Where a food group's operations are actually decided

Our Senai kitchen in Johor, which I designed and opened in 2016 for RM186 million, makes frozen dough, part-baked bread, buns, fillings and cakes for 279 company outlets and our Thai franchisee. Products for Singapore cross the Causeway or the Second Link overnight in our own refrigerated lorries, and every consignment needs an import permit and must meet the Singapore Food Agency's requirements for imported food. I plan that journey as a distribution of times, not a single figure. Since a festive-weekend jam in January 2023 destroyed a lorry-load of cream products, we have split production by risk: frozen and ambient lines from Senai, chilled and cream lines from our S$19 million Senoko kitchen in Singapore. Every lorry carries continuous temperature loggers, reviewed before the doors open at the receiving outlet, and our head of food safety, not the logistics team, decides whether stock that has drifted out of range may be sold.

A bakery, a café and a food hall fail in different ways. Bakeries handle cream and custard in small, warm spaces; cafés cook eggs to order at speed; food halls combine our own stalls with tenants we do not employ but whose hygiene reflects on us. Each outlet in Singapore operates under a Singapore Food Agency licence, and in Malaysia under the food hygiene rules administered by state health authorities, and every food handler holds the basic food-safety certification both countries require. All our bakeries and both kitchens are halal-certified, by MUIS in Singapore and JAKIM in Malaysia, which governs where every ingredient comes from and how it is stored. In food halls that contain both certified and uncertified stalls, our shared dishwashing keeps separate tray, crockery and washing streams. I report food-safety audit results, near-misses and recalls to the Audit and Risk Committee every quarter.

About 2,900 of our people are migrant workers or hold work passes, most of them at Senai and in Singapore kitchens and food halls. In Singapore our ability to hire work-permit holders is tied by quota to the number of local people we employ, and each permit carries a monthly levy, so local hiring and automation decisions are linked. In Malaysia we recruit through licensed agencies and pay every recruitment cost ourselves, after the 2021 repayment that took RM2.06 million out of our margin. Workers keep their own passports, sign contracts in their own languages and can raise grievances through a channel run by an outside organisation. I review hostel conditions, overtime hours and attrition by nationality each quarter. The measure I watch most closely is voluntary attrition in a worker's second year, because it tells me whether the arrangement we described at recruitment is the one people found when they arrived.

Laman Food Halls have 512 stalls, 146 of which we operate ourselves. The rest are let to tenants on a share of sales, typically between 22 and 26 per cent, with a monthly minimum. Tenant economics decide whether a hall stays full: when energy and ingredient costs rose in 2022 and 2023, I moved our cleaning, dishwashing and tray return to central teams so that tenants no longer staffed them, and we accepted a lower minimum at 40 stalls rather than leave them empty. Delivery platforms charge commission of around 30 per cent of the menu price, so we price and range delivery separately and judge it on its own contribution. Bakery shrink, mostly unsold product, is the third lever. It ran at 9.4 per cent of production value in 2024, and our five-bake trial in 40 outlets has brought it to 6.1 per cent without losing the morning trade.

Most of our outlets trade where air temperatures pass 33°C on many afternoons, and kiosks in transport stations and mall walkways often run hotter than the street. Display chillers lose capacity as ambient temperatures rise, ovens add their own heat, and staff working a full shift beside them tire faster and make more mistakes. Since 2024 we have specified chillers by their performance at higher ambient temperatures, logged temperatures inside every kiosk and set rest breaks by measured heat, not by the calendar. Flooding is the other recurring risk. The Klang Valley floods of December 2021 closed six of our Malaysian outlets for between three and seven weeks, and two of our Thai franchisee's Bangkok outlets flooded in September 2022. Every new site, ours or a franchisee's, now has a flood check covering street level, drainage and where stock is stored, and I am reviewing 23 existing Malaysian outlets against the same standard.