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Furthering future growth for the food processing industry in Malaysia faces multiple challenges, an area in which a recent trend shows the competitiveness of the exported processed food industry is declining. The sustainability of export flow is found to be a critical factor for long-term export growth. This paper provides empirical evidence on the survival pattern of Malaysia's processed food exports. The Kaplan-Meier technique is used in this paper to estimate the export survival time and rate of 128 processed food products at 31 export destinations for the period between 2000 and 2017. The findings show that food exporters face a high risk of failure in the initial years of exporting. At the aggregate level, the median survival time of processed food exports is two years, which means that 50% of export relationships face failure by the second year of exporting. The chances of export survival differ in terms of product groups and export destinations. This study also found that a higher initial export value increases the success rate of export survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]