Affordable meals, varied choices and lively spaces
As its name – Socially-conscious Enterprise Hawker Centre – implies, SEHCs turn hawker centres into venues that serve communities through:
- Providing access to affordable food options – Making sure patrons can access reasonably-priced meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
- Curating the right food mix – Ensuring each hawker centre offers a good variety of food options that meet the community’s needs.
- Organising customised events and activities – Attracting visitors and keeping the centres lively and bustling with curated events and activities.
Together, they help hawker centres thrive economically while preserving their important role as community spaces that serve Singapore’s diverse food culture.
Where to find SEHCs
There are 16 SEHCs located across Singapore. These centres are operated by the following operators:
Today, the network has grown to 16 centres, with more on the way.
Keeping hawker centres affordable and accessible
A key part of what makes the SEHC model work is the
Government’s commitment to keep hawker centres affordable and accessible. The
Government covers the substantial cost of designing and building SEHCs, which
is not passed down to operators or stallholders. This ensures that hawker
centres remain affordable community assets.
For daily operations, the Government appoints and pays
operators a management fee (which operators bid for during the tender process)
to run SEHCs. These operators decide on the stallholder mix in the centres, and
run the centres on a day-to-day basis, ensuring a good mix of food offerings
and maintaining centre cleanliness. In turn, the operators, as master tenants,
pay the Government a market rent for the premises, determined through an
independent professional valuation. This structure keeps the model financially
sustainable while protecting stallholders from bearing excessive costs.
Managing hawker centres with the community in mind
Operators are selected through open tenders using a
Price-Quality model. This means proposals are assessed not only on cost, but
also how operators can manage the centre, serve the community and support the
well-being of stallholders in a sustainable manner. Tenderers’ proposals are
assessed based on criteria such as:
- Costs to stallholders
- Food affordability for patrons
- Food mix and variety
- Initiatives to drive footfall
Together, this approach ensures that appointed operators serve patrons’ needs and safeguard the well-being of stallholders throughout their operations.
Choosing the best fit for each centre
To ensure that SEHCs continue to meet community needs and safeguard hawkers’ well-being, the management of SEHCs is awarded through an open tender process after an operator completes its final tenancy term.
This transparent process takes into account the past track records of incumbent operators, allowing those who performed well to continue while providing opportunities to appoint new operators where improvements are needed. This encourages healthy competition and drives operators to continually refine and improve their management models over time.