The Founder Story

Title

Black sesame has been in my body longer than I can remember.

My grandmother makes a filling for tang yuan that I've never been able to fully describe to someone who hasn't tasted it. Black sesame, sugar, lard, walnuts. Ground together until it becomes something almost liquid, dark and fragrant, pooling inside the dough. When she makes it, the whole apartment smells like roasted seeds and warmth. It tastes like the specific feeling of being taken care of.

Growing up, that flavor lived in a separate world from my everyday life. It was in my grandmother's kitchen. It was in the Chinatown bakeries I'd visit with my parents on weekend mornings. It was in the tang yuan at New Year, the black sesame soup my mom would make when someone was sick. But it never made it into the cabinets of every apartment I lived in after I grew up and moved away. My breakfast looked like everyone else's breakfast. Peanut butter on toast, almond butter in smoothies. Familiar, easy, fine.

For a long time, I didn't think too hard about the gap.

The thing about growing up between two cultures is that you spend a lot of energy translating. You learn to carry your whole self in pieces and hand different ones to different rooms. Food was always the place where that felt the least necessary. At the table, everything made sense. The ingredients didn't need to explain themselves.

What I'm building with Hei Butter isn't east-meets-west. That framing already creates a distance I'm not interested in. It's more like: I'm putting black sesame where it belongs in my daily life, in a form that actually fits there. A jar you can keep next to everything else. Something that doesn't ask you to translate.

Then last year, I ended up in emergency surgery to remove a kidney stone. The kind of health scare you don't see coming, that makes you lie in a hospital bed running through every habit that brought you there. My grandmother, who has always spoken about food the way a doctor speaks about medicine, had told me for years that black sesame was good for the kidneys. That the seeds hold something the body recognizes and needs. I had filed that away in the part of my brain reserved for old wisdom I wasn't ready to receive yet. I was ready to receive it.

That's for me. And it's for anyone who knows what it feels like to straddle something. Asian-Americans who grew up eating sesame paste in one context and peanut butter in another. First-generation kids who learned to code-switch before they knew the term for it. Global citizens who carry more than one culinary memory. People who have always known that the flavor they grew up with deserves a permanent seat at the table.

Earlier this year, I left my job in tech. There's a version of that decision that sounds dramatic, and a version that sounds completely obvious. From the inside, it felt like the second one. I spent years building products in a world increasingly driven by automation, and I found myself wanting, very badly, to make something I could hold in my hands. Something that started with an ingredient, went through a process, and arrived as a jar of something real.

Black sesame was always where I was going to end up. I just needed the kidney stone to hurry me along.

Hei Butter is what happens when the flavor that's been in your body your whole life finally makes it into your everyday. The jar in your cabinet. The spoon at 11pm. The toast on a Tuesday morning that tastes like something worth waking up for.

That's why I'm here. That's why now.

Back to The Butter Blog