A former Smiths Falls Hershey factory worker has struck it rich in the wonton business, with his Wonton Crunch products flying off the shelves — and his family business set to expand.

Prim Singh used knowledge of food processing gained at the former chocolate plant to design a computerized machine that fills and folds 5,000 wontons every hour.​

As a young man, Singh worked in a bar in Trinidad and Tobago, where he learned the elaborate folding technique behind the boat-shaped wonton. Singh said the crispy, Chinese dumplings were so popular, they often outsold liquor.

Singh left the island nearly 30 years ago, settled in Smiths Falls, and got a job cleaning food processing equipment on the production floor at the Hershey's plant.

A Smiths Falls, Ont., family has struck it rich in the wonton business. 0:30

Always a tinkerer, Singh studied the machinery, noting how electronics and mechanics were married together in a way that allowed for the creation of elaborately-constructed snack foods.

In the late 1990s, he took a three-year leave from Hershey's to study computers, eventually setting up a sales and repair shop in his home.

'Here he goes again'

To supplement the family income while he was away from Hershey's, he and his wife Grace, along with their two children, spent their weekends in the kitchen, hand-folding thousands of wontons to sell at local businesses.

Then he told his family that he wanted to try to build a machine that could master the complex, origami-like folds of the boat-shaped wonton.

"I couldn't see any reason why somebody wouldn't like it, and buy it," recalled Singh. "I kept coming back to the same thing.

I always knew in the back of my head that if I have this machine, and I can put the wontons in somebody's hands, they will like it. - Prim Singh

"I always knew in the back of my head that if I have this machine and I can put the wontons in somebody's hands, they will like it."

His son, Dean, is now the CEO of Wonton Crunch.

"When he told us he was going to make a wonton machine, we all laughed, you know, 'Here he goes again!'" his son said.

But after seven years of tinkering in the family garage, and a eureka! moment, Singh solved the puzzle of how to get a machine to fill and fold a boat-shaped wonton.

"Movement and machinery, they're all pretty much based on the same principles, and if you understand the principle of the movement, you can apply it to pretty much any machine," he said.

New facility to open in January

The machine developed by Prim Singh can produce 5,000 wontons every hour. (Stu Mills/CBC) With assistance from the Business Development Bank of Canada, and a helpful push by a successful appearance on Dragons' Den, Wonton Crunch is now selling more than 250,000 crispy jalapeno cream cheese wontons to Farm Boy stores every month — with new flavours on the way.

The machine-made wontons are flash-frozen and bagged before being delivered to distributors.

Now an international distribution deal for Wonton Crunch is in the works, and a large new processing facility is set to open in January.

"Smiths Falls has really, really been behind us," said Prim Singh, who vows to keep the business local.

"If anybody out there has a dream that they wish to pursue, they don't have to know how to get to the end. They only need to know, as long as you start, and you persist, you will get to the end."