The Rainbow Maker

Colourful melamine plates help hawkers in Singapore meet hygiene standards and operate together but separately in hawker centres. They have, however, become a challenge for one of its major manufacturers.

In 1969, Ang Siak Khoon imported a 200-tonne hydraulic press from West Germany to Singapore. A friend's son who studied chemistry in the European republic had told him about a relatively new type of plastic known as melamine that had become a fashionable material for tableware in the West.

An 1960s advertisement for Melmac, an American brand of melamine tableware.

As far as Siak Khoon knew, none of the over 100 plastic manufacturers in Singapore had such a product. This was an opportunity to enter the booming local plastic industry that was being turbocharged by the government's industrial ambition.

Or so he thought...

Armed with melamine resin from Japan and moulds from Hong Kong, Siak Khoon launched a set of 10 tableware pieces under the Hoover Melamine brand. They were more durable than the ubiquitous porcelain crockery used in households, restaurants and hawker stalls, but cost significantly more. Not even the pretty colours of melamine—Hoover offered them in pink and blue—could persuade customers to switch over.

Luckily, the Singapore partner of Japanese timepiece company Seiko was looking for a melamine manufacturer to produce cases for its clocks, which were respectable housewarming gifts back in the day. Siak Khoon quickly retooled his press to take the job and keep Hoover running.

But that was not the end of melamine tableware in Singapore. In 1973, the government introduced a new law to improve the hygiene of those selling food. The Environmental Public Health (Food Handlers) Regulations stipulated, among other things, that “broken, chipped or cracked utensils” must not be used because germs could live in the cracks.

Faced with fines of up to S$1,000 if they were caught using such utensils, restaurants, eateries and hawkers began seeking alternatives to their fragile porcelain crockery. Among various options, melamine tableware suddenly stood out even though it then cost up to three times more.

Perhaps sensing an opportunity, several local plastics manufacturers began touting melamine tableware as durable solutions. One of the earliest was Yee Cheong Plastic Manufacturers. A pioneer in Singapore's plastics industry, the manufacturer produced everything from electronic and automobile parts to everyday goods such as baskets and pails.

In 1974, it launched a melamine tableware collection targeting restaurants and eateries. A few years later, another manufacturer Singa Plastics also began advertising its melamine tableware under the Unica brand of household products.

Yee Cheong Plastic Manufacturers opened a factory in Bendeemer industrial estate in 1965. | Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

Hoover remained invested in making clock cases until Seiko switched from melamine to a newer type of plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) in the late 1970s. The manufacturer specialised in melamine refocused its business on tableware, but Yee Cheong's “YC Melamine Ware” had already established itself as the market leader.

Chasing Rainbows

Locally produced melamine tableware originally came in a modest range of colours. The choice of pink, blue, orange, cream and white were sufficient for hawkers operating along the same street or in a coffee shop to tell their tableware apart.

“In those days, coffee shops only had two or three food stalls. A kway teow soup, pork porridge and maybe a yong tau foo stall. There was little need for colours,”

says Ang Boon Keng, the eldest of Hoover's four second-generation owners.

But this changed when more and more hawkers were rehoused from the street into government-built hawker centres to ease traffic congestion and improve food hygiene. Between 1974 and 1979, over 50 such centres opened, including one at Old Airport Road that opened with 176 food stalls.

The former Satay Club at Queen Elizabeth Walk was one of many hawker centres built in the 1970s and 1980s. | Singapore Tourist Promotion Board Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

This made it bewildering for hawkers to identify and collect back their used tableware. At first, old habits from the streets carried on in the new locations: customers sat near the stalls they patronised so that hawkers could easily serve them and later retrieve the tableware. But as stalls sat cheek by jowl in the new centres, hawkers started fighting over customers sitting at a table in front of one stall but ordering food from another.

After several violent incidents, the government decreed that customers should be free to sit anywhere they liked in hawker centres. This created a pressing need for hawkers to differentiate their tableware, to which local manufacturers promptly responded with new colours including red, dark orange, purple, yellow, lemon green and dark green.

By the time all licensed street hawkers had been resettled into over 100 hawker centres and markets across Singapore at the end of 1986, customers of melamine tableware could choose from at least 10 colour varieties.

“We did our best to expand choices for hawkers. Look, even rainbows can't beat us in the number of colours!”

says Ang Boong Liang, the youngest of Hoover's second-generation owners who manages the company's warehouse today.

Even though other tableware options existed, none came close to the popularity of melamine. The cheaper plastic tableware was flimsy while styrofoam disposables, which the government even promoted at one point, were unpopular with customers and too often blown away by the wind.

White melamine tableware with patterns also failed to impress hawkers as compared to those in solid shades. The result is a colourful cacophony of melamine bowls and plates that signal the independence of each stall despite their consolidation into a centralised whole.

Although melamine tableware has also been used by hawkers around the world, including neighbouring Malaysia and Thailand, no country other than Singapore boasts a high concentration of food centres that each houses a large number of hawkers and correspondingly wide range of tableware colours.

The adoption of melamine tableware might be rational, but the origins of its colours were mere circumstantial. They were found in the catalogue of Japanese melamine resin producer Matsushita National Panasonic, then a major supplier in Asia and to several local tableware manufacturers including Hoover and Yee Cheong.

The range of coloured tableware offered by Hoover and YC remain similar even up till today.

Every time a manufacturer introduced a new colour to great response, it was quickly replicated by its competitors. Despite lacking uniqueness, Hoover's business grew substantially when the company began supplying melamine tableware to the growing number of private food courts such as Food Junction and Kopitiam, as well as institutions such as Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

By the 2000s, Hoover surpassed Yee Cheong in both market share and colour choices. There was a pot of gold to be found at the end of the rainbow after all.

Pantang Turns Premium

For most hawkers, the first consideration for tableware colour is if it is already used by other stalls in the same hawker centre or coffee shop. Two or more stalls may only use the same colour if the shapes and sizes of their tableware are different, for example, an oval plate versus a round bowl. Only after satisfying this criterion do hawkers apply personal or cultural preferences.

As the majority in Singapore's hawker trade, the Chinese proportionately affect what colours become prevalent across hawker centres and coffee shops. Orange and red were some of Hoover's top selling colours in the 1980s as the community regarded them as auspicious. Both are still widespread today.

“Jú sè (Mandarin Colour, 橘色) sounds like Jí (Lucky, 吉) , so we think orange tableware is lucky for our business,” says Ng Kok Hua, the second-generation owner of China Street Fritters, which has used this colour since it switched from porcelain to melamine tableware in the early 1980s.

In contrast, some Malay hawkers prefer green tableware as they believe the colour has symbolic significance in their religion.

“It's our Islam colour, that's why Muslim stalls normally use green. If other stalls already use, then they will choose another colour,”

says Siti Muhibbah, who has worked 17 years at the Joo Chiat outlet of kitchenware retailer 5B that serves many Muslim hawkers.

Until the 1980s, these hawkers only had “lemon green” tableware to choose from. But as demand for it grew, manufacturers began offering a "dark green" option too. According to retailers, the two options even became a way for Indian Muslim stalls to differentiate their tableware from the Malay stalls in the same premises.

A more colourful story, however, emerges when one visits the Geylang Serai Food Centre, which is dominated by Muslim establishments. Many of them that go back to the 1960s have been using anything but green—from yellow to purple, and even red. “Green was talked about by our prophet, but we also use other colours,” says Nor Mohammed bin Safiudin, second generation owner of Muhabbat Setia Hati. His stall used red melamine plates before switching to stainless steel in the 1980s.

“People always think when it comes to Muslim, it's green. No. This is typical stereotype!”

Nor Mohammed adds.

Colourful Across Cultures

The range of tableware at Geylang Serai Food Centre is just as colourful as those at other hawker centres, including People's Park Food Centre in Chinatown.

Based on a survey conducted in February 2023. Only solid melamine colours are shown, and each bar represents a colour used by one hawker stall. As some stalls use more than one colour, the total number of bars and stalls may not tally. Other types of tableware, such as disposables, are also excluded from this infographic.

Stereotypical or not, the association between Muslim stalls and green tableware may be faltering. In the last 20 years, a new generation of hawkers have emerged with different tastes in colours. Instead of the flamboyant tableware colours from before, many pick out neutral tones that they consider to be more modern, explains Siti. “Now, youngsters like to use black. They say it makes their food look brighter.”

This extends to even the Chinese, who traditionally regard black as “pantang”, that is, bad luck, and reserve it strictly for sombre occasions. “Up till the 1980s and even 1990s, people would ask if a family member had passed if you wore black,” says Hoover's Boon Keng.

This is why black melamine tableware was never offered by the largely Chinese local melamine tableware manufacturers. But in the 1990s, Japanese cuisine became more mainstream in Singapore and even started appearing in private food courts.

As these businesses popularised the use of black melamine tableware, which mimicked traditional Japanese lacquerware, hawkers came to appreciate the colour's ability to hide food stains and help a dish stand out too.

The shift away to neutrality is also evident in Hoover's top selling colours today. Besides black, other popular choices among hawkers are white, cream and “light stone”. While white and cream have long been offered by the manufacturer, light stone, an off-white background with black speckles, was created in the 1990s along with other shades such as “apple green” for food court operators who wanted something different from Hoover's existing variety.

Top Five Colours

Orange
Pink
Blue
Lemon Green
White/Cream

Orange
Pink
Blue
Lemon Green
White/Cream

Both light stone and apple green eventually made their way to hawker centres and coffee shops, with the former selling especially well. According to kitchenware retailers, customers like the speckles as they make scratches and discolouration less obvious.

Ultimately, colour choice is personal and hawkers past or present choose whichever they think is beneficial to their business, says Goh Huy Li, co-owner of Hup Soon Department Store that has been selling tableware to hawkers since the 1950s. This could mean a perceived “lucky” colour, a darker shade that is easier to maintain, or a contrasting one that helps their dish stand out.

Even the tableware manufacturer Hoover cannot confidently predict which colours hawkers will favour. But Boon Keng knows his favourite:

“The best-selling colour is my favourite colour!”

The Costs of Colours

While the neutral palette outsells traditional colours in recent times, the latter have become quintessential of hawker culture in Singapore. Older generation hawkers almost never change the colour of their tableware, and simply buy back the same one when replacing damaged or missing pieces. A new colour, they say, will only confuse cleaners as well as customers.

This has given Hoover an edge over the growing number of tableware supplies from China. While the latter may be cheaper and come in a greater variety of design, few, if any, are in the traditional colours that have become synonymous with hawker food. It helps that hawkers today can order Hoover's tableware in the colour they want and expect fulfilment from the company's warehouse in Woodlands (it moved its production factory to Johor in 1990) within days.

Hoover's factory in Johor.

However, this competitive advantage also puts a tight squeeze on Hoover's cash flow. There is no reliable way to predict demand as hawkers top up their tableware whenever it runs low—because of theft by customers and careless discard by harried cleaners. Hoover thus stocks up most of its colours, at a great cost.

“We have to keep stock even if a colour in a certain shape receives no query for six months. Otherwise, when a customer suddenly asks for it, we will have to clean up the machines, change the moulds and start over. That's a headache too,” says Boon Keng.

Stocks at Hoover's warehouse in Woodlands.

Given the wide range of hawker tableware, producing them in the 16 colours popular with hawkers adds up to a staggering amount of inventory. Just “round plate” alone, Hoover offers four designs, each in at least eight different sizes. This amounts to at least 512 distinct items if the company stocks them in every colour.

“It makes good business sense to stock only what you can sell, but we can't practise that since the old hawkers, and even the second generation, do not change their tableware colours,” explains Boon Keng. “As long as they are in business, they will replenish their tableware, which means that we can't phase out any colour even when sales have been slow.”

Hoover's showroom of their product offerings.

Hoover got a taste of danger during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Singapore went under lockdown and tableware worth millions of dollars sat in the warehouse without any buyer in sight.

Customers could only takeaway from hawker centres and coffee shops during the pandemic as eating in was not allowed.

“The stocks were just lying there. When they don't sell, they don't convert to cash. Colours almost killed our business,”

says Glen Ang, who took over the sales operation from his father, Ang Boon Hong, the second eldest of Hoover's second-generation owners.

Fortunately, business picked up quickly once restrictions were lifted. In fact, sales climbed higher than usual because a severe labour crunch drove some hawkers to engage offsite dishwashing services, and they needed more tableware to swap around.

Recent changes in hawker centre management are diminishing the role of colours too. All new hawker centres built after 2015 are managed by a private operator who have adopted centralised dishwashing services to overcome the persistent challenge of hiring cleaners.

Centralised dishwashing at Market Street Food Centre.

The tableware at these centres is owned by the appointed cleaning company and is shared among the stalls who pay a cleaning fee. Thus, it makes little economic sense to use a variety of tableware colours except to differentiate the ones for Muslim stalls, which have to be washed separately. This style of management has been gradually introduced to older hawker centres too.

In recent years, Hoover has also been encouraging hawkers to move away from relying on colours for differentiation. Instead, it offers to print or engrave stall names on tableware so that hawkers are free to use any colour, even if other stalls already have the same one. Hoover can then, in turn, phase out the less profitable colours. While the company recently streamlined its inventory by dropping some new but unpopular colours, it has kept the traditional ones—for now.

“After all, why did we have all these colours in the first place?” asks Boon Keng, “It was for the hawkers.”

The Making of a Melamine Plate

Melamine resin powder, which Hoover buys from Thailand today, comes pre-mixed with colour pigments.

The powder is weighed and put into a preheater to remove moisture that can leave an undesirable watermark on the finished product. After heating, the powder attains a cake-like consistency.

The cake of melamine is transferred into a 200-tonne compression moulding machine that runs at 160 to 170 degrees Celsius to press into a tableware based on the mould installed.

Each tableware design is produced from a mould that is typically made in-house, which Hoover has hundreds of. These high-grade steel components must be polished smooth and shiny before use to ensure that the melamine cakes do not cling onto them during the moulding process.

The moulding machine also degases formaldehyde, a binding ingredient in the raw melamine. This stabilises the product so it does not leach the toxic gas into food. Hoover also tests its tableware to ensure they do not release formaldehyde when used with hot, acidic or alkaline food.