This is the third supermarket raid we’ve done so far. Singapore’s supermarkets to me felt very different from Dubai and Tokyo – two other markets that are also heavily dependent on imported food and drink. Singapore may have been less theatrical than Dubai and less delightfully quirky than Tokyo, but maybe more revealing. 

The shelves seemed far more managed, and by that I don’t mean boring or sterile. I mean that they were unusually good at showing you the systems behind the supermarket. I could actually see health policy, affordability pressure, import dependence, and a very practical understanding of what people actually buy – far more clearly than in most markets I’ve visited.

The first big thing that stood out was how visible health labelling is in Singapore. It wasn’t in a vague wellness-washing way, but very structured and kind of in your face. 

The country’s Nutri-Grade system assigns drinks a score from A to D based on sugar and saturated fat content, with A having the lowest levels and D the highest. The Healthier Choice Symbol, a separate and older certification you can spot across many products, works alongside it, helping consumers navigate an increasingly complicated landscape of claims.

And this logic is about to become a whole lot more common. From mid-2027, Nutri-Grade will expand beyond beverages into 23 sub-categories of prepacked salt, sauces, seasonings, instant noodles, and cooking oils sold in retail. In other words, some of the real sodium and saturated fat battlegrounds are about to get some serious front-of-pack scrutiny too. 

Once I knew that, I couldn’t help wondering if some of what I saw on shelves was already a sign of brands getting ready. There were high-fiber breads and flatbreads. There were noodles that looked like they had been put through a full health-positioning makeover. Across categories, there was a clear sense that “healthier” was not being tucked away into some niche corner and the labels didn’t feel like decoration. Healthier was moving into normal food and changing the way Singaporeans eat and shop.

I’m a big fan of milk from the perspective of affordable nutrition (...though I can’t fully discount the decades of milk propaganda I’ve been exposed to). But nothing ever happens in plain old milk. It’s just a commodity. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Singapore changed my mind on this.

I was not prepared for the sheer volume of milk on Singapore’s supermarket shelves. For a country that imports over 90% of its food, has no meaningful dairy farming to speak of, and has high levels of lactose sensitivity, I was initially very confused by the milk section. But once I got a hang of the regulatory aspects, the aisle made a lot more sense. 

A functional arms race appears to have fully colonized milk here. And I kind of dug it.

It wasn’t just the variety that struck me, but the sheer ambition. Almost nothing was “just milk”. Everything was milk plus something: plant sterols to lower blood cholesterol, omega-3 DHA, high calcium, 20 grams of protein per two glasses, lactose-free, low fat, low GI.

Even the milk powder had these options. And plant-based milks were very clearly taking notes.

This is where the Nutri-Grade and Healthier Choice logic become especially visible. Full-cream milk, with its naturally occurring saturated fat, scores differently from lower-fat alternatives. In the case of one brand I saw, the full-cream version carried a Nutri-Grade C, while the low-fat version carried the Healthier Choice Symbol.

To be clear, cholesterol-lowering milk and fortified dairy exist in other markets. Danone’s Danacol has been sold across Europe for years. Benecol yogurt drinks are in UK supermarkets. Japan’s FOSHU system has long normalized functional claims on everyday foods.

But in many of those markets, these products still seem a bit niche, premium, or implicitly aimed at people with a specific medical concern. In Singapore, they were just everyday options for milk, with better pitches. That is what made the category stand out for me.

To be perfectly honest, I only really started paying attention to all the affordability cues after I heard the radio at Sheng Siong and FairPrice.

Both stores had music playing, and normally I would have had my earphones in. But I was trying to conserve my phone battery, so I actually listened. And somewhere between the music and the usual in-store chatter, an ad made my ears perk up: the Singapore government announcing its cost-of-living special payment to citizens. Adult Singaporeans were set to receive one-off cash payments of between S$400 and S$600 to help with expenses. It’s a stark contrast to what we’re seeing elsewhere in the world. Prices are up and not all governments seem to be doing much to ease their citizens’ pain. So I was very impressed by this. 

Once I heard that ad, the discount signs in the stores started looking a lot less random. There were plenty of discounts and price cuts across categories, giving consumers different ways to manage spend. But FairPrice was the clearest example of how structured this can get.

FairPrice is a cooperative run by the National Trades Union Congress and the largest supermarket chain in the country. It functions as a social enterprise, with a stated role in keeping essentials affordable. I didn’t fully grasp what that meant until I stood in front of the discount signs at the entrance.

It was a discount calendar. There were specific discounts for different groups of consumers, including senior citizens and the Pioneer Generation, based on the day of the week. There were also price freezes on select daily essentials. FairPrice’s promotional calendar is built on top of the country’s social support architecture!

Sheng Siong showed the same affordability story in a different way. This supermarket feels like a modern version of the traditional wet market. It brings together fresh produce, meat, and seafood in a clean, indoor supermarket format, while still keeping some of that tactile, practical wet-market energy.

Some of the seafood was actually still live, which immediately made the store feel different from a standard supermarket. Sheng Siong focuses heavily on HDB estates, where most Singaporeans live. So the format makes sense: fresh food, value cues, everyday staples, and a shopping experience that feels familiar to consumers who still want some of the wet-market logic but with modern conveniences as well (i.e., older consumers who have seen actual wet markets before). 

Between FairPrice and Sheng Siong, the way affordability was built in made me feel like these stores really did understand their shoppers.

After all that policy and pricing, salted egg brought some chaos back. But even here, there was a very tidy trend lifecycle on display.

I know most of you have probably heard of Singapore’s famous salted egg potato chips from Irvins and their insane popularity. I have nothing majorly new to add to the origin story, except what I saw on shelves in Singapore. 

For the uninitiated: salted egg as a flavor has been around in Southeast Asian cooking forever. It’s a preserved duck egg, cured until the yolk turns crumbly, rich, and intensely savoury. It has been used in everything from congee to mooncakes for centuries.

What’s newer, relatively speaking, is the snack format. Irvins helped turn salted egg into a packaged snack phenomenon with its fish skin and potato chips tossed in salted egg sauce. And it’s so popular now that it’s available across some 20 countries, not to mention at the airport gift shops. 

But what struck me across three Singapore supermarkets, and a few convenience stores, was the full lifecycle of the flavor. You rarely get to see it quite so neatly.

Irvins’ OG format is still very much present: fish skin, potato chips, that black-and-yellow hazard tape branding, and the promise that you may lose all dignity once the bag is open. “Dangerously Addictive” is the tag line, and let me tell you I’ve seen it happen first hand (speaking for a friend). 

Local branded players are doing their own versions too, like Shi Le Po, which has original and spicy salted egg fish skin.

Then comes the private label moment. FairPrice’s house brand has its own salted egg snack, which tells you the category has fully arrived. Once private label moves in, the trend is no longer just cute or viral. The margins are there to be captured.

Then salted egg moves again. The Nissin x Irvins instant noodle collaboration comes in original, mala, and spicy variants. 

It’s expanded into other interesting snacks categories too.

And then there are products like Hexa Salted Egg Sauce Powder and Knorr’s version of the same. These are the real tell. When a flavor becomes a cooking ingredient you buy to recreate dishes at home, it stops being a trend and becomes part of the pantry.

I also saw a salted egg cooking sauce from a Malaysian company at FHA, plus a bunch of other snacks incorporating the flavor. So this is not just a version of put salted egg on chips and call it a day. It has moved across snacks, meals, and home cooking.

Seeing the expanse of salted egg’s journey got me comparing it to current viral food darling from hell, the Dubai chocolate.

We live in an age dominated by social media, where the word “trend” gets thrown about with reckless abandon, and most disappear as quickly as they arrive. Dubai chocolate has managed to have a bit of staying power, but most of the products that feature this ingredient combo come and go, because it is not truly a flavor IMHO.

Sure, there have been flashes in the pan: espresso martinis, croissants, ice cream, and whatever the heck the matcha Labubu Dubai chocolate thing was. But at the end of the day, it is still largely chocolate, pistachio, knafeh - or crunch and sweetness from distinct ingredients, not really blends.

Salted egg is different: salted egg yolk, curry leaves, chilli blend together to actually create a flavor system that can move across eating occasions.

And I think this is the key difference between a flavor that gets copied and a flavor that gets absorbed. Some viral food trends stay tied to one hero product – the most staying of the Dubai chocolate is the bar chocolate form. Such “trends” spread by repetition, which means the same idea shows up in the same core form. Salted egg shows how a flavor can go on to become a durable trend.

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