At the kitchen table: Cassandra Lam of Mama Lam's

I'm kind of obsessed tbh

Emily Duncan

Mar 26, 2025

Hey dispatch pals,

It’s Wednesday, Mar. 26th, 2025, and we’re back with another Kitchen Dispatch interview!

Let’s get into it.

a bit of background

Mama Lam’s is a Malaysian-American sauce company based right here in Queens, New York. They make amazing curry pastes, hot sauce (sambal), and satay paste and have more products in development. They ship all over the country and are carried in stores across 21 states.

I’ve been lucky to get to know Cassandra over the past year and have been eating a lot of Mama Lam’s – including several bowls of laksa from her side venture, Laksa Shop! – so I wanted to introduce you to her products and story. I sat down with her to chat about the idea for her business and the journey to turn that idea into a reality.

an interview with Cassandra Lam

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hi Cassandra! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer some questions for The Kitchen Dispatch. First off, can you tell our readers a bit about Mama Lam’s? Who is Mama Lam?

So, yes! Mama Lam is my mom. Our last name is Lam, which is Hong Kong Cantonese, because my dad's from Hong Kong – she took his name. Sometimes when people see “Mama Lam,” they get confused because they're like, wait, that's not a very Malaysian last name. In Malaysia, it would be technically Lim. It's all about how you say the word in Chinese. Chinese has so many different dialects – Cantonese, Hakkanese, Mandarin – and all of those ways of saying things translate to different spellings in English. So that's why my mom is “Mama Lam” selling Malaysian products.

My mom immigrated to New York City from Malaysia in 1985. She came here kind of on a whim. She had an older sister here, and she came to meet her. But you know, things always happen when you travel. She met my dad and ended up staying here. They got married and had me and my sister, so I was born and raised in New York, between Queens and Long Island. Mostly Queens.

Growing up, my mom talked a lot about Malaysian cuisine. And one of her favorite dishes was curry mee – curry laksa. “Mee” means noodles in Chinese, so “curry mee” directly translates to “curry noodles,” and “curry mee” or curry laksa is a curry noodle soup.

There's so many different versions of it throughout Malaysia. She was trying to recreate this specific flavor of curry that she grew up with. So her curry paste is something she's refined over 30 plus years of living here and tweaking it to her own liking. Same with the hot sauce.

And what inspired you to turn her sauces into a business?

Growing up, Malaysian cuisine was not common in New York City. I would say we frequented probably 2 or 3 places consistently. Nyonya in Chinatown is one that's always been solid. But there aren’t many Malaysian restaurants out there. And even if they open, they don't survive.

When I graduated, I started working in advertising, but I wanted to do something on my own. And I've always been a big food person. I love eating. Especially – my dad's from Hong Kong – Cantonese cuisine is awesome, and then, going back to Malaysia as a kid, we'd just be eating everything.

So my mom was like well, we can sell curry. And I said, yeah! I mean, she’d already refined this product. And so the first thing we did was set up a food stand in Long Island City. On the weekends, we would prep the food and sell it at a food market there. And through that, we met a bunch of other food entrepreneurs, and they were asking, “Are you going to sell the jarred stuff? I want to buy some.” That gave me the idea to turn from focusing on serving food to selling the jarred product.

I decided to name that business Mama Lam's because, again, it's my mom's recipe, my mom's products. It just makes sense to name the product Mama Lam. And at the market, a lot of people called her Mama Lam. I was like, this is kind of cute. This works. Let's call it that.

So creating a food brand wasn’t necessarily what you always thought you wanted to do?

I don't think so. But, when I wanted to start something, food was where I went, just because I really liked it. I honestly did not know what I was getting into when I launched the brand.

Being in the industry for eight plus years now, it's pretty crazy. This industry is nuts. Small scale production, big scale, how they buy at supermarkets, the way you have to sell to them, learning how to push product. And that's just the selling part.

On top of that, there’s the production aspect. Our products are shelf stable, so we work with Cornell to run tests to make sure we produce our product in a way that ensures shelf stability. Especially with a jarred product, you have to be careful.

So no, I was not anticipating going into the food business when I came into the adult working world. I was thinking I’d just get a full-time job, steady pay. But after working a few years in corporate, I knew, this isn't for me.

I was gonna ask, you started in advertising, right?

Yeah. I started to realize, I'm working hard for a company that doesn't care about me as a person. They just care about the end goal, and it burns you out. I was working until 10:00 at night, for what?

I thought, if I'm going to work this many hours, I might as well be working on something that I believe in.

Absolutely.

Your mom is actively involved with the company, right? What role do you each take?

I consider my mom the head of recipes and development.

In the early years, when we were just launching, she was always in the kitchen with me. As we've grown the company, I'm able to have her step back a little bit – because production does get tiring.

There's prep work that needs to be done. Blending the shallots and the garlic takes a few hours, depending on how much we're producing. And then there’s the cooking time, which is about three hours, and then the filling process, because we have to fill directly after cooking. We don't let it sit overnight.

So we fill jars, which takes another couple hours. So from start to finish, you're talking about maybe a 10 to 12 hour day, which is a lot of time to be on your feet. And you're also handling product and cooking over a hot skillet, which– do you know those big braising pans? You're constantly over the heat and stirring.

It’s a very physical job.

Yeah. Definitely. So that's why… in the beginning I had to have her help me because we were just starting out, we couldn't afford to pay somebody yet. Eventually, when I could, I said, “Ma, you know, take a step back to work on developing recipes.” Which I think she likes. And now we have the satay.

The thing with recipes and product development, it can take a long time, at least for us, because my mom's not a trained chef. So she gets her recipes from family and then tweaks things to her own liking. So it's trial and error. It takes time.

So she focuses on thinking about what type of products we want to launch and how to actually create them. So that's how she's involved.

And then, since we launched satay, she's been in the kitchen more. She’s staying with me when we're running production until she's trained me to take it over.

Awesome. Very cool. And then you do basically everything else, right?

(laughing) Yeah. Basically everything. Sometimes I have her help me at the markets, if I have no one else. For me, I don't want my mom working – you know, standing too long. I don't want her to work that hard.

But then also it’s about if she feels comfortable and able to handle the volume of people walking through.

It's a big task, selling to people in a market setting or anything like that. I used to do brand ambassador work and it was exhausting.

So you know. You have to always have your face on, just to say hi and smile. It doesn't matter if anyone's having a bad day, you have to just go, go, go the whole time.

Yeah, you have to project warmth and be happy and excited about the product, even if your feet are wet and you're frustrated about something.

Exactly. So that's why – my mom can do 1 or 2 days of it, if I need her, but I try to not throw her out there in the world too much.

Mama Lam’s first launched in 2016. Now you’re getting stocked on shelves around the country. What’s that journey been like?

So right now we're in about 120 stores, mostly smaller independent retailers, smaller chains, and specialty grocery stores. And it's been an interesting journey. When we started, I would go into the small supermarkets locally and just pitch the product. I’d be like, “Hey, can I speak to the manager? I have a new product. Just want to see if you guys are interested in stocking it.”

Sometimes they’d say, “Yeah, I'll take a look at it.” Or, “Yeah, give me a case.” And I thought, this is awesome.

But getting in smaller stores is relatively easy. Staying in the store and on the shelves is harder. You want to make sure that they're continuously reordering, so that means doing store demos and helping people get to know the product.

And getting into the bigger chains, that's harder. They operate differently, more corporate. When you're selling to a retailer, you have two paths, right? You have the independent grocery stores, like the C-Towns, the Foodtowns. You can go in and pitch the product and they’ll buy it from you directly.

But there's another layer for bigger stores. They may want to buy from a distributor, which is a third party that buys directly from manufacturers and sells to retailers. It's because they like to have just 1 billing account versus 10 million small accounts like us. So that was an obstacle. We didn't originally have a distributor. And distributors may not take you on if they don't know your product. They don't know if people are going to buy it. The industry is very old school.

Right, is it tough with jarred sources? If they haven't tasted it, how do you sell someone on it?

You know, we do our best. I think we have a pretty solid customer base, which we've developed over the years with holiday markets, pop-up markets, farmers markets. Just being face to face with people and having them understand who we are, what the product is. And I mean, the most important thing, like you said, is the taste of it. If you can get someone to taste it, you know that people will most likely understand – this is great.

Absolutely. It’s so good.

This is a more general question, but do you have a favorite food memory, or a dish that you've eaten that you still think about? You said you were always a food person growing up.

That's a hard one, right? I don't know why, but right now the one thing that's coming to my mind is – maybe it's cause it’s soup weather – there's this Korean dish called galbitang. Beef bone soup with short ribs, served just simple with a bowl of rice and some kimchi. There's this one place in Flushing that I like; that's all they sell. They cook it for a long time, so even the broth is so flavorful. Just this one dish, and it's so warming. I don't know why I'm thinking about that. It’s probably what I'm craving.

I love a restaurant that does just one thing.

There's not many. And it's something that I think about because – obviously not Mama Lam’s, but Laksa Shop. It's a dilemma. Can we survive with just one main item?

Well, as you know, I'm a fan of Laksa Shop, so… whatever you need to do, do it.

What’s your go-to weeknight dinner when things get hectic? What's something that you would make when you’re like, “Oh no, I only have half an hour and I need to eat something?”

I mean, I do actually make curry chicken. Otherwise, now that we have this satay, I've been making satay udon.

Hell yeah. Which curry paste do you use at home mostly?

Oh, that's a fun question because, what happens is that sometimes we have leftovers or testers – you know, jars that are not sellable. So my husband and I, we just put everything together in a 32 ounce mason jar.

So it'll be a mix of traditional to vegan, mild to medium and then some – I would prefer to know how much hot sauce I'm putting in, right? But my husband, he'll put four whole jars of hot sauce in there. The curry comes out so spicy! So we have a mystery curry. That’s the one I use.

We didn’t talk about your hot sauce very much. Do you want to tell the people a bit about it?

So yeah, our hot sauce. When I launched that product, I wanted to call it a hot sauce because it’s more familiar to people. But I've always had to explain to customers, it's more of a paste consistency.

A lot of shallots and garlic go into it, there's chilies, and we cook it down so that it's very thick and concentrated. So you don't need much. There's no sugar in it too. So it's really just the full flavor of the ingredients and the heat of the pepper.

It is an oil-based product, so in recent years, since Fly By Jing really took off – she's done a lot for promoting Asian condiments, which has been awesome – now a lot of people are like, “Oh, is the hot sauce a chili crisp?” And I can say, “No, it's not, but… same idea.”

So, our hot sauce, you can throw it on top of your stir fried rice noodles, your eggs in the morning, but also, I like to marinate with it. I’ll throw it on my salmon.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the hot sauce. I've been using it a lot.

The hot sauce is one of those things that can really incorporate into anything. If you want a savory heat, you can add it to your Italian dish.

It's got a great heat to it, and it adds a little salt and a little extra funk. It's got a lot of flavor, but not a flavor that can't meld with a lot of different things.

Last but certainly not least, what's next for Mama Lam’s? What are you working on now?

So we just underwent a brand refresh, which was a big and exciting undertaking for us. Something I had been thinking about for years, but struggled to find a designer that I was comfortable and confident could understand our brand story and my vision. The original packaging was all me. I created the labels and logo and chose the fonts, everything. But I knew I needed to bring in a professional and I didn’t want to rush the process.

Fortunately, a friend introduced me to this great designer who really understood the direction I wanted to take the brand, threading the needle of having mass-market appeal while keeping an authentic Asian vibe, and specifically leaning more into Malaysian culture with the batik patterns that were added.

Otherwise, I’m treating 2025 as the year of collaborations. We’ve got some really exciting partnerships planned. We’ll be doing online giveaways all year with some of our favorite CPG brands from around the country. We’ve got some special Mama Lam’s menu items in the works at a few of NYC’s best eateries, which I think will really help show people the range that our products have; they don’t only need to be used for authentic Malaysian dishes. You can do anything with them.

In fact, Bench Flour Bakers in Astoria, for anyone unfamiliar, is one of the best bakeries in all of NYC. They currently have an amazing satay chicken sandwich on their lunch menu for spring, so everyone should go there, grab lunch, and get yourself some baked goods for home!

I second that! Bench Flour rocks. And what about Laksa Shop?

It’s been almost 6 months since we’ve done anything with Laksa Shop, which feels crazy after doing pop-ups like every weekend for almost two years. With the satay launch, the brand refresh, and some new products on the horizon, I had to take a break to focus on Mama Lam’s. But I want people to know that Laksa Shop will be back!

Yay! Glad to hear it. Will have to keep an eye out for that.

Thanks so much to Cassandra for sitting down and chatting with me!

It was such a blast getting to interview her. You can follow Mama Lam’s on Instagram and visit their website to buy sauces directly from Mama Lam’s or find them in stores.

and that’s the latest dispatch from my kitchen.

Since we last talked, I shared this Guinness Stew recipe on Yahoo! St. Paddy’s Day might be behind us, but here in NYC at least, stew weather persists. And if you’re looking for yet another way to use Mama Lam’s, try my spicy smoked salmon chip dip – it’s addictive!

More soon! Thanks for being here.