Tracking Food and Beverage Outlet Closures and Common Reasons for Closures

Mr Speaker, the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) tracks and publishes information on the formation and cessation of all business entities. The Government does not track the breakdown of cessations between standalone outlets, local chains and foreign chains.

The food services sector is highly competitive due to low barriers of entry, high product substitutability and rapidly shifting consumer preferences. Between 2015 and 2025, there has been a net increase of 42% in the number of food and beverages (F&B) entities, with formations outpacing cessations in most years.

The Government values Singapore's local heritage and takes steps to preserve and sustain it in our F&B landscape. Senior Parliamentary Secretary Dr Syed Harun, shared yesterday about our efforts to support heritage businesses under the Inter-agency Task Force for Heritage Businesses, Traditional Activities and Cultural Life. Enterprise Singapore also supports initiatives that protect and enhance local heritage through curated F&B and retail experiences. An example is, of course, New Bahru, a creative cluster that blends heritage conservation with a curated mix of contemporary local F&B and lifestyle businesses.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to thank Minister of State for his answer. I have three supplementary questions.

One is for the granular data that the Minister of State mentioned the Government does not collect, whether there is a possibility going forward that there will be the collecting granular data, in particularly in mature heartland estates, so that we can have a feel of the shifts?

Second is whether the Ministry has observed whether the closures disproportionately affect independent operators compared with chain outlets and how this may shape the character of neighbourhood centres over time?

The last supplementary question is in relation to the independent operators, if they face difficulty, is it possible for SME Centres and maybe the consultants within these SME Centres to be more proactive to help these independent operators before they fold, especially some of those who are heritage independent operators?

Sir, I thank Mr Saktiandi Supaat for his supplementary questions. We do not track those data, so we will take his suggestion into consideration.

With regard to the support for many of these independent operators or SMEs, or even heartland shops, I would like to assure the Member that, in fact, in addition to the SME Centres, Enterprise Singapore works very closely with heartland shops as well as SMEs on a variety of programmes. Every year, in Budget 2023, 2024, 2025, we have announced new measures to help SMEs.

We have also new programmes that help them. Recently, we have the food services productivity report, which allows for SMEs to benchmark themselves with their peers to see what are the best practices, for example. Then, we have the Food X Programme, for example, that enables them to maybe outsource some of the more operationally difficult or expensive parts of their operations. And then, we also have a Process Optimisation Programme which helps them to adopt new technology to help to streamline their businesses.

At the same time, we work very closely with the trade associations and commerce; for example, the Restaurant Association of Singapore and the Singapore Retailers Association. In fact, I just met them earlier this week to speak about these as well as other issues to help to raise the competitiveness of our SMEs and our heartland merchants.