This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Malaysia’s Richest 2026. See the full list here.

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porting a pair of mud-stained jeans, Loi Tuan Ee enters one of the nine sheds on his dairy farm tucked in the small town of Mawai in the foothills of Malaysia's Gunung Muntahak mountain in Johor state. It’s a hot and humid February afternoon, but inside the ambience is cool, with large industrial fans dispersing streams of mist. Loi is on his monthly tour to inspect the much-valued inhabitants of the shed—a herd of black-and-white and tan cows that he frequently refers to as the “ladies.” As diesel generators chug in the background, Loi points to where he plans to install solar panels, disclosing that a biogas plant to convert cow manure into renewable energy is also in the works.

With this hands-on approach, Loi, 62, over two decades has built his Bursa Malaysia-listed company, Farm Fresh, into the country’s biggest home-grown dairy operation in a market dominated by the local units of multinational giants. With its “grass-to-glass” model, the Malaysian company has overtaken Switzerland’s Nestlé to become the third-largest supplier of milk after FrieslandCampina from the Netherlands and New Zealand’s Fonterra Co-operative Group. Loi has added a range of items to the product lineup, including powdered milk, yogurt, and more recently, ice cream and plant-based beverages.

Farm Fresh’s cofounder and group CEO is now poised to boost the company’s regional production base with an almost $190 million outlay over the next few years to build new dairy farms and processing plants across Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines. “My vision is for Farm Fresh to be a multicategory champion both in Malaysia and regionally,” Loi declares.

His ambition is underpinned by increasing dairy consumption in the company’s home market and beyond. New Delhi-based research and consulting firm Imarc Group estimates Malaysia’s dairy market will expand by nearly a third to $3.4 billion by 2030, when annual sales of dairy products across Southeast Asia are projected to exceed $45 billion, up from $34 billion in 2025.

Farm Fresh is already riding this wave, reporting a 30% jump in net profit to 102 million ringgit ($30 million) on 14% revenue growth to 841 million ringgit in the nine months to Dec. 31. The buoyancy was partly due to an uptick in overseas sales, notably in the Philippines and Cambodia. Loi is confident the momentum will continue though the Iran war caused a shortage of plastic milk bottles, which he says has been addressed by switching to cartons.

With a herd of more than 13,000 cows across five dairy farms in Malaysia, including 2,000 cows in Mawai, Farm Fresh produces more than 67 million liters of milk annually. Additionally, 17 million liters of milk are exported to Southeast Asian markets from Farm Fresh’s 1,100-hectare farm with its herd of 3,000 cows in Greater Shepparton, about 180km north of Melbourne.

Creamy Layer

Since its market debut on Bursa Malaysia in 2022, Farm Fresh has sustained its growth momentum.

Jade Tam, an analyst at Maybank in Kuala Lumpur, says Farm Fresh has gained traction with its emphasis on having fresh milk in its products versus the milk solids or reconstituted milk used by rival brands such as FrieslandCampina’s Dutch Lady and Nestlé. “It was a long process to educate consumers that Farm Fresh products were the healthier options but in time, they have managed to gain market share at the expense of the incumbent players,” Tam says.

Shares of Farm Fresh, which hit a high of 2.99 ringgit in late January, are up 50% in the past year, taking its market cap to 4.7 billion ringgit. Loi and his siblings, who own a 37% stake, are listed at No. 43 among Malaysia’s 50 richest with a net worth of $630 million. Loi’s younger brother and cofounder, Tuan Kin, oversees plant operations, while his younger sister, Foon Koi, has a board seat.

The Loi siblings grew up on a rubber plantation in Perak, a state on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia where their parents worked as rubber tappers and grew tapioca. After high school, Loi took up a job as a supervisor in a palm oil mill then embarked on a high-flying career in packaging with Malaysia’s Century Bond, where he was deputy managing director.

At age 42, with two decades of corporate experience under his belt, Loi took the dramatic decision to return to his agricultural roots, a career move that drew skepticism from those within his circle. “I’m not sure if I was having a midlife crisis then. My friends thought I was crazy,” recalls Loi, who convinced Tuan Kin, who was also working at Century Bond but on the production side, to join him.

The brothers set up Rainforest Capital, plowing in 5 million ringgit pooled from their savings and from loans for a 34-hectare land parcel in Johor for their agribusiness. Loi tried his hand at growing fruit, then got into aquaculture, but neither venture took off. Then he began raising goats and supplying their milk to local supermarkets, and while the product sold well, he soon figured the business would be difficult to scale up.

But the experience proved his hunch that the market for fresh milk could be a sizable one. At the time, supermarket shelves in Malaysia were dominated by UHT milk in cartons with a long shelf life or milk that had been reconstituted from powdered milk. To fill the gap in the market, Loi turned to higher milk-yielding animals than goats.

Green Pastures

After establishing a firm footing on its home turf in Malaysia, Farm Fresh is looking to tap growing dairy demand across Southeast Asia.

“I'm not sure if I was having a midlife crisis then. My friends thought I was crazy.”

Importing 60 Holstein cows from Australia, the siblings set up their new company, Holstein Milk, in 2010, housing the herd on their land parcel in Johor. “This is where it all started and where I almost gave up,” Loi says, while traversing the bumpy 12km dirt road leading to Farm Fresh’s Mawai dairy estate in a Range Rover.

Within a year the cows fell ill and began dying, pushing the company into the red. Loi belatedly realized that he’d made an unsuitable choice: While Holsteins are the world’s top milk producers, they don’t adapt well to a hot and humid climate. “I was so naive that I even named the company after the breed,” he says. (The firm was renamed Farm Fresh in 2021 as Loi prepared to take it public.)

Determined, Loi dug in with a plan to find a breed of cows sturdy enough to withstand the tropical climate. But bankers refused to lend him more money given his track record. Then Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional, stepped in, paying 20 million ringgit for a 30% stake in the company in 2011. It saw the investment, says Hisham Hamdan, Khazanah’s chief investment officer, as part of its broader effort to boost the country’s food security.

“Khazanah came in at almost the perfect moment, everything fell into place,” Loi recalls. The company deployed the fresh capital infusion to import Australian Friesian Sahiwal (AFS) cows, a crossbreed developed for the warmer regions of Queensland. Loi went on to buy the cattle’s entire gene bank from the Queensland government for A$1 million ($710,000) and started crossbreeding AFS cows with his remaining Holsteins, creating an animal that was both heat-tolerant and high milk-yielding.

Khazanah provided additional funding to the company to scale up, giving Loi the wherewithal to buy more land to expand the first dairy farm while also helping to secure additional land leases across Malaysia at attractive rates. The investment paid off as the company turned profitable in 2014 and went public in 2022. Khazanah partly cashed in during the IPO and has been gradually selling shares since, retaining only about a 3% holding in Farm Fresh as of September 2025.

Overall, the sovereign fund says it made a return of more than 13 times its estimated total investment of 60 million ringgit. “Beyond the financial outcome, what is most meaningful is seeing the company grow from a small local dairy producer into a trusted household brand with a regional presence,” says Hamdan.

Loi’s sales experience came in handy when expanding Farm Fresh’s distribution. In 2016, the company started building a salesforce to sell its products in rural areas that has since grown to an 800-strong group of mostly women operating from their homes. “We are empowering rural women to be microentrepreneurs,” Loi says.

Farm Fresh started selling in Singapore in 2016, a market that Loi considered an ideal testing ground for premium products. With an eye on expanding to other overseas markets, he bought the dairy farm and a processing plant in Greater Shepparton for 85 million ringgit in 2018 as a production base for exports.

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n 2024, Farm Fresh entered the Philippines, a country that consumes about $4 billion worth of dairy products annually, according to Imarc’s estimates. The company started processing fresh milk imported from its Australian farm at a new $20 million factory in Pampanga, north of Manila. Recently, Farm Fresh signed an agreement with the University of the Philippines Los Baños to develop a 400-hectare farm on university land to breed 5,000 cows with the target of producing 20 to 25 million liters of milk annually.

“There’s a huge opportunity in the Philippines because dairy consumption is very low,” Loi says. With a population of about 120 million, per capita consumption is below 4kg a year, less than half Malaysia’s and among the lowest in the Asia-Pacific, according to a November report by BDA Partners, a New York-based investment banking advisory firm.

Last year, Farm Fresh started exporting milk to Cambodia as supplies from Thailand were disrupted amid heightened border tensions between the two countries. “This was a very unusual and unexpected opportunity for us,” Loi says. The company is investing $20 million to build a 75,000-square-meter processing plant in Phnom Penh and plans to gradually scale up its production capacity in the country to as much as 70 million liters of milk annually. Loi has earmarked an additional $25 million for a new 500-hectare dairy farm northwest of the Cambodian capital to make inroads into Laos and Vietnam.

Loi sees another big opportunity in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s most populous country, where annual dairy sales exceed $9 billion, according to Imarc. President Prabowo Subianto’s $20 billion free lunch program for school children will help accelerate demand for dairy products, Loi reckons. Farm Fresh is awaiting government approval to invest $40 million to set up a 230-hectare dairy farm with an integrated processing unit in Bandung, West Java.

In Indonesia, Loi will have to face-off with local fresh milk producer Cisarua Mountain Dairy (Cimory), whose founder Bambang Sutantio became a billionaire after the 2021 listing of the company. Another listed local incumbent is Ultrajaya Milk Industry & Trading, cofounded by Sabana Prawirawidjaja, who has previously featured on the list of the country’s richest. With dairy demand rising in Indonesia, Loi says, “There’s room for growth.” Dinar Primasari, corporate secretary of Cimory, agrees. “We are still short in fresh milk supply for the domestic market,” she says. The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that domestic milk production only accounts for 20% of demand.

Lactose League

Farm Fresh is slugging it out with industry giants such as FrieslandCampina’s Dutch Lady and Nestlé in Malaysia.

Apart from venturing into new markets, Loi has been expanding Farm Fresh’s product portfolio over the past five years by adding a range of new items, including butter, yogurt and plant-based beverages such as soy milk. In 2023, the company bought controlling stakes in Malaysian ice cream makers Inside Scoop and Sin Wah Ice Cream for a total of 112 million ringgit. Loi is investing an additional $50 million to ramp up production of ice cream and plant-based beverages.

“The Southeast Asian footprint that we are building will give us a strong base in the years to come.”

The ice cream segment is estimated to generate sales of about 140 million ringgit in the year ended March 31, accounting for about 11% of projected total revenue, Loi says. The company plans to double production capacity to 1 million units of ice cream per day and expand the distribution network by 20% to 13,500 outlets in Malaysia by year-end. Loi says he will also spend $8 million to start production of cream cheese next year. “Everyone loves cheese cakes,” he quips.

Apart from its retail push, Farm Fresh has been courting bulk customers such as hotels, restaurants and cafes, a segment that already accounts for 25% of its total sales. “Their milk is of high quality and fresh from their farm,” says Venon Tian, cofounder and group chief operating officer of Zus Coffee, explaining why the Malaysian coffee chain has been a customer of Farm Fresh since Tian says Zus plans to tap milk supplies from Farm Fresh as it expands into the Philippines and Indonesia.

These days, Loi also has to contend with deep-pocketed competitors expanding on its domestic turf. Thai billionaire Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi’s Fraser & Neave, maker of Farmhouse and Magnolia milk brands, which has a long-standing presence in Malaysia, set up its first integrated dairy farm in the country in 2022 in Negeri Sembilan, a state southwest of Kuala Lumpur, importing 2,500 cows from Chile last year. Loi says any dairy operation takes time to build momentum. “I’m not too worried about competition,” he insists. “The Southeast Asian footprint we’re building will give us a strong base in the years to come.”

—With additional reporting from Ardian Wibisono.