&ldquo;The cheese is the point and it always will be.&rdquo;<o:p></o:p>

At the main entrance of Bangsar Shopping Centre, a 575-square-foot Fromage sits in full view, in a mall culture drunk on abundance. Instead of a cheese extravaganza supermarket, it is a store where each offering must earn its keep. Moreover, every cheese carries an AOP (France &amp; Switzerland) or DOP (Italy) certification. Here, founders Amine Chekali, Melik Belhadi and Etienne Delaune tell us why Fromage is for cheese novice as much as it&rsquo;s for the connoisseur. <o:p></o:p>
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L&rsquo;O: Three friends, three continents of experience, and three different professional languages: tech scaling, artisanal sourcing, and brand positioning. At what point in your friendship did someone say, &ldquo;We should open a cheese shop in Kuala Lumpur?&rdquo;<o:p></o:p>
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AMINE: It came out of frustration more than ambition, and the frustration was very specific. We&rsquo;re three friends in KL who all love cheese and finding it in a proper environment was a constant struggle. Supermarket level on one end, hotel pricing on the other, and in between a kind of grey market of expat WhatsApp groups and private importers where you&rsquo;d Venmo someone and pick up a vacuum-sealed wedge from a condo lobby. None of that felt like the way cheese is supposed to be sold. Cheese is supposed to be cut to order, in front of you, by someone who can tell you what it is.<o:p></o:p>
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The conversation kept coming back over dinners. We&rsquo;d open something good someone had managed to bring back from Paris or Geneva and the same complaint would surface. At some point it stopped being a complaint and became a plan. The three of us bring different things. Melik spent years in wealth management and finance in Geneva, which is also where most of our European producer relationships started, because Switzerland is where he was already buying his own cheese. Etienne is French Malaysian, comes from marketing and startup operations, and understands both sides of the cultural translation that a brand like this needs. My background is launching businesses, I spent years at Rocket Internet helping bring Lazada and Zalora into Southeast Asia, so I knew what it takes to build something from zero in this market.<o:p></o:p>
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Once we mapped out who would do what, the question stopped being whether we should and became whether anyone else was going to. Nobody was. So we did.<o:p></o:p>
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We&rsquo;re aware none of us came from F&amp;B, and that&rsquo;s exactly why the partnership with the Meilleur Apprenti de France was the first decision we made, before the lease, before the brand, before anything. The friendship and the complementary skills got us to the door. We weren&rsquo;t going to push it open without someone who actually knew the craft standing next to us.<o:p></o:p>
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L&rsquo;O: When you say you want to teach people about cheese, do you worry that treating your customers like students instead of experts might come across as condescending, even if you don&rsquo;t mean to?<o:p></o:p>
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AMINE: Honestly, people who walk in and tell us they know nothing about cheese are our favourite customers. There&rsquo;s nothing to be condescending about. They&rsquo;re curious, and we get to put something in their hand and watch them react. That&rsquo;s the whole job.<o:p></o:p>
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If anyone is being treated as a student, it&rsquo;s us. We&rsquo;re not from the F&amp;B world. We brought in a Meilleur Apprenti de France as a consultant from day one because we knew what we didn&rsquo;t know, and he&rsquo;s still consulting with us now. He&rsquo;s the one who taught us that affinage is half the cheese, that you cut a wheel of Comt&eacute; differently from a wheel of Beaufort, and that the way you wrap something for a customer changes how it tastes three days later. So, the dynamic in the shop isn&rsquo;t expert and novice. It&rsquo;s more like, here&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;ve learned from someone who knows; let us share it with you and tell us what you like.<o:p></o:p>
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The customers who already know cheese push us in the other direction, and there are more of them in KL than we expected. They come in asking for things we haven&rsquo;t stocked yet, and a lot of the selection has grown out of those conversations. Someone asked us for a proper &Eacute;poisses in our second week. Someone else wanted to know if we could get Salers, which is one of the rarest farmhouse cheeses in France. That&rsquo;s not a customer being taught; that&rsquo;s a customer teaching us what the market actually wants. The shop is shaped by both directions of that conversation, and that&rsquo;s the part we love.<o:p></o:p>

L&rsquo;O: You mentioned that you don't like &ldquo;French snobbery,&rdquo; but you&rsquo;re bringing in some of France&rsquo;s most credential-heavy goods, like AOP, DOP, and a Meilleur Apprenti de France. Are you doing that on purpose, or are you still trying to figure out where the line is between being educated and being a snob?<o:p></o:p>
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AMINE: Fair question, and the honest answer is that those labels aren&rsquo;t there for prestige, they&rsquo;re there because they mean something specific. AOP and DOP tell you a cheese was made in a defined place with defined methods by people who&rsquo;ve been doing it the same way for generations. A Comt&eacute; AOP has to come from the Jura, from a specific breed of cow fed on grass from defined pastures and aged a minimum number of months in a cave that meets the standard. If any of that break, it&rsquo;s not Comt&eacute; anymore. That&rsquo;s not snobbery, that&rsquo;s the opposite. It&rsquo;s a guarantee that you&rsquo;re not getting an industrial product with a French-sounding name on the label.<o:p></o:p>
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The same logic applies to the Meilleur Apprenti de France. We didn&rsquo;t bring him in for the title on a wall. We brought him in because we needed someone who actually knows the craft. This includes knowing how to read a wheel before cutting it, how to determine when a Brie de Meaux is at its peak versus a week past its prime, and which producer to contact in Savoie for a Beaufort with a specific character. Without that, we&rsquo;d be three guys guessing, and our customers would taste the guessing.<o:p></o:p>
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Snobbery occurs when the focus is solely on the label, and the conversation stops at the certificate. For us, the label serves merely as a shortcut to confirm that the cheese is authentic; after that, the discussion revolves around whether you will enjoy it on a Tuesday night with a glass of something. The second part is the one that matters. The first part is just doing our homework.<o:p></o:p>
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L&rsquo;O: For the past 20 years, you&rsquo;ve been helping high-growth tech companies grow. Cheese is slow: it takes time to age, it doesn&rsquo;t speed up, and it doesn&rsquo;t change with the seasons. What does it feel like to go from a world of hockey-stick metrics to one where it might take 24 months for your best product to get to a customer?<o:p></o:p>
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AMINE: Honestly, it&rsquo;s a relief. 20 years of launching tech businesses teaches you a lot about velocity, but it also teaches you what velocity costs. You optimise for the next quarter, you ship things you don&rsquo;t love, and you watch teams burn out chasing curves that exist mostly for investors. Cheese is the opposite of all that, and after two decades I find I have a lot of respect for the opposite.<o:p></o:p>
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The tech background is useful in the parts of the business that benefit from it. Operations, supply chain, the cold chain from a producer&rsquo;s cave to our counter, the website, the app, the systems behind the till. Those are problems I know how to solve, and they need solving properly because the cheese deserves it. But the cheese itself &ndash; I have no interest in rushing. A 36-month Comt&eacute; is 36 months because that's what makes it a 36-month Comt&eacute;. You cannot accelerate that wheel. The producer&rsquo;s timeline is the timeline. My job is to build a business that can wait and has the cash flow and discipline to let things age the way they need to.<o:p></o:p>
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What I&rsquo;ve actually found is that customers feel the difference, even if they can&rsquo;t articulate it. Slow products carry something fast products can&rsquo;t fake. There&rsquo;s a depth to a properly aged cheese that&rsquo;s the cumulative result of someone making a small decision every week for three years. You can&rsquo;t shortcut that, and you can&rsquo;t replicate it, and people taste it the moment they bite into it. So in a strange way, patience is the competitive advantage, not a constraint. The thing that would have driven me crazy at 25 is the thing that makes this business worth doing at 35.<o:p></o:p>
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L&rsquo;O: You talk about longstanding relationships with artisanal producers in France and Switzerland. There are two parts to this question: 1. What does &ldquo;direct producer relationships&rdquo; really mean in a time when every boutique claims to have them? And 2. What does it look like at 2 AM when a Comt&eacute; wheel arrives not quite aged right and you have to make the call?<o:p></o:p>
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MELIK: You&rsquo;re right that &ldquo;direct relationships&rdquo; gets thrown around a lot and often means very little. For us it means specific people we can call by name, whose farms we&rsquo;ve visited, whose families we know, who answer the phone when we call. It&rsquo;s not a procurement contract, it&rsquo;s a phone number. That sounds small but it&rsquo;s actually the whole thing, because it means when something is off, there&rsquo;s a conversation, not a complaint to a distributor three layers removed from the cave.<o:p></o:p>
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On your 2 AM scenario, the honest answer is you have to be both, and the order matters. You&rsquo;re a buyer first, because if you put a wheel on the counter that isn&rsquo;t ready, you&rsquo;ve broken faith with the customer who trusted you to choose for them, and that trust is the entire business. You can&rsquo;t recover from that with a story about your producer relationships. So the wheel doesn&rsquo;t go out. But the way you handle the conversation with the producer is the friend part. You don&rsquo;t fire off a complaint, you pick up the phone and ask what happened: was the cave warmer than usual that month, was the milk different, did something happen with the herd? Producers at this level are not factories. They&rsquo;ve had a bad week, the affinage didn&rsquo;t go the way they wanted, and they often know before you tell them. You work it out together, you figure out what to do with the wheel, and you talk about what's coming next.<o:p></o:p>
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The relationships survive precisely because you don&rsquo;t pretend the buyer side doesn&rsquo;t exist, and they deepen because you don&rsquo;t pretend the friend side doesn&rsquo;t exist either. Both have to be honest. A pure buyer relationship gets you industrial reliability and zero warmth, and you can taste that on the counter. A pure friend relationship gets you sentimentality and inconsistent product. The work is holding both.<o:p></o:p>

L&rsquo;O: One might say that you&rsquo;re French-Malaysian, and you&rsquo;re making a brand that fits perfectly between those two cultures. Do you ever feel like you&rsquo;re acting French for a Malaysian audience or Malaysian for French producers? <o:p></o:p>
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ETIENNE: With French producers there&rsquo;s a register you fall into, you talk about region, about terroir, about the family, about whose grandfather started the farm. With Malaysian customers and partners the conversation is different, it&rsquo;s about what pairs with what they already eat, whether a washed rind cheese works in this climate, what fits how people actually entertain in KL where dinners run long and the food is generous and shared. You move between those two modes constantly and the vocabulary is genuinely different in each.<o:p></o:p>
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But I don&rsquo;t experience it as performance. Both sides are me. I grew up between the two and the back and forth is just how my head works. The shop itself is where the translating stops, because the whole point of Fromage is that the two worlds meet on the counter. When a Malaysian customer asks how a Comt&eacute; would go with their Sunday lunch, or whether a Roquefort would survive being part of a larger spread with rendang and sambal on the same table, that's exactly the conversation I want to be having. That&rsquo;s not me acting French or acting Malaysian, that&rsquo;s just the conversation that this shop exists to have.<o:p></o:p>
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If anything, the bicultural thing is what makes it possible to do this without it feeling imported. A purely French shop in KL would be a museum, a beautiful one maybe, but a museum. A purely Malaysian take on cheese wouldn&rsquo;t have the depth, because the tradition isn&rsquo;t here yet. The space in between is where the brand actually lives, and it&rsquo;s where I live too. The honest version of the answer to &ldquo;when do you stop translating and just be&rdquo; is that the translating is the being. There&rsquo;s no separate authentic self underneath the two sides. The bridge is the home.<o:p></o:p>

L&rsquo;O: Customers can use the companion app to learn about origin, intensity, flavour profile, and pairing suggestions. Why did you think cheese, which is probably the most tactile and immediate food experience, needed a digital agent?<o:p></o:p>
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AMINE: The app isn&rsquo;t meant to replace the counter, it&rsquo;s meant to extend it. The tactile experience happens in the shop, that&rsquo;s not negotiable, you have to smell it, taste it, talk to whoever is cutting it for you. We will never put a screen between a customer and a wheel of cheese. But the conversation at the counter is two minutes, sometimes five if it&rsquo;s quiet, and people leave with a piece they&rsquo;re going to eat over the next week or two. The app is for those two weeks.<o:p></o:p>
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What people miss without it is the story, and the story is half of why specialty cheese is worth caring about. Why this Morbier has a black line down the middle, which is genuinely a beautiful story, farmers in the Jura would cover their morning curds with a layer of vegetable ash to protect them overnight, then add the evening milk on top, and the line stayed even after the practical reason disappeared. Why a 24-month Comt&eacute; tastes nothing like a 36-month Comt&eacute;. Why the rind on a washed rind cheese smells terrifying and then the inside tastes mild and creamy. Why Roquefort is aged in caves at Combalou and what that actually does to the cheese. In a traditional fromagerie in France you absorb that over years of going back, talking to the same fromager, asking dumb questions, slowly building a vocabulary. Here in KL, that infrastructure of knowledge doesn&rsquo;t exist yet. The app is how we compress that learning curve, on your own time, when you&rsquo;re actually eating the cheese on a Friday night rather than standing in a queue behind someone.<o:p></o:p>
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There&rsquo;s also a practical layer. Pairing suggestions, what wine, what bread, what to serve it with at room temperature versus straight from the fridge, how long to take it out before. These are the questions customers text us at 7 PM on a Saturday because they&rsquo;re about to open a bottle and they want to do it right. The app answers that without making them text us.<o:p></o:p>
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We&rsquo;re aware of the irony of saying screens add to a tactile experience. Our answer is that the screen isn&rsquo;t the experience, it&rsquo;s the footnote. The cheese is the point and it always will be. The app exists so that the cheese gets the most out of you, and you get the most out of it.<o:p></o:p>

For more updates, follow them on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/fromagekl/">Instagram</a>.

Fromage opens at Bangsar Shopping Centre

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