Lu Run: How Daniel Uepi Turned Tongan Family Food Into a Real Sydney Business
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
The story of Daniel Uepi, founder of Lu Run, and how a family's food found its way from the feast table to retail shelves across Sydney.
Daniel Uepi has been cooking his whole life.
Ota ika. Lu sipi. And otai, the national drink of Tonga, made from fresh fruit, coconut, and condensed milk. Food cooked for family feasts, big celebrations, the kind of gatherings where the table never empties and everyone leaves with takeaway bags full of leftovers. Food that people talked about long after the night was over.
That food has always been there. What took time to build was everything around it.
When grief becomes a starting point
When Daniel's father passed away, the family did what they'd always done. They cooked - Daniel, his wife Tai, his mother Losana, and his sister Saane. For functions, community, each other. Slowly, something became clear. People didn't just enjoy the food. They came back for it, brought friends, and asked where they could get more.
That's a different thing from people being polite at a family dinner. That felt like a signal.
But Daniel is the first to admit where they were when they first tried to act on it.
“We were just cooking at home. We had no idea of the business side of it really — the money, accounting, rules in the kitchen. There was a whole lot we didn't know.”
The name, and what it means
Lu Run is named for lu, the taro leaf that is Tonga's national dish. Taro leaves steamed for hours, layered with meat and coconut cream, wrapped and cooked low and slow. It's the dish at the centre of every Tongan celebration, the thing people ask for first and think about longest afterwards. It's also Lu Run's signature dish.
The “Run” part is like a McDonald's 'run' - that late-night dash for food with your crew - a mix with Tongan culture and Aussie slang. Lu Run. It tells you exactly what it is and exactly where it's from in the same breath.
That combination - deeply Tongan, completely Australian - is the whole idea.
The problem that was costing them every weekend
In the early days, Lu Run was doing market stalls and festival food stores. Daniel, his wife, every team member: all working full-time jobs by day, running the food business on nights and weekends. Every event had to count.
And that's where the numbers became the hardest part.
“If we made too much and we didn't sell, we waste a lot of food. If we didn't make enough and there were heaps more sales coming through, we'd miss out. It was very hard to get to the sweet spot. We were just scraping in with each event, pretty much.”
Getting food costing right - knowing your yield, your waste margin, your price point - is the difference between a market stall that slowly builds and one that slowly bleeds. Most food business owners learn this the hard way. Daniel was in the middle of learning it when he found FoodLab.
Finding the structure
One night, scrolling after a full day's work, Daniel came across FoodLab: a commercial kitchen, a training programme, and a track record of helping families exactly like his.
“I clicked onto it, read it, seen all the pictures and I thought - wow, this is sent for me. This is perfect, what I needed.”
He applied. What the programme gave him wasn't one single breakthrough. It was the realisation that a food business has multiple moving parts, and all of them have to work together.
“You can get lost in trying to get your menu right, or just your sales, your pricing or quotes. But then you forget about the accounting, or the kitchen rules, or the safety. Knowing that it's not just one thing - knowing that there are all these different aspects and you have to put them all together - that was one of the big things FoodLab taught me. To put them all together to make one business.”
A brand that looked the part
FoodLab connected the Lu Run family with two collaborators who helped rebuild their brand from the ground up.
BrandKind is an Australian social enterprise that connects businesses who need it most with a network of volunteer brand and design professionals. Creaytive - a volunteer designer - brought that work to life visually for Lu Run.
Before: no logo, inconsistent menus, a family selling food at a market with nothing to signal that this was a real business. After: a full brand kit, a logo, uniform, and a marquee with their design.
“We looked the part. Before that, it was kind of all over the place. Now we look professional out to the customers.”
That shift matters more than it sounds. At a market, standing out is the first sale. The second sale is the food.
What Lu Run looks like now
Twelve family members are involved in Lu Run today. They do markets, events, and have a food van on the way. Their otai drinks - in watermelon and green apple, and mango and pineapple - are now stocked in retail stores across Sydney including Berala Hotel, Collingwood Hotel, Mana'ia Pacific Shop Lakemba, and Bubu's Island Feast Granville, generating consistent weekly income alongside their events and market work.
“Before FoodLab we were just taking food store events that would happen maybe once a month. Now we have consistent income coming in every week — constant income, besides our stores and events. There's a big jump from before I started to where I'm at now.”
The gap Daniel is building toward
Daniel doesn't talk small about where this is going.
Think about what Guzman y Gomez did for Mexican food in Australia. Or El Jannah for Lebanese. Every major cuisine now has a commercial format built around it: a chain, a retail presence, a brand people recognise from the highway.
There is no equivalent for Pacific Islander food. Not in Sydney. Not in Australia. Not anywhere.
“At the moment there isn't one out there for Pacific Island food. We don't really have a restaurant or fast food place in Sydney, or even in the world. I want to be the first to bring that out commercially — for Tongan and Pacific Islander food. In Sydney. Australia. Tonga. New Zealand. America. As far as I can take it.”
That's not ambition for its own sake. That's someone who has looked at a genuine gap in the market, a cuisine that has fed communities for generations and remained largely invisible in commercial food culture, and decided to fill it.
“I would like to be a proper representation of our Pacific Islander culture, faith and morals through our food.”
“When you taste it, it always shocks everyone.”
That surprise is the market.
Since FoodLab, Daniel says simply: “I have grown more confident and I have grown in the food industry for my business.”
If you've got the food and you're ready to build the business around it, our training programme is open now. Find out more here.
Daniel Uepi is the founder of Lu Run. You can follow them on Instagram at @the.lu.run, where they post their upcoming markets and events.
If you want to support the work that makes programmes like this possible, find out more about donating to FoodLab here.
If you are a food entrepreneur and want to know more about our training programme, find out more here.
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