Singapore · since 1971
The house behind the bird's nest.
For fifty-five years, the bird's nest inside other people's jars came from us. Our own swiftlet houses. Our own cave sources. Our own factories. Cleaned by hand, never bleached.
Since 1986
From the nest to the jar, every step is ours.
Masterdon Swiftlets Resources began with a barter. In 1971 our founder, Eric Tan, traded goods with Indonesian businessmen and was paid in bird's nest. He has not stopped since.
Today the group holds its own swiftlet houses and cave sources across Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and three processing workshops, including a licensed food factory at 48 Senoko Drive in Singapore — accredited to ISO 22000, HACCP and Halal standards — where every nest is cleaned by hand and bottled.
That control is not a boast. It is the whole reason the company exists: Eric built his first factory in 1986 because other suppliers were bleaching nests to stretch a profit, and he wanted every customer to know exactly what they were holding. Three generations of buyers have taken him at his word.
- Swiftlet houses
- 27Indonesia · Malaysia · Thailand
- Processing workshops
- 3Sited to keep supply steady
- Cleaning by hand since
- 1986Never chemically bleached
- Generations at the helm
- 2Eric Tan · Kara Arissa Tan
How it is made
Feather by feather.
A swiftlet builds its nest by threading its own saliva into a cup no bigger than a palm. It takes the bird about thirty-five days. Nothing about that can be hurried, and nothing about the cleaning can either.
Each nest is soaked, then picked over by hand under lamp and magnifier, dirt and down lifted out one piece at a time with tweezers. The process repeats until nothing is left but the nest itself. Bleaching would take minutes and cost us the very thing we sell, so it is done the slow way, by people who have done it for years, in rooms of our own.
The family
Six chapters, one family.
A provision shop. A barter. A factory built out of principle. And a daughter who came back to run the houses her father built.