Measures to Help Hawkers Cope with Increasing Costs of Supplies and Ingredients

Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui asked the Minister for Sustainability and the Environment (a) what support measures are in place for hawkers to cope with the escalating costs of supplies and ingredients; and (b) whether previous pilot programmes that consolidate hawker orders to leverage on bulk purchasing for ingredients have been effective in reducing costs for hawkers.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) provides a conducive environment for hawkers to operate to enable them to price their food affordably and sustain their livelihoods at the same time. To do this, NEA moderates the rent of hawker stalls by not setting reserve rents in the tender of stalls and disallowing subletting. In addition, NEA has put in place support measures to help hawkers enhance their productivity. For example, the Productive Hawker Centres programme provides a subsidy for hawker centres to adopt centralised dishwashing and the Hawkers’ Productivity Grant provides co-funding for the purchase of kitchen automation equipment and digital solutions.

To moderate the costs of ingredients, some Socially-conscious Enterprise Hawker Centre operators have tapped on their network in the food and beverage and food supply sectors to offer bulk purchasing services. So far, the take-up for such services by stallholders has not been widespread as most of them already have established relationships with their existing suppliers or are particular on the source and quality of their ingredients. Nonetheless, NEA will continue to support such bulk purchasing options where possible.