A tapioca mill, a peanut trade and a name borrowed from a mythic bird.

Garudafood dates its story to 1958, when, according to the company’s own timeline, Darmo Putro began producing tapioca flour under the brand Tudung in Pati, Central Java. English Wikipedia describes the early business as a small company trading tapioca flour, and says Darmo Putro was a Chinese-Indonesian veteran of the Indonesian revolution who became a trader. The Tudung name has stayed with the family ever since: Indonesian Wikipedia records that the largest single shareholder of the listed company today is PT Tudung Putra Putri Jaya, citing Garudafood’s 2021 annual report.

The move into snacks came in 1979, the company says, when the business began selling unbranded peanuts in their shells. In 1990 it set up PT Tudung Putrajaya to market those in-shell peanuts under the brand Garuda — the name of the mythic bird on Indonesia’s national emblem. Indonesian Wikipedia gives the founding date of the present company as 31 August 1990 and places it in Pati, though it also says the peanut business traded as PT Tudung Putrajaya from 1979; the company’s timeline dates that name to 1990. Indonesian Wikipedia calls Garuda the company’s first brand, and Garudafood still describes its in-shell Kacang Garuda as the “king of peanuts.”

Darmo Putro’s youngest son, Sudhamek Agung Waspodo Sunyoto, became the face of the business. English Wikipedia says he was the last of eleven children, studied economics and law at Satya Wacana Christian University in Salatiga, and spent more than 13 years at the cigarette maker Gudang Garam before returning to the family firm. Indonesian Wikipedia lists him as president director of the GarudaFood group from 1994 to 2012 and its chairman from 2012; he also became group chairman of the wider Tudung Group. The company still publishes what it calls the founder’s spirit: that success is born of honesty, tenacity and perseverance, accompanied by prayer.

Coated nuts, wafer sticks and a jelly drink.

In 1994, the company’s timeline says, two pieces of the modern group were put in place: PT Sinarniaga Sejahtera, a distribution company to carry Garudafood products, and PT Garuda Putra Putri Jaya, which a year later expanded into coated peanuts. Indonesian Wikipedia says PT Tudung Putrajaya and PT Garuda Putra Putri Jaya were later merged as PT Garudafood Putra Putri Jaya, the name the company uses today. A factory in Gresik, East Java, began operating in 1997, and in 1998 the company bought a jelly-cup maker, PT Triteguh Manunggalsejati, which it describes as the origin of its packaged-drinks business.

The best-known brands followed one after another. Gery is dated differently by the company itself: its brand page says Gery was launched in 1997 for coated biscuits and confectionery, while its timeline records the launch of a Gery wafer brand in 2001. Today the name covers chocolate-coated malkist crackers and wafers sold as Gery Saluut, snack cereal and chocolate spreads, and its advertising signs off with the stuttering line “Wak-wak-wak-waktunya Gery.” Garuda Pilus followed in 2002, Okky Jelly Drink in 2003 and the cup tea Mountea in 2005. A biscuit factory in Sumedang, West Java, opened in 2007, and a dairy plant there in 2012.

Chocolatos, a chocolate-cream wafer stick, is the brand that took Garudafood furthest from the peanut. The company dates its launch to 2008 and describes it as a bigger wafer stick with a denser chocolate filling; Indonesian Wikipedia says it first appeared in November 2006 as Gery Chocolatos before standing alone. The brand’s own copy leans on an Italian theme — the company says the products use Italian chocolate, and the brand’s sign-off is “Mamma Mia Lezatos.” The range has since stretched to wafer creams and chocolate drinks. The milk drink Clevo arrived in 2009. In 2015 Garudafood launched a new corporate logo, its timeline records.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Indonesia, Singapore or Malaysia: SilverQueen, Garudafood, Nabati, F&N, Marigold, Hup Seng and Gardenia. Food and drink brands from the region in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the everyday meal or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Joint ventures, a listing and a cheese maker.

From the 2010s Garudafood grew through partners. In July 2011, The Jakarta Post reported, it formed a joint venture with Japan’s Suntory Beverage & Food to make non-alcoholic drinks in Indonesia, with Suntory holding 51 percent; the paper quoted Sudhamek, then group chief executive, as saying the tie-up would help the firm reach its aim of leading the domestic beverage market. The company says it bought the venture, PT Suntory Garuda Beverage, from a Suntory Group company in 2024 and renamed it PT Garuda Beverage Sukses. In 2019 it set up a joint venture with Hormel Foods Asia Pacific to market and distribute Skippy peanut butter, and another with the film studio Falcon Pictures, which in 2022 launched a chocolate brand named after the Dilan novels and films.

Garudafood became a public company in 2018 under the ticker GOOD; Indonesian Wikipedia’s list of Indonesia Stock Exchange companies gives the listing date as 10 October 2018. The same year it set up Goldenbird Pacific Trading in Singapore to handle exports, which Indonesian Wikipedia says reach more than 30 countries, with a focus on ASEAN and China. In 2020 it acquired PT Mulia Boga Raya Tbk, the listed maker of ProChiz processed cheese, and launched the potato and corn snack line Garuda Crunchy. The company has also turned its factories into showcases, opening a digital visitor gallery for Gery at Gresik in 2019 and one for Chocolatos at Sumedang in 2025.

Garudafood makes its products in Indonesia. Indonesian Wikipedia, citing a company public presentation of April 2024, lists production sites in West Java, East Java, South Kalimantan, Riau and South Sulawesi, among them Rancaekek, Gresik, Sidoarjo, Bogor, Cikarang and Gowa. Its peanut supply has reached into farming too: Kontan reported in 2011 that farmers in West Nusa Tenggara were supplying part of the company’s peanuts through a programme backed by the International Finance Corporation. The company is headquartered in Jakarta, and it says it has been named to the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 list three years running.

For a design guide, Garudafood shows how a family business can build a house of separate brands — a mythic bird for peanuts, a sing-song slogan for biscuits, an Italian accent for wafers — while the corporate name stays in the background. Compare Mayora, the Jakarta biscuit and confectionery family, and Skippy, the peanut butter Garudafood distributes in Indonesia. For this guide we use a Garuda red, a peanut-shell tan and a wafer gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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