apple and Johnson & Johnson to study data collected from Apple watches to discover if there were any signals or predictors of cardiac events. She also worked with the government of Singapore to pilot a program that sent notifications via wearables to improve people’s health. For example, during flu season it would remind people to get a flu shot. If someone was showing early signs of diabetes it would alert them to see a doctor.
She was content in her job when she and her husband started talking to a high school friend about adding to the food scene in Seattle, the city where she grew up and still visited regularly. The more they talked, the more they realized that while they could eat some of their favorite Chinese foods at their relatives’ homes, there weren’t any restaurants serving them. “My mom has always been a very good cook. She cooked every night, and interestingly my dad had been trying to convince her to start a restaurant for a very long time,” Liao says. “She thought it sounded like too much work.”
In 2018 she, her husband, and her high school friend opened Xiao Chi Jie, a small, fast-casual restaurant inside a food court in the Bellevue neighborhood. It specialized in Sheng Jian Bao, a fluffy, pan-fried bun filled with soup. “We made it in a cast iron pan with 70 at a time, and it had to sell out in 30 minutes for it to taste good,” she says. “People really liked it, and because it didn’t really exist anywhere else, people traveled to come get it.”
The restaurant was open for a year-and-a-half before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Liao and her cofounders then pivoted to selling frozen dumplings, opting to make more traditional varieties because they were easier to prepare at home. After posting ads on Facebook and WeChat groups, they were inundated with orders. “Somebody brought a cooler and bought 30 bags of our soup dumplings and flew it to Alaska to give it to their friends and family,” Liao remembers. “It was like, What is happening?”
By January 2022 they had a large enough clientele to raise funding, at which point Liao and Wang quit their other jobs to focus on this full time. They rebranded the company and named it MìLà, which means honey and spice in Chinese.
One of the most challenging parts of second-generation Chinese Americans running a Chinese food brand during the pandemic was overcoming stereotypes. “We got comments on social media like, ‘Is there COVID in this? Are there bats in this food? Is there dog meat?’” Liao says. “We tried to be very calm and say, ‘These are the ingredients. This is how we make this.’ We tried to be as educational as possible, and slowly the comments stopped.”
They brought in Liu partly to help educate the public about Chinese culture in a fun, engaging way. The brand now has more than 260,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, where it posts videos on topics ranging from Lunar New Year resolutions to creating festive bento boxes at home.
Now sharing her culture is one of the most rewarding parts of Liao’s job. “Our philosophy is welcoming people to the table, inviting them in, having them try it,” she says. “The goal is for Chinese food to just become regular food, an option anybody can have” and easily prepare in their kitchen rather than always ordering takeout or going to a restaurant.
“It’s really crazy that this is what I am doing now,” she adds. “But it really matters to me, and that is really fun.”
—Alyson Krueger C’07
