Ayam gepuk opens where young, Malay-majority neighbourhoods meet fast food
We mapped the 265 ayam gepuk outlets we could verify and compared the 2 km around each one with the 1,113 KFC, McDonald’s and Marrybrown outlets in the same states. Population and income look the same as fast food. Age and ethnicity do not.
- It is a Klang Valley product.E8F8E9F9
55% of outlets are in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, against 37% of fast-food outlets. Four map squares hold 158 of the 265.
- Inside a state, the crowd matches fast food.
Residents within 2 km and district income sit at the 48th and 48th percentile of fast-food sites in the same state: no difference.
- The neighbourhoods are younger and more Malay.
Voters aged 18–29 make up 30.2% of the surrounding polling districts, against 26.8% around fast food. Malay voters: 56% against 40%.
- Young residents explain it; students barely do.
Holding state and commercial density fixed, the youth share predicts an outlet. Students enrolled nearby add little, and Malay share adds nothing once youth is known.
- The chains sit on top of each other.E8F8
90 of the 238 outlets of the four chains have a rival chain within 1 km; in Bukit Jelutong and Setiawangsa, Top Global and Pak Gembus are 47 m apart.
Figure 1. Every verified ayam gepuk outlet (Pak Gembus lime, Top Global orange, Pak Gendut pink, Artisan blue, independents yellow) and the fast-food benchmark (grey). Pak Gendut’s two Sabah outlets are off this view. The grid follows a street directory: columns A–L west to east, rows 1–12 north to south. Grid references in this report pan the map to their square.
It is a Klang Valley product
More than half of all outlets sit in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya. Fast food, a mature category that has reached every state, puts only a third there. Ayam gepuk is under-represented in Johor (6% against 15%) and Penang (1.5% against 7%). East Malaysia is almost untouched: two Pak Gendut outlets in Sabah (0.8%, against 6.5% of fast food) and none in Sarawak or Labuan.
That gap is either untested ground or weaker demand. Public data cannot tell which; the chains’ own sales by state can.
Figure 2. Share of each group’s outlets by state. The line joins the two shares; a long line means ayam gepuk is placed very differently from fast food.
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Inside a state, the crowd is the same size and income, but younger and more Malay
Comparing outlets across states would mostly measure the Klang Valley effect above. So each outlet is ranked only against fast-food outlets in its own state. A score of 50 means “exactly like where fast food opens”.
Population and district income both land at the 48th percentile: ayam gepuk goes where fast food goes. The difference appears only at polling-district grain. Around an outlet, 30.2% of voters are aged 18–29, against 26.8% around fast food, and 56% are Malay, against 40%.
District averages hid this completely. At district level the youth share scored 50. Fine-grained age data is what changed the answer.
Figure 3. Where the median ayam gepuk outlet ranks among fast-food outlets in the same state (0–100). The bar spans the middle half of outlets. The dashed line at 50 means no difference.
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Young residents explain it; students barely do
Youth and Malay share move together (r = 0.43), and campuses sit in young areas. To separate them, one model weighs all the factors at once, within each state. The youth share of nearby polling districts has the strongest pull after fast-food density. Malay share adds nothing once youth is known (not significant). Students enrolled within 2 km add little: public-campus enrolment is borderline (p = 0.07), private colleges nothing.
Outlets are near campuses more often (17% have a public campus within 2 km, against 8% of fast food), but only because campuses sit in young, busy neighbourhoods. The UiTM survey that drew attention to ayam gepuk interviewed students (94% of 386 respondents). That tells us who answered the survey, not where the product sells.
Figure 4. How much each factor raises the odds that a site is an ayam gepuk outlet rather than a fast-food one, per standard deviation. Logistic regression with state fixed effects; 255 ayam gepuk and 997 fast-food sites in the same states.
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The chains sit on top of each other
110 of 265 outlets have another ayam gepuk outlet within 1 km. Across the four chains, 90 of 238 outlets have a rival chain within 1 km: Top Global most often (24 of 48), then Pak Gembus (33 of 110), Artisan (17 of 36) and Pak Gendut (16 of 44). In E8 Bukit Jelutong and F8 Setiawangsa a Top Global and a Pak Gembus are 47 m apart.
Clustering can mean a destination strip that feeds both, or two outlets splitting one crowd. Location data cannot separate the two. Outlet sales before and after a rival opens can, and that is the first test we would run with a client.
Figure 5. Distance from each ayam gepuk outlet to the nearest other ayam gepuk outlet, any brand.
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What we would test next
With a chain’s own outlet sales, the same catchments become a model of what makes an outlet succeed, not only where outlets are:
- Screen new sites on polling-district youth share and fast-food density, not campus distance.
- Rank the under-served states (Johor, Penang, East Malaysia) by lookalike score against the best Klang Valley outlets.
- Measure cannibalisation where outlets are under 1 km apart before adding another in E8 or F8.
Limits
- Catchments are 2 km circles; drive-time catchments are the next version.
- Voter figures count registered voters aged 18+ at their registered address (PRU15 roll, 2022). Students registered at home addresses are missed, so the real youth skew is likely larger.
- Student counts are allocated to campuses by rule; MOHE publishes no per-campus figures.
- OSM under-maps independents and the fast-food benchmark in some states; two independents may duplicate a chain outlet.
- Income is a district value, not a catchment value.
Data and method
- Outlets: Pak Gembus and Top Global store locators (Sep 2026), OpenStreetMap; 9 geocoded from address or postcode.
- Benchmark: KFC, McDonald’s and Marrybrown from OpenStreetMap, deduplicated within 50 m.
- Residents: WorldPop 2020 constrained population, 100 m grid.
- Age and ethnicity: SPR electoral roll, PRU15, aggregated to 7,748 polling districts (counts only, cells under 10 suppressed), area-weighted into each 2 km circle.
- Income: DOSM HIES 2024, district median. Students: MOHE Statistik Pendidikan Tinggi 2025 (Tables 1.3, 2.1, 4.1).
- Tests: within-state percentile against the benchmark (Wilcoxon), and logistic regression with state fixed effects and robust errors.
- Context: Mohamed Apandi et al., Jurnal Intelek 21(2) 2026, doi 10.24191/ji.v21i2.11394.