Singapore’s Cosmopolitan Coffee and Tea Culture

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By Josh Doyle

Cosmopolitan Singapore, with its open economy and love of free trade, is a hub for business in Asia. It’s also spilling over with a vibrant coffee and tea culture fueled by colorful locals who enjoy the global feel of their open border city but wouldn’t let go of their tea and coffee culture for the world. 

The coffee industry there has two faces. One lives in the takeaway shops selling 800 cups each morning to crowds of bankers and executives from foreign firms setting roots in the city. Or the specialty coffee houses popping up in the suburbs that are leading Southeast Asia in innovation.

The other Singaporean coffee, with its roasted caramel sweetness, isn’t found in cafés. It’s hiding in the street side eateries with five fans on the wall and a buzz of activity. It’s here in these kopitiams, affectionately known as hawker centers, that you’ll find locals from every income bracket and all age groups sipping as many as 4 to 6 cups per day of Singapore’s national drink, better known as kopi.

Fueling these hawker centers is a large amount of high-caffeine robusta beans, not the arabica that has become standard in Western cafés. “The culture [in kopitiams], they like a strong coffee,” Victor Mah, president of the Singapore Coffee Association, told STiR. “Not ones with the fancy acidity... The roast is a little bit darker than what you see in an indie café.”

What the robusta beans lose in quality, they make up for in Singapore’s classic roasting recipe. That means being freshly roasted in a combination of butter, salt, and sugar — not your average roast, but then this is not your average coffee scene. Add in a dollop of condensed milk, and you have a drink Singaporeans young and old line up for several times a day.

This steady need for robusta has made an attractive market for exporters to take advantage of Singapore’s open door policy on trade.

“That’s the beauty about Singapore, we don’t have any barriers or taxes. You can bring coffee in from ASEAN countries, Africa. There’s no import duty,” Mah reminds STiR. Coffee exporters pay only a GST tax of around 7%.

Regional exporters in Vietnam and Indonesia have captured a good slice of Singapore’s robusta market. But in the skyscraper-lined streets of Singapore’s financial district and in cafés where Singapore’s hip kids hang out, announcing you drink cheap robusta is like shouting a bad word.

Fuelling the financial district are well-positioned cafés capitalizing on takeaway customers, putting a quick coffee in the hands of bankers filing into their offices. “Some of them do 800 or 1,000 cups take-away,” said Mah. He adds that margins can be tight since cafés don’t skimp on baristas — they aim to make quality coffee for a customer base that has drunk it all over the world. Deep-pocketed multi-national firms also are adopting an office coffee supply (OCS) system, having quality brew delivered or even made on-site in their offices.

“It’s growing in Singapore. You have the Google’s and the Facebooks with big offices,” Mah says, noting that some brands have baristas on-site to provide for employees. “So there’s a movement there with multi-nationals providing this.” At the very least they feature well-stocked coffee vending machines, which Mah identifies as a growth market.

Single origins

In the more innovative cafés, Singapore is leading the region. Café Just Want Coffee serves handcrafted Papua New Guinea roasts in the $6 to $7 bracket. The café mocha at Toby’s Estate blends Ghana red chocolate into their $6 cups, giving a taste of the ingenuity and flare behind Singapore’s best coffee houses. “Cafés are for the millennials,” a young Singaporean told STiR. And those millennials have high-standards.

But they also serve a constant flow of tourists from Asia and abroad looking to experience Singapore’s cosmopolitan thrills and luxury cuisine. Specialty coffee is another attraction Singapore has mastered, making themselves a leader in Southeast Asia with unique bean origins and innovative baristas running the best equipment money can buy.

Instant coffee in trouble

In 2017 the instant coffee industry in Singapore took a hit. As the city-state launched a war against diabetes in 2016, instant coffee brands saw their sales decline. And yet plenty of locals are still knocking back their kopi, often filled with high amounts of sugar and sweetened condensed milk.

Kopi seems too engrained in the local culture to disappear, especially with older generations. As a result, instant coffee brands like Gold Kili are focusing on imitating that butter and sugar roasted kopi flavor in their mixes. 

Coffee pods are also showing strong retail volume sales in Asia’s most globalized city-state, with growth between 2016 and 2017. Pods are winning for a couple of reasons. For one, they give consumers full control of the amount of sugar and creamer used, making them preferable to instant mixes. And two, they’re easier to store, easy to dispose of, and produce consistent tasting gourmet coffee every time.

Tea makes a comeback

The tea world may be finally getting rid of the stiff, colonial image that has made it such a turn-off. Coffee has done a much better job of engaging with millennials, with its specialty roasts and tattooed baristas. But tea is catching on.

Singaporean brand Kittea puts together the owner’s love of cats and tea — using feline breeds to set the theme of their tea flavors. “The Chinese White,” a cat made famous by sushi shops who place paw-waving figurines on their shelves as good luck charms, is Kittea’s name for a blend of light green tea with jasmine flowers.

Their “Siamese” mixes ginger, lemongrass, and lemon peel. Playful animations of cats on the tins set the tone for a product you don’t have to wear a dinner jacket or long white gloves to enjoy. It’s young, fun, and it’s quality made. Well-established luxury brand TWG Tea is matching their twice-yearly product releases with the fashion world, releasing new blends for their Haute Couture Collection to reflect the season and style changes just like a designer would.

It also helps to have a visionary c.e.o. like Taha Bouqdib, who “works like a perfumer, blending tea, fruits, flowers, or spices in order to create unique and imaginative combinations for his creations,” Maranda Barnes, director of communications & co-founder of TWG Tea, told STiR.

As for where to sell this new wave of creative and luxury tea products, Singapore’s luxury department stores make a good home for high-end tea companies. French brand Kusmi Tea is finding success with their counter in the Takashimaya department store, while TWG has storefronts scattered in high traffic shopping centers all over the city.

“Singapore’s cosmopolitan lifestyle is a big melting pot of different cultures and tastes from all around the world in one city,” said Barnes. “TWG Tea serves as a link between the past and the present, and to the rest of the world; sharing our expertise in a new tea-drinking culture for modern-day consumers.”

If any city can revitalize the tea industry, it’s probably Singapore. The businesses and people understand what it means to be global, and how to keep up with the times — all while keeping a mind to traditional values. In a time of protectionism and trade wars, Singapore’s doors are still wide open, taking a positive view of free trade and globalization, and welcoming companies that bring value to the region.