The Big Read: Singaporeans want cheap and good hawker food. Hawkers need to make money. How do we square the circle?

SINGAPORE — Hawker Jason Ng received an earful from an irate customer recently after he raised his food prices following the staggered Goods and Services Tax (GST) hike in the last two years.
“I had one customer who scolded me (quite severely). He said the Government raised the GST by 1 percentage point, but how come your food price went up by more than that?” recounted the 31-year-old who owns six hawker and coffee shop stalls selling fish and seafood soup. 
Mr Ng noted that the GST hike in the past two years — it rose from 7 to 8 per cent in January 2023 and to 9 per cent in January this year — came on top of other rising costs for hawkers, such as that of manpower, ingredients, and stall rentals.
Despite the higher overheads, he had raised his food prices thrice by just a combined total of S$1 in the nine years since he opened his first stall. 
A bowl of sliced batang fish soup, for example, now costs S$6 at his hawker stall in Pasir Ris.
Nevertheless, each time he introduces a slight price adjustment, Mr Ng finds himself having to justify it.
Referring to the recent scolding incident by the customer, Mr Ng said: “He told me… it’s like daylight robbery. But it’s not true…because suppliers also increase (their prices) and it’s not just by one percentage point.” 
The same goes for his rental.
“When they renew the contract, they (raise rental prices) by about S$300 or S$400. Can I absorb it all? I cannot,” said Mr Ng, who declined to say how much he pays for rental. 
Facing a similar situation is Madam Henny, 68, who has been running a toast and drinks stall at Kukoh 21 Food Centre at Jalan Kukoh off Chin Swee Road for three decades.
She told TODAY that she had received some complaints when she tried to raise the price of two soft-boiled eggs from S$1.60 to S$1.80.
To avoid arguing with — and losing — customers, she decided to price the pair of soft-boiled eggs back at S$1.60.
“Most importantly, you need to have business so you can cover (your costs)… The scariest is to not have any customers, because you won’t be able to cover anything,” said Mdm Henny, who declined to give her full name.
Mr Ng and Mdm Henny are among Singapore’s ubiquitous hawkers who have had to strike a difficult balance between managing rising overheads and customers’ longstanding expectations of “cheap” hawker fare.
With generations of Singaporeans having grown up with the notion that hawker centres and coffee shops are the go-to places for affordable food, it is perhaps not surprising that they will chafe at price hikes or what they deem to be high prices for food at such stalls.
Retiree Poh Wee Koon, who was eating at a Bukit Batok coffee shop, lamented: “The prices (of hawker food) keep rising. This economic rice stall… two vegetables, one meat, and they charge S$5.”
“Might as well go to Koufu (food court) and eat. (For the same dish) it’s about S$5.50 or S$6, and there’s air-con. Over here, there’s no air-con,” said the 68-year-old.
And for some others, the dependence on affordable hawker fare has become even more critical amid inflationary pressures in recent years, given that food expenditure can constitute a significant portion of household spending.
Figures published by the Singapore Department of Statistics (SingStat) in May this year showed that hawker food prices had risen by 6.1 per cent in 2023 — the highest since 2008.
This translated to average price increases of between S$0.30 and S$0.40 for different cooked hawker food items, including chicken rice, fishball noodles, and nasi briyani.
This broad-based increase in hawker food prices was partly due to higher input costs, according to the Statistics Singapore Newsletter, a SingStat publication. 
This included pricier raw food ingredients due to supply chain disruptions triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic and compounded by other events such as the Russia-Ukraine war, it said.
While acknowledging the cost issues faced by hawkers, some customers told TODAY that they were still concerned about such rising costs being passed on to them.
Part-time consultant Lionel John, 72, who dines at hawker centres and coffee shops almost daily, said he has noticed how food has become more costly in recent years.
“Of course, when prices go up, they never come down. The rate of increase is also quite exorbitant. If something costs S$4 and you increase (the price) by $0.50, it’s more than a 10 per cent increase.”
Another regular hawker centre patron, Ms Lynette Teo, 31, noted that while most hawker food is still priced below S$10, it is increasingly common to see more food items costing more than S$5. 
“I think Singaporeans understand that it’s tough (for hawkers) and we are willing to pay a certain price. If it’s below S$10, it’s fine, but we have definitely started seeing (double-digit prices) and hawkers start to charge for small things like extra soup,” said the senior account manager at a technology company. 
With Singaporeans by and large expecting food at coffee shops and hawker centres to be affordable, how does this square with the need for hawkers to make a living amid rising costs? And what are the implications of such a tension between consumers and hawkers?
Hawkers in seven hawker centres and eight coffee shops told TODAY that rentals and the costs of ingredients and manpower form the bulk of their costs of running their business.
Their monthly rentals vary, depending on where their stalls are situated, and whether they operate in a hawker centre or a coffee shop.
At NEA-run hawker centres, hawkers told TODAY that each month, they pay between S$700 for a unit at the Berseh Food Centre in Jalan Besar, and about S$3,000 for a unit at the Amoy Street Food Centre in Tanjong Pagar.
Within privately-run coffee shops, the rentals can be significantly higher. While several hawkers and stall assistants declined to provide exact figures of their monthly rentals, they told TODAY that the figure is generally above S$5,000.
Still, rentals form just a fraction of the hawkers’ monthly overheads, which include manpower, ingredients, service and conservancy charges, and table-cleaning fees.
In a July 2 written reply to a parliamentary question on hawker food prices, Ms Fu said that NEA surveys showed that raw materials and manpower were the main cost drivers for stallholders in hawker centres. 
These accounted for an average of 56 per cent and 20 per cent of their operating costs respectively in 2022, she added.
Several hawkers told TODAY their monthly operating costs run above S$10,000.
Mr Desmond Yeo, 56, who runs a roasted meat stall at the Amoy Street Food Centre, estimated that the rising costs of meat and poultry had driven his monthly operating costs up from about S$18,000 in 2019 to around S$22,000 today.
After branching out from his family’s hawker business almost five years ago to set up his own stall, Mr Yeo said he had seen his operating costs increase year-on-year — with the hikes especially steep during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Citing reasons such as Malaysia’s export bans on poultry that limited its supply here, Mr Yeo said he saw prices surge about 20 per cent in its aftermath.
“The chicken prices went up and never came down.”
This, combined with lower footfall observed at the Amoy Street Food Centre as more office-workers in the area turn to working from home post-pandemic, has led to increased costs and reduced profits for the hawkers there.
Faced with these cost pressures, the hawkers at Amoy Street Food Centre and elsewhere said they are left with little choice but to raise the price of their food items to ensure their stalls remain profitable. 
Still, the hawkers are hesitant to increase their prices too much, lest they lose customers.
Faced with the reality of price increments that are not in tandem with their rising operating costs, several hawkers interviewed by TODAY say they choose instead to settle for taking home less profits.
For some, the drop could be as severe as a 40 per cent reduction in profits today, compared to five years ago.
Mr Yeo said that since his stall opened in 2019, he had increased his prices only once in 2022 — by just S$0.50.
He tries to peg his stall’s food prices to that of the same item in the heartland areas with the aim of keeping a “very stable” customer base and turnover daily.
Noting that some of his competitors “are already ahead” of him price-wise, Mr Yeo plans to adjust his prices around Chinese New Year next year.
Another hawker at the Amoy Street centre, Ms Sng Yu Jie, 30, said she had tried to tweak her stall’s food prices following the Covid-19 poultry import disruptions.
“It’s very hard…I increased (my food price) by about S$1, and I saw a decrease of 30 per cent (in sales) for that particular item,” said the co-owner of hawker stall Craft’B which sells rice bowls and drinks.
“It takes a while for them (customers) to accept the price and to come back. So I’d rather lose quantity (of profits), than to lose these customers.”
The NEA spokesman said in response to TODAY’s queries that while it does not regulate hawker food prices, it provides “a conducive operating environment” for hawkers at hawker centres.
“This allows them to balance between pricing their food affordably and sustaining their livelihoods,” said the spokesman.
“To do this, NEA moderates the rent of hawker stalls by not setting reserve rents for stall tenders and disallowing subletting.”
NEA also has other measures in place to assist hawkers with cost.
These include productivity support grants for the upgrading of equipment, rental waivers and other support in times of need such as during Covid-19.
For instance, the Hawkers’ Productivity Grant subsidises automation equipment and technological solutions for individual hawkers. As of June 30, 1,003 cooked food stallholders have benefitted from the grant, with more than S$3.28 million disbursed. 
“Collectively, these measures have contributed to keeping operating costs lower for our hawkers,” said the spokesman.
Still, under the broad umbrella of hawker food, it is not uncommon to see some offerings such as trishaw noodles or peanut porridge going for under S$3, while certain dishes and cuisine cost much more.
For example, a whole deep-fried spring chicken at a Western food stall or a serving of Japanese unagi with rice could easily set diners back by double-digit sums, particularly at heartland coffee shops.
However, hawkers say that generally these items are priced as such due to their relatively higher cost and that they are not necessarily getting a higher profit margin than hawkers who sell cheaper food.
At Ms Sng’s stall for example, an unagi rice bowl goes for S$11 while a wagyu beef rice bowl is priced at S$13 due to the higher costs of these ingredients. 
Apart from these, however, most of her other food items are priced below S$10.
Another hawker, Ms Ong, 24, who runs a stall in Marsiling selling Western food, said she buys bigger-sized chickens — weighing about 900g — which cost about S$5 a bird.
A serving of half spring chicken goes for S$7.50 at her stall, and comes with fried rice and eggs. 
Hawker food and coffee shop fare have long been regarded as one of Singapore’s safety nets — providing accessible and affordable food options to all Singaporeans, regardless of their socio-economic status.
And with high inflation in recent years, the expectation among Singaporeans that hawker fare should not be costly has arguably grown.   
Ms Teo, the senior account manager, noted that from houses to cars, “everything else is getting very expensive”.
“The alternative to (hawker and coffee shop food) would be restaurants and food delivery. But if we take away our cheap food in Singapore, we’re basically like every other developed country that starts from a high or medium price point.
“The cheap hawker food is what makes Singapore, Singapore,” she said.
Ms Teo’s view that hawker food should remain affordable was a common refrain among regular patrons interviewed by TODAY.
Research officer Jackie Chu, 30, believes that hawker food should be affordably priced as it caters to a wide demographic of customers across different socioeconomic statuses.
At the same time, Mr Chu said it should not be too cheap such that it drives hawkers out of business.
Noting how the price of a chicken chop at a hawker stall he frequents in Pasir Ris had risen from S$5.90 to S$7.20 in the last four years, Mr Chu said: “I feel if it’s coffee shop stalls, when it hits double digits, I think that’s when I will start to reconsider and go somewhere else.”
Echoing his sentiments, data engineer Gabriel Lewis, 30, said that a reasonable price tag for hawker food is one that is pegged to the market rate of that item.
“If the chicken chop is going for an average of S$7 or S$8 at other hawker centres, and suddenly you have a place that increased its prices to S$12 but the quality is the same, then I don’t think it’s fair,” said Mr Lewis.
He added that hawker food should also be kept at a cheaper price, as there is often little to no service offered, as opposed to a restaurant where one’s table might be waited on.
Another factor for Singaporeans’ attitudes towards hawker food prices is the ingrained generational expectations of how hawker food should be priced, experts said.
Writer and cook Lim Tse Wei said: “(Diners have a generational expectation that) hawker food has always been cheap, so why should it change? At the same time, there’s also a real social safety net aspect to it.”
Dr Teo Kay Key, a research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies’ (IPS) Social Lab, said that consumers would be more willing to pay a premium if the same food is served in a more comfortable environment or a standalone shop unit that has servers.
“The overhead costs for the latter location are more visible — owners have to spend on decor, rent of the whole place, manpower, (and) utilities… Hawkers likely also have to pay for many of the same overhead costs, but the overall environment provides an impression that they pay a lower sum compared to restaurants,” said Dr Teo, who co-published a paper titled “The Cost of Eating Out: Findings from the Makan Index 2.0” in 2023. 
In response to such widely-held public expectations, the Government has reiterated its commitment to ensuring that residents have access to affordable cooked food options within the heartlands.
It has also introduced a variety of measures over the years to back that commitment, such as increasing the supply of hawker centres and coffee shops, and launching budget meal initiatives. 
Last year, Senior Minister of State for National Development Sim Ann said that all coffee shops leased from HDB would have to offer budget meal options to diners by 2026.
The requirement for budget meals was first introduced in 2018 for new coffee shops let out by HDB.
Following Ms Sim’s announcement, all other HDB rental coffee shops due for renewal from May 2023 must also provide four budget meals and two budget drinks, as a condition for renewal of their tenancy.
Budget meals include lunch or dinner options that are typically priced at S$3.50 and below, and drinks priced at S$1.20 and below.
To ease the transition for coffee shops operators and stallholders, HDB offers a rental discount of five per cent off the renewal rents for a period of one year from the time of tenancy renewal, after verifying that the budget meals and drinks have been implemented.
HDB said in response to TODAY’s queries that over the last five years, it has also kept rents “steady and low” through offering tenancy renewals to existing coffee shops at prevailing market rates.
In general, HDB coffee shop rents are “far below” rents charged by private owners, it added.
Singaporean food critic and author KF Seetoh has been a vocal critic of some policies aimed at hawkers, including the social enterprise hawker management model and the budget meals requirement.
In a Facebook post published on July 6, Mr Seetoh referred to these schemes as “abusive and stifling” ways of “bullying” hawkers. 
He also questioned why hawkers were required to pay market prices in bidding for a hawker stall, yet be “cornered” to sell a S$3.50 dish without “decent compensations”.
Mr Seetoh wrote: “Why do you want to interfere in the journey of these humble entry-level food business entrepreneurs and hamper creativity? Back off. Hawkers know best how much they must sell their food to survive and thrive.”
Still, hawkers offering such mandatory budget meal items on their menu told TODAY that they try to make up for these sales through profits gleaned from other items.
Such is the approach taken by Mr Alan Ng, 70, who runs a stall selling soup at a coffee shop in Yishun.
Mr Ng hopes that the lower-priced budget meal item would also appeal to more customers, who will then go on to try other food items that his stall sells.
Others, like Mr Quan, 32, a stall assistant who oversees operations at a roasted meat stall in Bukit Batok, said they also cap the number of budget meals sold at the stall in a day.
Ultimately, the prices of food in hawker centres and coffee shops must be kept sustainable — for both stallholders and consumers — to ensure the continued survival of a national icon.
While most hawkers and consumers alike understand the rationale behind affordably-priced hawker food in the Singaporean context, the big question remains: Who will be left to foot the bill?
Hawkers are after all also running a business, and should not be expected to prioritise “altruistic outcomes” over their business outcomes, said IPS’ Dr Teo. 
Instead of prioritising any one people group or economic activity over another, the key lies instead in being able to “provide options to everybody”, said Mr Song Seng Wun, an economic consultant at financial service provider CGS International.
Instead of mandating that different hawker food be priced at a certain amount, Mr Song said it is crucial instead to ensure there is a range of different-priced items available for customers to choose from.
Being able to make their own choices of what they are willing to pay — be it S$2 for a cup of coffee or S$7 for a more expensive option — ensures that hawkers offering these food items, at different prices, can continue to make a living.
Hawker fare has been so deeply embedded in Singapore culture that it was successfully inscribed onto the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 2020.
But if hawkers’ livelihoods are not safeguarded, and if the hawker trade is not seen as a financially viable alternative to other opportunities in the labour market, it could ultimately deter newcomers from considering it as a career — and possibly threaten the long-term survival of the hawker trade.
As it stands, new hawkers can find it tough to survive despite some support from the Government. 
In 2020, NEA launched its Hawkers’ Development Programme — combining training, apprenticeship, and mentorship to equip aspiring hawkers with the relevant skills to run a hawker business.
In a written reply to a Parliamentary question earlier this month, Ms Fu revealed that as of April 30, 566 aspiring hawkers have enrolled for the programme and completed their classroom training. 
Among them, 120 have moved on to complete their apprenticeship. Out of the 29 who proceeded to start their business within a hawker centre, just 16 of them remain in operation.
The NEA spokesman said that it has been working closely with hawkers and stakeholders to sustain the hawker trade, and has also taken steps to provide new hawkers with the necessary skillsets to boost their chances of succeeding.
For instance, the agency runs an Incubation Stall Programme, which provides eligible aspiring hawkers with pre-fitted stalls at reduced rental rates for 15 months.
Existing hawkers told TODAY that they have resorted to various means to keep their businesses profitable while minimising increases to their food prices.
These include staggering the rate and frequency of price increases, and providing advanced notice of price changes to their regular customers.
Some who are reluctant to adjust their food prices upwards, for fear of losing customers, said they have had to decrease food portion sizes to keep prices unchanged.
Others, like 68-year-old Madam Ha Siew Hong — who runs a mixed vegetable rice stall at Kukoh 21 Food Centre which also sells a variety of soup and noodle offerings — have taken to offering these reduced food portions at discounted rates.
For example, she accepts requests from elderly diners who ask for smaller food portions at a cheaper price because they have smaller appetites.
To mitigate rising business costs without passing on too much of these increases to their customers, some hawkers also choose to open more hawker stalls so they can enjoy economies of scale.
Mr Ng, who has five other outlets in hawker centres and coffee shops apart from the one in Pasir Ris under the Jun Yuan House of Fish brand, said his strategy has been to expand the number of outlets he owns: “With the higher volume, you are able to push down the supplier costs.”
Similarly, 32-year-old Marcus Tan, who owns five chicken rice outlets under the brand name Feng Ji Hainanese Boneless Chicken Rice, told TODAY that he tries to aim for a higher volume of sales across his stalls, to combat rising business costs while keeping food prices low.
Notwithstanding its benefits, such an approach could nevertheless have knock-on effects for customers and the wider hawker ecosystem in the long term.
After all, if there is an unspoken price ceiling or a limit on how much customers are willing to pay for hawker fare, more businesses might look for ways to enjoy economies of scale — leading to bigger food outlets and hawker chains possibly benefitting over smaller, individual stallholders in the long run.
From the customers’ point of view, they may also lose out on a diversity of offerings if the market were to be monopolised by hawker chains.
Noting the rapid growth of more prominent hawker chains and brand names, real estate agent Vincent Lye, 37, said: “I think if you have that kind of capital, it makes sense (to expand). Otherwise, it’s very difficult for (the smaller hawkers).”
While he acknowledges that such chains could offer consistency in their offerings, he expressed concern that these big chains will push the more traditional, individual hawkers out of business. 
“Their branding is very prominent… and these groups have economies of scale for their supplies. They definitely can get better deals than (individual hawkers), and in terms of competition, they (individual hawkers) would lose out.”
Ultimately, the lines between winners and losers of what Associate Professor Walter Theseira called the “MacDonalisation” of the hawker system are blurred.
The labour economist from the Singapore University of Social Sciences said that the increasing commodification of hawker food — marked by the growing presence of chains and franchises offering “hawker-like food” — could reduce the risks faced by individual hawkers.
“A franchise offers a brand name, a supply chain, and it offers training in a certain method of cooking. But in exchange, a franchise also typically reduces the reward available to the hawker, because in the franchise, you often just become an employee.
“So the downsides are contained, but so is the upside,” Assoc Prof Theseira said.
On the one hand, such a system could allow hawkers’ wages to be roughly fixed to a certain industry benchmark. On the other hand, it could effectively eliminate a large part of Singapore’s hawker culture.
If the chains eventually “swallow up the space”, this could reduce opportunities for new and non-franchised hawkers to emerge.
“If you are an individual hawker who wants to offer your own take on a particular kind of noodle, but if you see chains offering the (same), you might conclude quite reasonably that it would be suicidal to go into the market because the chains are already doing it,” said Assoc Prof Theseira.
“And that’s what we worry about. We worry that the next generation of hawkers offering their own touches on local hawker culture and food may not enter the market or flourish, if the space is taken up too much by chains.”
Ms Sng, the hawker, said that ultimately, consumers also have to be more open to price adjustments by hawkers.
“If the public is not open to all these price increases, I think this is a dying trade. You see a lot of (hawkers) my age, they open and then in three months’ time, they close down their shop. It’s very demoralising,” she said.
At the end of the day, experts said that customers will decide what they value, and what food and dining services they choose to pay for — which will then have further ripple effects.
Mr Lim, the cook and writer, said: “It’s a values-based question. Do we value efficiency? Do we value low prices? Do we value giving people steady paychecks in exchange for generating profits for business-owners? Or do we value a diversity of products…and people being able to work for themselves rather than an employer?
“I think people don’t necessarily realise that all of these choices are embedded in how we eat hawker food.”