Growing Conversations: Spicing up our food services and retail sectors
Growing Conversations – this is a series where we peel back the layers, sharing how Enterprise Singapore is innovating, disrupting and transforming from within to champion growth for our local businesses, and across industries. Read on to discover how we journey alongside them, wherever they are growing.
From coffee shops to restaurants, fashion to furnishing, our Food Services and Retail divisions work with businesses from all walks of life. Led by Assistant Managing Director Jeannie Lim, the team champions growth for the food services and retail sectors, exploring ways to drive industry transformation.
Their goal? Discovering ways to energise the sectors, establishing Singapore as an attractive business hub and global lifestyle destination. In this instalment, the team shares why elevating Singapore’s lifestyle landscape is important, and what the team is doing to achieve this goal.
While Singapore is a culinary and shopping haven, many may not be aware of what goes on behind the scenes to support our Food Services and Retail scene. Could you share more about the team’s efforts in growing the sectors?
Earlier this year, Singapore clinched the top spot in the 2025 Asia Pacific’s Best Cities Report, which ranked over 140 cities in the region according to its liveability, lovability and prosperity. A bustling lifestyle hub, the city-state is marked by a myriad of experiences that cater to both locals and visitors alike.
From experiential retail concepts and unique dining experiences to heritage-rich heartland neighbourhoods and traditional coffee shops, the team seeks to revitalise Singapore’s food services and retail scene. We also aim to help businesses stay resilient and grow in the face of an ever-changing macro-economic landscape.
Due to resource constraints and changing consumer demographics, we are driving sector-wide transformation through programmes that leverage shared resources and business optimisation, as well as programmes for digitalisation, automation and sustainability, with an increasing focus on enhancing the vibrancy of the sector.
And you may be wondering, why vibrancy? Well, when we think of a global business hub, several key elements come to mind – cutting edge infrastructure, global connectivity, trade and so forth. Vibrancy often falls under the radar, despite playing an important role in contributing to the liveability and liveliness of a place.
With the team drumming up its focus on vibrancy, what are some of the things being done so far?
Beyond our usual work of providing business advisory services, access to overseas markets and facilitating industry connections, we are rejuvenating the sectors in two ways – by shaping distinct precincts and cultivating unique local brands and concepts.
The former looks at how we can unlock the potential of existing neighbourhood gems, turning them into distinctive lifestyle destinations. From Jalan Besar to Holland Village, our neighbourhoods hold interesting elements of our history and communities. By playing up their unique characteristics and refreshing their spaces, these precincts can become lifestyle destinations of their own, attracting new visitors and raising the discoverability of lifestyle businesses in the area.
For a start, we’ve homed in on Jalan Besar, a precinct with unique identity as an eclectic neighbourhood and a “maker’s district”. Come September, placemaking initiative Find Your Folks @ Jalan Besar will kick into action, celebrating the neighbourhood’s unique spirit and inviting the public to rediscover and connect with the stories and businesses within the precinct. A key programme under Singapore Design Week, we are partnering creative agency LOPELAB and events collective Ice Cream Sundays to bring the cultural activation to life. Through a public trail featuring site-specific benches co-designed by local F&B and retail businesses and a street festival that transforms Hamilton Road into a vibrant area lit with live music, food pop-ups and interactive installations, we encourage the public to explore independent cafes, family-run shops and beloved local businesses within the precinct, such as Community Coffee and The Fashion Pulpit.
Can you tell us how your team supports the curation of innovative store concepts and cultivates industry partnerships with aggregators? Any memorable projects so far?
In addition to shaping precincts, we are also working with businesses to develop unique physical store experiences and creating platforms to showcase local brands across the city.
With e-commerce on an upward trend, businesses are aware that consumers today are no longer satisfied with basic retail transactions. They want an experience; something memorable that will entice them to shop in-store rather than online.
With our support, local businesses are stepping out of their comfort zones to create innovative experiential concepts – memorable store experiences that resonate with their core customers while enticing new patrons. Through capability-building programmes and connections with the right partners, we are working alongside our businesses, helping them sharpen their strategy and bring their ideas to life.
A memorable project that we had the joy of working on would be the FairPrice Finest outlet at Clarke Quay. The outlet features various novel concepts such as a “You Pick, We Cook” service for on-the-spot preparation of fresh produce, and an experiential zone with cooking classes and demonstrations. We sharpened these ideas with the FairPrice team, to create an engaging shopping experience that would increase footfall and time spent at the store.
It’s also heartening to see a traditional supermarket retailer take the bold leap of faith to embrace different store concepts. We see them as an inspiration to the rest of the industry, encouraging other players to dare to think outside of the box.
Beyond experiential concepts, we also cultivate industry partnerships with key partners and aggregators to develop vibrant lifestyle destinations that showcase a diversity of promising local brands.
You might have heard of or visited New Bahru. We worked with The Lo & Behold Group to turn a former school into a lively enclave to showcase promising and fast-growing homegrown brands.
This creative cluster houses young and emerging brands such as coffee-tech company MORNING and children clothing brand Sea Apple, that have now opened experiential concept stores in the space. To date, more than half of the tenants have achieved a 12% increase in revenue growth at their outlet in New Bahru.
DORS (formerly known as the Design Orchard Retail Showcase), is another integrated retail space that we partnered JTC and Singapore Tourism Board to bring to life. Home to over 80 Singaporean designers and brands such as fashion label GINLEE, DORS is not just a one-stop retail showcase – it also serves as a creative incubator, events space and platform for homegrown brands to showcase their products to the world. Since 2023, DORS has seen a 6% year-on-year growth in annual revenue, with over 210,000 visitors last year.
In fact, DORS just re-opened with immersive zones and thoughtfully designed experiences, such as ‘The Beauty Bar’, where consumers can test, swatch and sample products; and ‘Play Mode: On’, featuring bold brands with punchy prints and playful silhouettes. So, if you haven’t visited, now’s the best time to check them out!
An avid fan of With Love’s pop-ups? You might be pumped to find out that they are making a comeback – not with another pop-up store, but as a permanent flagship store! Located along Neil Road, their four-storey shophouse will showcase a slate of curated local and Southeast Asian brands. Each level serves a unique purpose, from rotational displays for emerging brands, to dedicated storefronts for long-term partners, and even a community floor for events and workshops.
In the upcoming months, we will be welcoming more partners and aggregators to bring exclusive experiential concepts to elevate Singapore’s retail landscape – so keep an eye out!
How else is the team encouraging local businesses to embrace innovation?
To foster innovative retail concepts, we have also pushed out initiatives, such as the newly launched Retail Maverick Challenge. In partnership with CapitaLand Investment, the challenge aims to identify local retail brands with innovative and outstanding store concepts that redefine traditional retail models, providing consumers with a more personalised and immersive shopping experience.
We also held the Retail Open Innovation Challenge last year, where top retail corporates like Gain City, Decathlon and HomesToLife provided challenge statements, sharing pain points that they would like innovative solutions to address. The challenge matched these retail giants with startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), where they collaborated to innovate solutions that redefine the retail landscape – whether it’s through creating immersive and experiential retail experiences, innovating sustainable solutions or uncovering ways to optimise operational efficiency.
Through this challenge, HomesToLife partnered with Evolve Innovative Solutions to develop a generative AI solution that allows their designers to instantly visualise furniture configurations in 3D, alongside real-time pricing estimates and construction details. The solution significantly streamlined HomesToLife’s design iteration process and improved its workflow efficiency.
Cultivating experiential concepts and encouraging businesses to adopt new solutions can come with its set of difficulties. What are some standout challenges that the team faces?
Balancing diverse stakeholder interests while driving meaningful change is one.
For instance, businesses face various operational challenges day-to-day, which may affect their capacity to plan for or invest in transformation, such as adopting new technologies or creating new concepts.
While we have a vision to transform the sectors, we are also mindful that it must make commercial sense for our companies. That’s why we spend time connecting with businesses, partners and our lifestyle trade and industry associations to better understand their pain points and brainstorm ideas for collaboration.
We have also learnt to take an iterative approach in our work. For more complex projects, we conduct small pilot projects and gather feedback from them. This allows us to refine our strategy before scaling up. Coupled with strong partnerships and open stakeholder dialogue, this approach allows us to address challenges early and achieve better outcomes in the long run.
It’s said that teamwork makes the dream work. What keeps the team going, and growing as one?
Seeing our projects come to life encourages us, both as public officers and as consumers ourselves. We are often inspired by the passion of entrepreneurs and partners who remain undeterred in the face of challenges. Instead, with our support, they find new ways to refresh and reinvent their concepts, to remain competitive and attractive to consumers.
It’s also especially rewarding when our successful projects inspire other businesses to transform. This positive momentum enables our lifestyle landscape to be vibrant.
We also find ways to weave fun into our work. For example, we organised a group-wide amazing race in Jalan Besar earlier this month. The team building activity resulted in many insightful conversations surrounding placemaking ideas. At the end of the day, we’re thankful for the opportunity to grow businesses that contribute towards making Singapore not just liveable, but loveable!
Inspired to break new frontiers and take your business to new heights? Find out how we can partner you, wherever you are growing.
