Back in the 2023 MND Committee of Supply debates and the debate on the HDB Amendment Bill in the same year, I raised my concerns about the uneven distribution of hawker centres and coffee shops across Singapore.
Fast forward to 2026, Sengkang finally had its own hawker centres, with Buangkok Hawker Centre opening in late 2023 and Anchorvale Village in mid-2024. With the completion of Rivervale Shores, the entire Rivervale Division with 18,000 or so households finally had more than one coffeeshop.
The MND shared in an earlier COS response that “most residents can access commercial facilities with a food court or eating house within 400 metres from their homes or an approximately five to 10 minutes' walk.” The question then is, what is the percentage of residents that have to travel more than 400 metres, to access a food court or eating house?
While I appreciate that new BTO projects do contain retail and F&B options, there remains many neighbourhoods within and outside of Sengkang that still do not.
A case in point is the Value Meals @ South West project that was launched in March 2025, which aimed to place 80 vending machines in heartland locations for residents to purchase. Subsequently, such a vending machine was also installed in Punggol, and to quote DPM Gan, he: “Hope to deploy more such vending machines across Punggol for the convenience of our residents”.
In Sengkang, after a protracted period of working with the HDB and external vendors, we finally have hot food vending machine cafes across three locations, at 108 Rivervale Walk, 188C Rivervale Drive, and 288B Compassvale Crescent. I am grateful for the vendor, which is a replacement vendor after the initial bidder pulled out, for their commitment to the project despite the various challenges faced, chief of which is uncertainty around demand and the high fixed and overhead costs involved.
Rather than ad-hoc projects being introduced in Punggol or Sengkang or any other town, I hope the HDB can consider a large scale tender of multiple sites across HDB towns to ensure that affordable and accessible meals are available to all residents across Singapore, especially those which currently do not a food court or eating house within 400 metres from their homes.
This would then provide for sufficient economies of scale for the would be operators, allowing them to have greater business sustainability and viability. Moreover, any incremental rental revenue derived by the HDB should not be a primary consideration, given that the physical footprint of a vending machine is small, and the vacant void deck space would not have been revenue generating in the first place, hence there is no issue of opportunity costs for the HDB.
I urge the MND to consider extending similar initiatives islandwide, similar to how it has piloted the Pick locker network islandwide across HDB void decks for the convenience of all residents. Affordable food access should not depend on which district one lives in.
