Lan Ho, founder and CEO of Fat Miilk.
Courtesy of Lan Ho
Lan Ho was working as a retail pharmacist at Walgreens earning about $120,000 a year, before she decided to quit her job to start a coffee company.
Getting the pharmacist role was no easy feat. She had gone through a decade of higher education, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Lindenwood University, her master’s degree in finance from Harvard University and her doctorate degree in pharmacy from the St. Louis College of Pharmacy.
Despite everything she had already invested, Ho said she felt miserable working as a retail pharmacist. One day, she had an epiphany: “What am I doing at the back of Walgreens, like, hidden from the world?”
“I think it was this compounding effect of just waking up every single day and being extremely, extremely unhappy and unfulfilled [and] it was just like this tug at my heart where I just, like, could not do pharmacy anymore,” Ho said.
It was this feeling that ultimately pushed her to change the trajectory of her life.
Today, the 35-year-old is the founder and CEO of Vietnamese coffee company Fat Miilk which brings in over $500,000 a year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Refugee roots
Born in Oakland, California and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Ho grew up in an immigrant household. Her parents were both refugees from Vietnam, and they encouraged her to pursue pharmacy because they wanted her to have stability.
“When you have parents who came from a war torn country … a lot of your most impressionable years [are] very much in the energy of survival,” Ho told CNBC Make It.
“I pretty much went to pharmacy school because my dad thought that this … was the best thing that I could do for myself. And I have so much respect for him that I wanted to make him proud,” she said.
However, while in pharmacy school, she began to feel very unfulfilled and would experiment with business ideas on the side. She dabbled in blogging and even tried to open her own fashion company.
“Fat Miilk is not the first company that I launched. I actually launched so many other ventures. None of them really took off,” she said.
Ultimately, she realized that throughout her life as a student, she had always been a big coffee consumer and was very fascinated with the industry. This became the idea that she went all-in on.
“I just love the creativity and the expansiveness of coffee. At the end of the day, I feel like it’s such a ritual,” she said. “You see so many people take their own spin on it and add their own culture, their own flair … And I was just always very fascinated by [the coffee industry.]”
Quitting pharmacy
In 2018, while working in her first retail pharmacist job, Ho also experimented with her coffee business on the side. By 2019, she had incorporated the company, formed an LLC and trademarked the name “Fat Miilk.”
It wasn’t until the pandemic in 2020 when Ho was furloughed for two months from the job, that she finally found more time to focus on the business: “In those two months, I launched Fat Miilk, and when they asked me to come back, I said ‘no.'”
She left Walgreens, and took on a per diem role at a telehealth company instead, which gave her more flexibility. Along with using her own funds, she also borrowed money from her loved ones and lived off of credit cards in order to bootstrap her coffee company.
“I would say the first three years … my mental state was definitely a mix of survival [and] feeling inspired. But also, like, it was very volatile,” she said.
March 2022 was a turning point for Ho and her business. That month, a casting director from the TV show “Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars” reached out to her to join as a contestant on the program.
A couple weeks later, she flew from Illinois to Los Angeles where they filmed the series. Ho ended up as a finalist in the competition and had the opportunity to pitch to Gordon Ramsay about Fat Miilk on television.
“I made it all the way until the end. I pitched [my business] to Gordon Ramsay, and I knew it was going to get this national attention … And that was the point where I really started to build,” said Ho. “From the moment that I got back from filming until now, [I decided] we’re gonna go big with this.”
Being on that show gave Ho two major advantages, she said. Externally, it gave her much more credibility, and internally, she gained the confidence to think bigger with her business.
In February 2024, she opened the first Fat Miilk coffee shop in Chicago. Ho is also set to open a second outlet in Naperville, Illinois in 2026. A third location — and their first out-of-state store — is also in the works.
Ho said one of the biggest lessons she’s learned along the journey is how to take up space and take care of herself along the way.
“That was the thing that allowed me to create new lanes and narratives for myself that ultimately led me to where I am now,” she said. “If I was seeking permission, I’d still be waiting.”
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