Singapore's wet markets evolve with premium offerings and digital services to win younger shoppers

Singapore's wet markets are caught between two worlds. On one side stands the supermarket, open late into the evening, offering credit card rewards and the convenience of one-stop shopping. On the other stands the wet market stall, where a fishmonger knows what arrived that morning and a vegetable seller remembers your allergies. The question facing the city's traditional markets is no longer whether they will survive, but whether they can survive by becoming something different while remaining, in some essential way, themselves.

The numbers tell a stark story. In 2014, twenty-three percent of Singaporeans aged eighteen to sixty-nine had not visited a wet market in the preceding year. By 2016, that figure had climbed to thirty-three percent. By 2018, it reached thirty-nine percent. The trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as people who might have ventured out to buy fresh fish or vegetables instead ordered groceries online and had them delivered to their doors. Younger shoppers cite practical obstacles: wet markets close by afternoon, while supermarkets stay open until ten or eleven at night. Some admit they simply do not know how to haggle or gauge prices. Others have never even been to their nearest market.

Yet there are holdouts. Andre Frois, a forty-one-year-old rapper and writer, visits the wet market at least once or twice a month. His grandfather worked as a fishmonger on Queen Street after arriving from Swatow, China around 1920. Frois values the connection to his community, the generations of culinary knowledge embedded in the stalls, and the ability to find ingredients like buah keluak and rempah that supermarkets stock only in powdered form. He is, by his own admission, an outlier among his peers. Aileen Toh, fifty-three, started her vegetable and kueh stall at Teck Ghee Court Market in November 2025, after leaving a job at the food delivery company Deliveroo. She knew the market was struggling—older stallholders told her bluntly that business was hard—but she believed in the value of local produce and the possibility of building a customer base that shared that belief.

The government has watched this decline with concern. In October of last year, Member of Parliament Joan Pereira raised a parliamentary question about attracting younger stallholders to wet markets. The Minister for Sustainability and the Environment, Grace Fu, responded that the viability of wet markets ultimately depends on consumer demand, not simply the availability of young vendors. This echoes a conversation that took place more than forty years ago. In 1981, a government committee studying the future of wet markets recommended building more supermarkets and air-conditioned grocery shops instead. The reasoning was straightforward: as more households became dual-income, wives had less time for shopping, and wet markets with their short opening hours could not compete.

But some stallholders and business owners are refusing to accept that logic as inevitable. Norman Firdaus and Sarah Norman, both in their late thirties, run Amina Halal Fresh Poultry at Teck Ghee Court Market. Eight years ago, they began taking orders by phone and WhatsApp. When they realized younger customers were walking past their stall without knowing what they sold, they created a virtual catalogue. Then they went further: they consolidated orders from fifteen other stalls at the market and delivered everything together to customers' doorsteps, charging nothing for the service. The couple now have regular customers they have never met in person, people living in nearby housing blocks who text their orders and wait for delivery. Remote orders now make up sixty percent of their takings. Kelvin Sim, a former chef who runs Chef Sim's Cuts at the same market, has noticed that younger customers prefer to order meat online, while older ones still want to see the product in person. Neo Jun He, general manager of Quan Shui Wet Market, which oversees eight traditional stalls plus a modern concept store and an e-commerce operation, estimates that his family business now splits revenue evenly between its digital and traditional operations. What began as a necessity during the pandemic—delivering fresh pork online—has evolved into a full online wet market including produce and seafood.

Others are pursuing different strategies. Patricia Ng at Wholesome Meat in Holland Village Market sells grass-fed, free-range, antibiotic-free beef at prices competitive with supermarkets, despite their higher overheads. She recently began selling frozen beef rendang made from her stall's meat, with no preservatives. It sold out on the first day. Aileen Toh stocks only locally grown vegetables and highlights the farms behind each one. Customers will pay five dollars for her kale when a supermarket sells similar produce for three dollars, because they understand the value of freshness and want to support Singapore's farms. New kinds of stalls have appeared in wet markets: Luli Roasts, a micro-roastery selling Ethiopian and Guatemalan coffee beans; Eliko Picture Books & Collectibles, specializing in vintage picture books; Sideway at Tiong Bahru Market, showcasing handmade ceramics and homeware. These spaces are becoming, as one sociologist put it, community hubs where shoppers can get super-fresh premium produce, one-on-one advice on ingredients and cooking, and even concierge services.

But beneath the business strategies lies something harder to quantify and easier to lose. Professor Kelvin Low, head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, notes that wet markets carry a sense of the nation's history and have become important parts of Singapore's food culture and everyday life. People who grew up shopping at wet markets with their families remember the sensory experiences: the noise, the smells, the feel of produce, the interaction with others. A good fishmonger knows what arrived that morning and can recommend a cut based on what you are cooking. A butcher can prepare it accordingly. A vegetable seller might tell you what is good that day or how to cook something you have never tried before. Much of that knowledge is not written down; it has been passed from person to person. If wet markets decline further, generations of expertise could disappear along with the stallholders' livelihoods. Norman Firdaus spoke about the isolation he sees in modern Singapore: people ordering delivery and asking riders to leave packages at their doors, never speaking to one another. At his stall, customers talk to him about their houses, their families, their lives. Patricia Ng has watched friendships form at a table in front of her stall, between young couples discussing their children and older people who might otherwise be lonely because their own children work overseas. Madam Poon Kein Hoon, sixty-five, left her career as an architect to open Roomy Heart, a Japanese home goods stall at Tiong Bahru Market eight years ago. She wanted to revive the kampung spirit her grandfather had instilled in her, to create a space where the community could gather. She does not measure success in financial terms. Seeing customers leave her shop with a smile is reward enough.

As wet markets evolve, the question is whether they can preserve what makes them valuable—the freshness, the knowledge, the relationships, the sense of community—while adapting to how people actually want to shop now. Neo Jun He argues that the question should not be how to persuade young people to accept the traditional model, but whether the model itself needs to evolve. His answer is yes. The hope, he says, is not that every young Singaporean wakes up at six in the morning to shop at a wet market, but that the values behind the pasar—freshness, knowledge, relationships, community—remain relevant even as the way people shop changes. Whether that balance can be struck, and for how long, remains to be seen.