Fairness, fear, and the great HBB backlash

There is an almost ritualistic quality to the outrage that erupts every few months in Singapore’s food-and-beverage sector. A home-based business — maybe it’s an enterprising auntie selling kuih from her kitchen or a young upstart brewing coffee in a HDB corridor — gains traction, finds a loyal customer base, and inevitably draws the attention (and ire) of established F&B owners.

Suddenly, the conversation shifts from taste or innovation to the weighty matter of “fairness.” Out come the familiar refrains: “We are over-regulated. They are not. The playing field is tilted. Someone must do something.”

Strip away the veneer of public safety or hygiene and what emerges is a deep, almost visceral discomfort among commercial operators — a discomfort with the idea that someone can succeed with less: less paperwork, less rent, less regulation, less capital. 

For a country that built its reputation on order, hierarchy, and process, the notion that a part-time baker can out-earn a shophouse café is hardly a commercial threat. It’s an existential one.

The regulation regurgitation

The prevailing narrative is that home-based businesses operate in a kind of wild west — untethered, unsupervised, a threat to public health and basic decency. It’s a seductive story for those who have weathered the Sisyphean ordeal of opening a restaurant in Singapore: floor plans reviewed by committees, grease traps inspected to within an inch of their lives, licenses and certificates demanded at every turn.

But this story is, quite simply, a fiction.

HBBs are already underpinned by a web of regulation. The Singapore Food Agency has guidelines so explicit that unlicensed improvisation is quickly put to bed. You can sell cookies, cakes, or home-cooked meals straight out of your kitchen, but only if you stick to selling direct to individual consumers, keep operations small, and resist the temptation to mimic a full-blown catering outfit. 

Everything must be prepared with strict attention to hygiene, using only ingredients from licensed or legally imported sources — no shortcuts with dubious suppliers or ingredients brought back from overseas. The SFA will step in if they detect even the faintest whiff of unsafe practices, and operators are strongly encouraged to complete basic food safety training.

What’s forbidden is made equally clear. You can’t offer catering services, supply your goods to restaurants or food stalls, or operate out of temporary fairs and pop-ups. Ready-to-eat raw seafood is off-limits, and the moment your home starts to resemble a mini-factory — with bulk storage, heavy equipment, or non-resident helpers — the authorities will come knocking.

In practice, this creates a brittle existence. Most HBBs operate at the mercy of neighbours’ goodwill, tiptoeing around complaints about smells, parking, or noise. Social media can propel a business to stardom overnight, but just as easily weaponise a single misstep.

Meanwhile, commercial F&B enjoys privileges that HBBs can only imagine: access to direct suppliers, bulk discounts, large-scale storage, the option to staff up at will, and premises designed for food safety and volume.

What persists is not a regulatory vacuum, but a regulatory illusion. The burden home-based businesses carry may be lighter, but it is no less real — just less ostentatious and far more precarious.

Regulation as ego

“Fairness” has become less a principle and more a cudgel — used not to elevate standards, but to flatten difference. When established players clamour for heavier regulation on HBBs, they’re rarely defending public health. What they’re really doing is protecting a legacy of comfort and control.

There’s a distinct performance to this. Every interview with an aggrieved F&B owner is the same: lists of licensing obstacles, rent woes, architectural drawings, the endless relay of government agencies. It’s a parade of hardship, designed to solicit sympathy and lend moral weight to the argument that “if we suffer, everyone should suffer.”

Never mind that many requirements exist because the business is already large enough to demand them. Never mind that these businesses also enjoy the benefits of scale, supplier access, and media attention that turns adversity into PR.

What goes unspoken is that commercial F&B’s regulatory pain is, in part, self-inflicted. Years of chasing growth with razor-thin margins have created a fragile, over-leveraged sector that cannot weather even mild competition from below. The answer is never to question these strategies. The answer is always to demand the state act as enforcer — turning policy into a moat, not a scaffold.

Yet the market keeps sending a different message. Customers aren’t abandoning cafés because HBBs exist. They’re leaving because too many cafés have become indistinguishable, dull, and incapable of reinvention.

Why customers choose HBBs

Strip away the regulatory melodrama and you’re left with a simpler truth: Singaporeans love home-based food businesses because they offer something the commercial sector simply cannot.

It’s not nostalgia or price — it’s the rawness of personality, the thrill of discovery, and the sense that every bite is participation, not just consumption. Commercial F&B outlets have, ironically, become the opposite of novel: safe, repetitive, algorithmic. The branding is immaculate, the menu engineered for Instagram, the service drilled into banality.

Home-based businesses exist in a space untouched by consultants and corporate playbooks. There’s the real possibility of something new — flavours you won’t find on Orchard Road, recipes that don’t survive market research, passion projects that carry their makers’ fingerprints.

There’s also intimacy. When you order from a home kitchen, you’re dealing directly with the creator. The exchange is immediate, sometimes messy, occasionally imperfect — but undeniably human. This cannot be manufactured at scale, no matter how many loyalty apps are deployed.

HBBs sell stories as much as sustenance — about tradition, about hustling during lockdown, about family and improvisation. Every transaction feels like a small act of rebellion against a city where so much is regulated and homogenised.

The real fear

After all the noise about public safety and “level playing fields,” the real driver becomes clear: ego. There’s a certain humiliation in watching a home cook with a single oven outperform a fully staffed café with a seven-figure renovation.

Legitimacy in Singapore has always been tightly policed. Commercial F&B outlets are expected to embody the stability and uniformity that Singapore prizes. When HBBs upend these assumptions, drawing lines of customers without the usual accoutrements of “success,” it rattles the social order itself.

This is why calls for regulation grow shrill in proportion to HBB popularity. What’s at stake is psychological: if the barriers to entry no longer protect incumbents, if legitimacy can be conjured from a WhatsApp group, then old hierarchies wobble.

Regulation becomes a weapon of reassurance — a way to reassert boundaries and reaffirm old definitions of what “counts.” But no amount of red tape can restore relevance once it’s gone. The market is speaking with its feet and wallets, not with slogans or petitions.

A better way forward

The answer isn’t to level everything down to the lowest common denominator. The path forward lies in recognising that not all businesses carry the same risk, and therefore shouldn’t be subject to the same regulatory regime.

Proportional, scalable oversight begins with honest risk assessment. A home-based business selling a dozen cakes weekly to regulars is not a threat to public health. Light-touch guidelines — basic hygiene, transparent labelling, volume limits — make sense at this scale.

But as an HBB evolves, it should graduate to new tiers with proportionate responsibility. The journey from HDB kitchen to shophouse should be a continuum, not a cliff — with genuine support for those making the leap.

The result would be an ecosystem that rewards adaptability and courage, not just incumbency. Commercial players retain legitimacy where it matters — at scale. HBBs keep freedom to experiment. A city that prizes creativity as much as conformity.

Leave it alone

My fear is that sustained public pressure will eventually compel government action. In Singapore, complaints cast in the language of “public good” rarely go unanswered. The machinery of policymaking whirs to life, and new compliance burdens follow.

For restaurant operators, this may feel like vindication. But history shows that when the state “levels the playing field,” the solution is always one-size-fits-all. The red tape that ensnares HBBs will wrap tighter around the entire sector. What seems like a shield becomes, yet again, a shackle.

The reflex to control, to codify, to close ranks at the first whiff of competition is not only unoriginal — it’s a recipe for stagnation. True fairness is not achieved by pulling everyone down to the level of the most encumbered. It is found in designing systems that recognise difference and reward risk.

The government’s role is not to shield the anxious from discomfort. It is to ensure the field remains open for the best to survive and thrive — without punishing them for operating outside lines drawn decades ago.

Let HBBs breathe. Let commercial F&B compete on scale, efficiency, and experience. If those aren’t enough to draw the crowd, perhaps it’s time to ask harder questions about what the crowd actually wants.

The true mark of a confident industry isn’t how tightly it can police its borders, but how generously it can embrace the new. In this, as in all things, Singapore would do well to remember: leave the damn thing alone, unless you are absolutely certain you can make it better.