Every Filipino home has a smell that holds a sense of immediate nostalgia. For many of us, it is the slow, familiar curl of smoke rising from a lit green coil, a scent that meant nightfall was coming, the family was settling in, and that someone had thought ahead to keep the mosquitoes away. That coil, more often than not, was Lion-Tiger Katol.

This year, Lion-Tiger turns 70. But before it became a household name, it was simply an idea born out of concern for ordinary Filipino families.

Where Katol began

Mosquito coils trace their origins to late 19th-century Japan, where entrepreneur Eiichiro Ueyama experimented with powdered chrysanthemum flowers, which produce pyrethrum, a natural insecticide. Early versions burned quickly as straight incense sticks, but his wife Yuki suggested shaping them into a spiral to prolong their burn time, giving rise to the coil form we recognize today. 

The word katol is believed to derive from the Japanese katori senkō, meaning “mosquito-repelling incense,” a term Filipinos shortened and adopted so completely it became part of everyday language. And in 1956, it found its most purposeful champion in a Filipino entrepreneur from Cebu.

A founding built on conviction, not commerce

In 1956, Ernesto Dacay Sr. recognized what the mosquito coil could mean for the Philippines, a tropical archipelago where dengue and malaria were a constant, deadly reality for ordinary families. His goal was never simply commercial. It was to protect every Filipino family from mosquito-borne disease, and he saw the coil as the most practical way to do it.

He registered the Lion-Tiger brand and began importation that same year. But he was never content to be a middleman. By 1961, he had built a factory in Cebu, creating local employment and establishing what would become the foundation of a Filipino manufacturing institution. The company started as Associated Industrial Company, later known as Benson Industries Incorporated. In 2008, Philcoil Industries Inc. was established, alongside Green Coil Industries Inc. The names reflect a business that kept growing, but the founding conviction behind them never changed.

In an era where brands manufacture purpose as a marketing strategy, Lion-Tiger had purpose before it had a brand. Ernesto Sr. was not trying to tell a compelling story. He was trying to solve a problem that no Filipino family should have to face unprotected. This is what business as a force for good looks like at its most fundamental: a product that serves the market and protects lives at the same time. That distinction matters, because genuine purpose does something that manufactured purpose cannot: it survives.

The proof is in the generations

Purpose is easy to declare at a founding. What is far harder is passing it down.

Ramon Dacay, Ernesto Sr.’s son and now president of the company, joined the business in June 1976, attending night school while building his career from the ground up. What he built with his father became distinctly his own, rooted in the original conviction behind the business and further developed through his personal vision and choices.

Under Ramon’s stewardship, Lion-Tiger grew from a single product into a full household protection brand, adding aerosol sprays, new coil variants, and scented options over the decades. Every new product, every new variant, came back to the same question: does this protect Filipino families better? That clarity of purpose is what separates brands that last from those that drift over time. And because the product itself is the good, every expansion of the brand was also an expansion of its impact, reaching more households, protecting more families, preventing more disease.

Now the third generation is writing the next chapter, with Ralph Ryan Dacay, son of Ramon, among those carrying the business forward. He leads quality control, new product development, and the brand’s expansion into e-commerce and new platforms, ensuring that newer generations know and trust Lion-Tiger just as those before them did.

Three generations with the same mission. Not through coincidence, but through familial culture and entrepreneurial drive, quietly built and diligently nurtured. It is a promise the brand has carried from the very beginning: “Mula Lolo hanggang mga Apo, lahat ng Pilipino protektado.”

When the product is the purpose

There is a version of corporate social responsibility that lives in annual reports, separate from the actual business. Lion-Tiger is different. For 70 years, it has made an affordable, accessible product available to Filipino families across every income level and every region of the country. The family in a modest home in the province who lights a coil before bedtime is not the beneficiary of a charity program. It is a customer, treated with the same seriousness as any other. That is a more powerful and more sustainable form of social good than any foundation could replicate.

Purpose that is real becomes the driver for every business decision. It is what reminds a company of who it is, even when the market is telling it to be something else. Lion-Tiger’s most powerful competitive asset is not its formulation or its distribution, though both are strong. It is the nostalgia of every Filipino who grew up with that familiar scent in their home and reached for the same brand when they had a family of their own. That kind of trust is earned over decades, renewed with every product that works, and protected by every generation that chooses to take the mission seriously.

Seventy years ago, Ernesto Dacay Sr. lit a coil and made a promise to Filipino families. Three generations have chosen, each in their own time, to keep it. That promise is still burning. – Rappler.com

Ralph Ray Dacay Chua is the president of Immuni Global Incorporated, a related company of Philcoil Industries Inc. and Green Coil Industries Inc. He is an ASEAN Youth Fellow of the Singapore National Youth Council and a recipient of the Ramon V. del Rosario Siklab Award, the Mansmith Innovation Award, and the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry Injap Sia Outstanding Young Entrepreneur for Industry. He holds a Master of Business Administration with Distinction from the University of Manchester.