Running a BBQ Smokehouse Out of His Home with AI
Before he started a business, Royston Chan had a simple idea of a perfect weekend. He wanted to have something cooking low and slow in the smoker, open a bottle of wine, and relax with his girlfriend.
Today, his weekends look nothing like that.
On a typical Saturday in Singapore, Royston's kitchen is a production line. His retired father is systematically folding cardboard delivery boxes. His mother is peeling a mountain of potatoes to be made into mash. Royston and his girlfriend are managing the smoked meat - massive smoked dino ribs, glistening pork bellies, and tender beef short plates that have been smoked low and slow for 12 hours.
By Sunday night, they will have fulfilled hundreds of orders.
Royston works full-time in enterprise tech during the week. But his real passion is cooking, especially authentic, wood-fired Texas barbecue. In early 2025, he launched Mandai Smoke Co. as a weekend-only passion project.
The beginning was quiet. In their first month, they received exactly one order. In their second month, they received four.
Even with just four orders, the administrative work was draining the joy out of the barbecue. Royston hated sitting down to manually calculate exactly how many kilograms of raw meat and other ingredients he needed to buy to fulfill the weekend's orders without wastage.
He needed a system. But as an enterprise tech professional, he knew that off-the-shelf software wouldn't work for a niche, weekend-only smokehouse, and that custom enterprise solutions would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Then, he attended a tech event through his day job and saw a demo of Manus.
"I gave it one prompt," Royston recalls, "and it started building exactly what I needed. I was like what's going on? This is crazy.'"
He decided to run an experiment. He asked Manus to build a simple prep calculator, a tool that would take his incoming orders and automatically tell him how much food to prepare. Through a few iterations, it worked as he envisioned.
He didn't know it yet, but that simple calculator was the foundation of a custom internal tool that was about to save his business.
His business would handle a moderate amount of orders each month, but when December arrived, and the holiday rush hit Singapore, that's when things really changed. As people searched for festive meals, many discovered Mandai Smoke Co for the first time.
Almost overnight, the quiet passion project exploded. Revenue multiplied exponentially as holiday orders poured in.
For a small business, a sudden, massive increase in order volume is usually catastrophic. Orders get lost, delivery drivers get confused, and the food arrives cold.
But Mandai Smoke Co. was ready for a moment like this.
Royston built most of this infrastructure when Mandai was still small — just a handful of orders a week. He wasn't reacting to demand; he was preparing for it, thinking like a restaurant operator long before he had a restaurant's volume. So when Christmas came and orders surged, his systems were already built to handle the capacity, and he didn't have to scramble.
Before the rush hit, he had expanded his simple prep calculator into a full logistics workflow system he called FLAME (Food Logistics And Management Engine).
"We were so lucky," Royston admits. "If we didn't do that, we wouldn't have been able to handle the demand that came."
The result was amazing feedback from their Christmas customers. That smooth execution proved to Royston that his weekend hobby was actually a scalable business.
Today, Mandai Smoke Co. processes around 300 orders a month. To handle this volume without hiring a massive administrative team, Royston relies on FLAME.
The system handles the complex, niche problems that standard software ignores. It imports orders from their website and WhatsApp, then automatically scans every address. If a customer in a condo or apartment forgets to include their unit number, FLAME flags it immediately, preventing delivery drivers from getting stranded in lobbies.
Food delivery is notoriously difficult, especially for a business that doesn't fit the standard food delivery app model. Royston hires freelance drivers directly. Using Manus, he built a system that uses geographic clustering to group deliveries. The system optimises the sequence so that each driver's route is highly efficient.
This efficiency changes the economics of delivery. "Because we put everything together efficiently, and they just follow our routes," Royston explains, "our drivers' hourly earnings are up to 90 SGD an hour."
To manage customer communications more professionally, Royston used Manus to build a custom inbox using the official Twilio WhatsApp Business API. Now, he can seamlessly segment customers, send automated confirmations, and collect the feedback that helps him perfect his recipes.
As someone who works in enterprise software, Royston understands exactly what he has built.
Instead of relying on traditional enterprise platforms, he built his system iteratively with Manus, adding features exactly when the business demanded them at a fraction of the cost.
"Manus is in the niches," Royston explains. "A smoked meat business only running on weekends - there's no food delivery platform that does that. As we see more problems in the business, we use Manus to build better solutions. It grew with us."
Today, the dream has evolved. Royston is looking to move Mandai Smoke Co. into a commercial food factory. He's planning new product lines, like charcuterie boards and smoked jerky.
The quiet weekends of drinking wine and cooking for two are gone. But in their place is something much bigger: a thriving family business, powered by wood, fire, and a custom AI engine that makes it all possible.
Each story in this series is based on a conversation with the person featured.
