Two brothers and a second-hand machine.

Munchy’s began in 1991 in Batu Pahat, a town in the southern Malaysian state of Johor. Its present owner’s history page says two brothers started Munchy Food Industries Sdn Bhd that year with a second-hand wafer-stick machine in a shop lot. English Wikipedia names the brothers as Soo Kuok Tan and Lee Kok Tan, joined in the business by their siblings CK Tan and Net Tan, and cites The Star, which profiled the family in December 2008 under the headline “Munchy’s Dream Come True for Tan Brothers.”

The first export market was South Africa, English Wikipedia says, and a partnership with a multinational chocolate company let Munchy’s add chocolate wafers to its range. The big step came in 1996, when the company moved into a factory in Batu Pahat. English Wikipedia describes it as a 120,000-square-foot plant built around fully automated wafer technology, and both it and the company date three launches to that year: MUZIC wafers, Munchini wafer rolls and LEXUS biscuits, all under the Munchy’s name. In 1997 the brothers set up MunchWorld Marketing Sdn Bhd as the sales and distribution arm, responsible, English Wikipedia says, for branding, advertising, promotions and distribution. It remains the trading company today, based in Klang, Selangor.

Growth continued through the 2000s. The company dates its first television commercial to 2002, for MUZIC, and the launch of Oat Krunch to 2009. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s own figures from 2015, put the Batu Pahat site at more than 300,000 square feet, with two wafer plants, four biscuit plants and wafer-stick machines running twenty lines, and said Munchy’s exported to more than 60 countries and kept sales offices across Malaysia and in Singapore and Thailand.

Crackers, LEXUS and a run of brand awards.

Munchy’s sells under a family of names rather than one. Under the Munchy’s name itself sit cream crackers, cracker sandwiches and Marie biscuits; alongside it are LEXUS, a line of cream sandwiches, cookies and crackers, Oat Krunch, MUZIC wafers and the assortments TOPMIX and FUNMIX. When Universal Robina announced its purchase in 2021 it named Munchy’s Cream Crackers, LEXUS Cream Sandwich, Oat Krunch, MUZIC Wafer and Choc-O cookies as the key products, and called Munchy’s Malaysia’s number-one biscuit brand, a description that is Universal Robina’s own.

The brand has collected Malaysian marketing awards for two decades, according to the list on its owner’s website. It records Superbrands status in 2003, 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2015; BrandLaureate awards for product branding in biscuits and wafers in 2006, 2007 and 2008; gold in the foodstuff category of the Putra Brand Awards in 2022 and 2023, after silvers and bronzes in earlier years; gold in the biscuits and cookies category of the Reader’s Digest Trusted Brand awards in several years from 2014; and Brand of the Year in the biscuits category of the World Branding Awards in each cycle from 2019–2020 to 2024–2025.

Munchy’s put its products on Shopee, Lazada and 11street in 2017, the company says, and it commissioned a new chocolate line in 2021. English Wikipedia lists markets from India, Bangladesh and Nepal to South Africa, the Gulf, North Africa and the United Kingdom; the 2021 acquisition announcement put the brand’s reach at more than 50 countries.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group make malted drinks, snacks and sauces, and they come from Switzerland, Britain, India, Malaysia and China: Ovaltine, Horlicks, Bournvita, Mamee, Julie’s, Munchy’s and Pearl River Bridge. Brands like these sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf far from home.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a jar, a packet, a bottle and the name on it, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the place 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.

From private equity to URMunchy’s.

The Tan family sold the company in 2018. That June, CVC Capital Partners announced that its Asia Fund IV had acquired 100% of Munchy Food Industries, the Malaysian site Business Today reported. Three years later CVC sold it on. On 26 November 2021 the Philippine food group Universal Robina Corporation (URC) announced that its subsidiary URC Snack Foods (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd would buy Munchy’s from CVC for RM1.925 billion on a cash-free, debt-free basis, with completion expected in December 2021. URC said the deal would add immediate value to its international portfolio, and Munchy’s chief executive Rodney Wong said it would give Munchy’s access to research and development expertise across categories.

URC already made snacks in Malaysia. Its local business was incorporated as Pacific World Sdn Bhd in 1982, began production in Pasir Gudang, Johor, in 1984 with Jack ’n Jill snacks and took the name URC Snack Foods (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd in 2001, the company says. In July 2022 the two businesses began operating as one corporate entity under the name URMunchy’s, short for Universal Robina Munchy’s, and in January 2024 manufacturing was consolidated into URC Snack Foods (Malaysia), with two plants, in Batu Pahat and Pasir Gudang; MunchWorld Marketing stays the trading entity. The old munchys.com address now forwards to the URMunchy’s website, which lists Munchy’s biscuits next to Jack ’n Jill and Roller Coaster snacks and Cloud 9 confectionery.

The company says the Batu Pahat factory, where Munchy’s moved in 1996, now covers 444,081 square feet and runs 13 production lines making more than 550 products, while the Pasir Gudang plant runs eight lines making more than 200.

For a design guide, Munchy’s shows how a family of sub-brands, from LEXUS to MUZIC, can sit under one cheerful master name and survive two changes of owner. Compare Julie’s, the Melaka biscuit maker, and Jacob’s, the cream-cracker maker from Ireland. For this guide we use a munch red, a wafer gold and a cocoa brown with a chunky rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Munchy’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.