Comment: The food in Singapore isn’t what it used to be – or is it just me?

ECONOMIC RESTRICTIONS AND AGING HAWKERS

This apparent decline appears to be symptomatic of the complex issues facing hawkers as a whole.

Inflation and rental costs are making it increasingly difficult for street vendors to run their businesses at the prices, let alone the standards, that Singaporeans expect. One trader came forward a drop in turnover of 30 percent after increasing prices by S$1.

Some street vendors are addressing this problem by expanding their stalls into chains. For example, Li Xin Teochew Fishball Noodles started as a handcart stall around 1968. Today there are 18 outlets in Singapore.

While there are undoubtedly benefits to expanding the business, such as leveraging economies of scale to reduce costs, there are also tradeoffs.

Albert Sng of Sean Kee Duck Rice, a second-generation street vendor, shared in a 2023 interview that his stall’s beloved chili pepper alone requires 100kg of chilies to be fried for up to five hours.

He expressed fear that outsiders or franchise partners would cut corners and compromise on taste, saying, “I’m taking the family recipe and burying it.” I have already received many offers, people telling me that they want to buy the stall and franchise it. But I don’t want that.”

Hawkers can teach hirelings and partners how to prepare their dishes, but they cannot teach them to care.

According to the National Environment Agency (NEA) the average age of street vendors in 2021 is 60 years. This statistic is worrying for two reasons: not only does this figure hover close to the retirement age, but it also reflects how unpopular the hawker trade is among younger Singaporeans.

NEA’s efforts to tackle this issue have seen limited success so far, with only seven experienced hawkers having registered for the Hawkers Succession Scheme since its launch in 2022. For context, there were approximately 13,430 licensed hawker stalls in Singapore in 2023.

Of these seven, only two are linked to prospective successors. Transferring one’s lifeblood is an emotional decision for experienced hawkers. It’s often “not about the money,” says Cornelius Tan, chairman of the Chinatown Complex Hawker Association, but whether the candidate is the right person who can “keep the legacy going.”

Even hawkers who have children or younger relatives willing to succeed them face their own challenges, such as learning intangible culinary skills that have become muscle memory through years of mastery. It’s not as simple as handing someone a written recipe or establishing a standard operating procedure, and it puts culinary standards and customer trust in the brand at risk.