To last in an unforgiving industry, Tommy Pang has learned to test quickly, cut ruthlessly, and protect the fragility that built him

Tommy Pang is 28, a founder balancing two very different inheritances. From his parents, hawkers who built a yong tau foo stall in their late forties, he absorbed the instinct for caution — survival first, expansion later, if ever.

From his peers, many of whom came of age in a world of delivery apps and relentless scaling, he felt the pull of speed and experimentation. Bai Nian Holdings, the company he now leads, is shaped by both impulses: restless but wary, ambitious but rarely careless.

He remembers the beginning clearly. “Many think I was born with a silver spoon,” he says. “But truth be told, my parents were just normal hawkers. They started from nothing. My father only began this business in his late forties. He was still trying to figure out life himself. We were really just an average family. We stayed in a normal HDB; we didn’t have nice things. But those moments — going out for a simple meal together — were enough.”

That memory steadies him when ambition tempts him to gamble too hard. Yet it hasn’t stopped him from stretching the brand far beyond what his parents ever imagined. Today, Bai Nian Holdings spans outlets and spinoffs, including Peng Jia Zhou porridge, Hae! Mee prawn noodles, and Shi Nian pig leg rice — with more concepts still being tested.

The variety looks daring, but Pang frames it as discipline. “Cash is king, reputation compounds, and product is everything,” he says. “Those three principles should always be there.”

Between hunger and hesitation

It wasn’t always discipline. In his early years, he chased growth with little restraint, opening outlets faster than systems could keep up. At one point, he went on a spree of joint ventures, many of which collapsed. “I had to close about 20 outlets,” he admits.

“I was too hungry for growth, and I didn’t have the systems in place before growing that fast. I made mistakes.” The exits weren’t failures in his telling, but pruning — removing what couldn’t last, so the rest could endure. 

That blend of aggression and caution mirrors the split between generations. His parents never dreamt of multiplying outlets, preferring to protect what little they had. His peers, raised on digital speed, saw little point in waiting. Pang hovers in between.

He shares their hunger to test, pivot, and expand. But unlike them, he carries the fragility of watching his parents build late, build slow, and worry that one wrong move could unravel everything.

It has also shifted his sense of success. In his early twenties, he bought watches, cars, clothes. But affording them did not make him happier. Now engaged, with a fiancée and a family to care for, his definition has changed. “True happiness is being able to provide for them,” he says.

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“If my sister wants a new iPhone, I can just buy it for her without worrying about the price. What makes me happy now is going on overseas trips with my family and taking them out for a nice meal. That, to me, is true happiness and success.”

Survival over sentiment

This turn to family is not sentimental but protective. “It took them 14 years to build this business,” he says of his parents. “I don’t want to be the one who makes a rash decision to expand too quickly and then destroys what they worked so hard to create.”

He knows how fragile F&B can be — high rent, low margins, fickle traffic — and refuses to let bravado undo what patience secured.

Yet he is unsentimental about where the industry is headed. Younger diners, he notes, are “Grab and foodpanda babies” who will not return to hawker centres the way previous generations once did.

The future, he argues, belongs to leaner models: delivery-first kitchens, niche concepts, smaller footprints. Those who fail to adapt will fade, no matter how beloved their recipes.

That is the paradox Pang embodies: son of hawkers who chose safety, founder of a holdings group built on risk. His philosophy now is less about glamour than survival. To last, he has learned to balance both inheritances — the stability of his parents’ generation and the urgency of his own.

In between, he has carved out a practice of restraint: testing fast, pruning faster, always keeping one eye on fragility. The inheritance he protects is not only a stall or a brand, but the reminder that in F&B, endurance itself is perhaps the only luxury.

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