Just keep swimming: 23-year-old fish farm and other F&B businesses open up about their struggle to stay afloat

With the new restrictions and announcement of Phase Two (Heightened Alert), it feels like we're experiencing deja vu.

Once again, the local F&B industry is scrambling to adjust to the dining-in prohibition announced on Friday (May 14), giving us flashbacks to 2020.

One would assume that businesses that survived last year's circuit breaker would be able to cope with the Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) restrictions with ease, but unfortunately, this isn't the case.

"[We were] honestly mentally prepared for it, but I guess we will never be able to ready ourselves for a blow such as this," Wong Jing Kai, 31, the managing director of Ah Hua Kelong, tells AsiaOne.

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During the circuit breaker period, the 23-year-old fish farm cum restaurant had "struggled to stay afloat" before finally gaining some traction with its delivery services. However, this was only after they were about a month and a half into the circuit breaker.

"We could barely break even when we did," Jing Kai says.

But the one thing Ah Hua Kelong is trying to avoid is letting go of its part-timers, he adds. With the new regulations prohibiting dining-in, its part-timers are "now a bit lost". Nevertheless, they have been supporting the company "from the get go".

While establishments like homegrown chocolatier Lemuel Chocolate have already been providing delivery options since the circuit breaker period, 25-year-old Natasha Ng, its head of marketing, as well as research and development, admits that they are still "anxious and worried about cashflow".

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"The prices of delivery services are all hiked because of demand, so it is still a big struggle," Natasha says. "We have to still find a balance between offering accessible delivery options, whilst bearing costs of the hiked up prices since we cannot afford to run our own deliveries in-house."

Similarly, Raymond Khoo, 57, founder of The Peranakan and S17 Community Kitchen, shares that while the outcome was "not unexpected", it was still shocking.

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"We can shift to takeaway or delivery mode and we have come up with new offerings to target our plant-based food diners. However, there are still plenty of unknowns, especially it comes to delivery drivers," Raymond tells us with regards to his restaurant, The Peranakan.

However, he feels significantly more unprepared when it comes to his second business, S17 Community Kitchen, which only opened six months ago.

"It's [the community kitchen's] first time facing this. Therefore, we have to depend on the expertise of The Peranakan restaurant's manager team," he says.

Jaded Macarons, which officially launched its online store in August 2020, and now has a physical store in Yio Chu Kang, is another new business that is going through it all for the first time.

Chef and co-founder Alvin Chan, 23, who started out as a home baker, says that the macaron store has had to pivot back to its online roots, offering delivery directly to consumers.

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"We are slightly better equipped as we have transitioned from a home-based business to full-fledged business[during the pandemic]. But overheads are higher, so times are still tough."

Despite the gloomy outlook, some business owners have chosen to look at the silver lining while gearing up to tackle what's shaping up to be a month of deliveries and takeaways.

This includes Jackie, 27, founder Freckiefloss by J, an online store selling Thai cotton candy crepes, who "anticipates that business will boom during this period".

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"Business was better because of circuit breaker last year. In anticipation of the busier period, I've ordered more inventory," she tells us positively.

There are also people like hawker Tan Sai Heng, 60, owner of Heng Carrot Cake, who feel that they are "more prepared" to deal with another round of restrictions because they have already experienced it last year.

"[The situation] feels inevitable due to the increasing amount of unknown cases in the community," he tells us. "Business is as usual but we've shortened our working hours".

Whatever the case, we hope that our local businesses manage to persevere on and stay strong during this trying period. Do #supportlocal and get your meals from your favourite F&B establishments to show them some love.

melissateo@asiaone.com