Top Hawker Food Delivery Services in Singapore

What are Hawker Food Delivery Services?

Hawker food delivery services are delivery services that focus exclusively on the delivery of hawker food, fresh from the stall straight to the customer’s doorstep, although some of these delivery services also cater to restaurants and fast-food chains. Hawker food is sold in open-air areas called hawker centres, and there are currently 114 hawker centres located across Singapore, all managed by the National Environment Agency. This makes the market for hawker food delivery a thriving one, given the variety of food offered and ease of access to such stalls.

Types of hawker food delivery services

There are several established hawker food delivery services in Singapore that cater exclusively to hawker stalls, the biggest of which is WhyQ. They offer the lowest delivery fees with no minimum orders (in certain areas), which means that ordering a bowl of bak chor mee from your favourite store through them is a lot more cost-effective than travelling all the way down and queuing in Singapore’s stifling heat. Other services that cater to hawkers include Crumb.ly and Bungkus – the latter is halal-focused, allowing those who have strict dietary restrictions to easily access the stalls they want to patronise without having to sift through hundreds of other options.

Other hawker delivery services are less straightforward but equally useful, and operate more as directories. These include SG Dabao and food leh?. They operate a map system which allows customers to view the listings of hawker stalls across Singapore that do delivery and provide information and direct contacts to these hawkers to arrange for food delivery. Food leh? even has a pick-up option in case you’re in the area and just want to skip the queue.

Bigger delivery services like Oddle and Grab operate programmes that include entire hawker centres, so you can pick and choose as many dishes as you want within the same hawker centre to be delivered to you at one go, truly embodying the notion of variety and convenience.

Hawker catering is also gaining ground, with a service like Caterspot running corporate hawker delivery services.

Why opt for Hawker Food Delivery?

Hawker food is often cheaper than food from restaurants or fast-food chains, given the lower rental costs of a hawker stall. Contrary to popular belief, hawker food is also likely to be a lot more hygienic and healthy, given that portions are cooked to order and individually prepared. This is unlike at other F&B joints where food is often prepared in bulk and left to sit out, taken from freezer storage or chock full of preservatives. Furthermore, hawker food is well-known to be delicious and many components of each dish are handmade and require laborious preparation.

Opting for hawker food delivery enables customers to save on the cost of meals (compared to restaurant or fast-food take-out) and transport time, especially if the customer is craving a certain dish from a hawker centre that’s further away from his or her home. Some hawker stalls are extremely famous and have even been awarded the Bib Gourmand or Michelin Star. While both awards are usually associated with fine-dining and sky-high prices, hawker food is both accessible in terms of location and price (no reservations or dress code needed!), and getting to sample such fine fare for such low prices is a treat indeed. Opting for hawker food delivery from such stalls enables one to skip out on waiting in line in person and, also allows the customer the benefit of avoiding the hassle of looking for a seat in often-crowded hawker centres.

Most importantly, opting for hawker food delivery is the equivalent of showing support for local hawker culture, which has often been called a dying trade.

Below, we present to you our list of top hawker delivery services in Singapore so that you can help show your support for the local F&B industry and preserve an integral part of our culture.

Why is preserving Hawker culture important?

Hawker culture is vital to Singapore’s history, and has recently been submitted to UNESCO for consideration as part of its intangible cultural heritage list. If successful, it will encourage the preservation of hawker culture and help boost Singapore’s tourism economy.

Supporting hawkers is important to ensure their continued survival. Many hawkers in the trade have mastered their skills over the years, often coming from a line of predecessors who have perfected their craft and refined their signature dishes over generations. As Singapore speeds towards its status as a tech hub, many hawkers have been left as the last of their line, with no one to take over for them when they retire. This means that many historical recipes and time-honoured methods of cooking are dying out. Furthermore, there remains a low number of entrants into the hawker industry, given that youth are more inclined towards tech-heavy jobs in large corporations, drawn by the veneer of prestige. Being a hawker requires long hours of laborious grunt work, including the manual preparation of food ingredients, negotiating with suppliers, and even having to deal with customers’ sometimes unreasonable expectations. It is not an easy route by any means, which explains why hawker culture is seen as declining in Singapore.

Hawker centres are often seen as a melting pot of cultures, where many different stores co-exist. Its public and open-air nature make it welcoming and accessible to people from all walks of life, and the low cost of its food offers sustenance to those who might be struggling to keep afloat. It’s an important place for many who gather there to eat and socialise. To continue preserving hawker culture and to encourage more to enter the industry, it’s important for customers to continue patronising hawker stalls, and one way the industry has innovated to keep up with competition is by going into delivery. By choosing hawker delivery services instead of casual dining brands or fast-food joints, therefore, it is a sign of encouragement for vendors to continue so that everyone can continue enjoying the services a hawker centre provides.

Editor’s Note:

While every precaution has been made to ensure the accuracy and fairness of this listing, we acknowledge that they may be inaccuracies. Therefore, we urge you to contact the service provider above for the correct information and/or contact us with the correct information.

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