Singapore Hawker Haven’s offerings are stocked in Australia and the US
For Singaporeans who’ve moved abroad, a craving for fishball noodles is never just about food. It’s a memory that reminds them of home—the kind of hunger that other food can’t seem to satisfy.
It’s a craving shared by a growing number of Singaporeans scattered across cities with no hawker centre on the corner. For most of them, the only real fix has been asking a relative to smuggle it over in their luggage, making do with instant noodles, or settling for whatever comes closest at a local Asian supermarket.
However, when Jameson Wong, 37, moved to Australia, he decided to change that.
He started Singapore Hawker Haven, a frozen hawker food brand now stocked in more than 80 Australian supermarkets and, as of this year, on shelves in the United States too—one dish and one homesick craving at a time.
A night time craving
Jameson moved to Melbourne, Australia, in late 2022 with his wife and young family. But while the move gave them more space and opportunities to be surrounded by nature, food turned out to be one of the hardest adjustments for him and his family.
He joked that he has a very low “ang mo food quota”. He can perhaps manage a burger once a month before he starts thinking about chicken rice. Fragrant jasmine rice was one of the small, specific things he found himself missing in Melbourne—the local version, he said, “just doesn’t feel as fragrant as back in Singapore.”
One winter night in July 2023, that low quota caught up with him.
Cold, hungry and craving mee pok in bed, Jameson turned to his delivery apps, only to find that his closest options were instant noodles or a A$30 Uber Eats order—and neither would satisfy that particular craving.
So he opened his laptop instead and started doing the math on whether it was possible to import authentic Singaporean hawker food to Australia for himself.
Jameson worked out the landed cost of manufacturing the dishes in Singapore and shipping them frozen to Australia, then compared it with what people in Melbourne were already paying for a meal.
To his surprise, the numbers made sense. In 20 minutes, by his own account, he’d sketched out a viable business plan.
“We are specialists”
But the idea wasn’t simply to put Singaporean dishes in overseas freezers.
Jameson wanted to bring over the food as it was meant to be made—with recipes and techniques honed by hawkers who’d spent decades perfecting them, many of whom had little to no international exposure beyond the hawker centres where they operated.
He saw an opportunity to give them a new revenue stream by bringing their food to customers overseas.
The frozen Asian food he found in Melbourne didn’t match up to his Singaporean standards, reinforcing his belief that there was room for something more specialised.
“Most frozen Asian food is made by generalists. On the other hand, we are specialists,” said Jameson, describing his offerings.
To ensure quality, dishes are flash-frozen at the source, a process that took plenty of experimenting to get right. The rule is simple: if a dish can’t survive freezing and reheating with its taste and texture intact, it doesn’t launch.
Getting past the paperwork
But the journey to get food into Australia wasn’t easy. The country’s food import rules are strict, and every ingredient, from fish to spices to sauces, came with its own paperwork.
There were nights Jameson spent combing through government documents line by line to make sure that his business would comply with Australian laws and come to fruition.
Once that was sorted, he got a full container load shipped from Singapore to Australia, in partnership with a second-generation hawker family willing to run the experiment with him.
But before the container had even sailed, Jameson went store to store across Melbourne with nothing but the Singaporean story—the families, the dishes, and what Singaporean food means to homesick Singaporeans. Around 30 independent Asian grocers, most of whom had never heard of mee pok, committed shelf space to his products.
Just three months after Singapore Hawker Haven hit grocery shelves in Melbourne in 2024, it went viral and sold out. And naturally, messages started flowing into the company’s channels.
These milestones were the validation Jameson needed. His business wasn’t just centred on a personal craving, but a sizeable market of people craving cooked Singaporean food overseas.
From Australia to America
Today, Singapore Hawker Haven has three key offerings: laksa, mee pok and fishballs, which are now stocked in more than 80 supermarkets and grocery stores across Australia, priced between A$11.99 and A$13.99 (S$10.93 to S$12.76) online.
Besides its one-person meals, the company also offers snacks such as otak-otak buns and yam paste with gingko nuts.
In 2025, with financial support from the Singapore Global Network (SGN), a government initiative supporting Singaporeans abroad, the company donated more than 1,700 products to Singaporeans in Australia celebrating the Republic’s 60th National Day.
From Jun 2026, its products have also been available in the United States, after receiving requests from Singaporeans in the country.
Singapore Hawker Haven launched in selected Asian supermarkets in Los Angeles, with online prices at US$8.99 (S$11.37) for a pack of about 15 fishballs and US$10.99 (S$13.90) for a bowl of laksa or mee pok.
But Jameson’s ambitions for the US extend well beyond the Singaporean, Southeast Asian and Chinese customers who make up his core base today.
Over the next two years, he plans to methodically enter five cities across the East and West Coasts of the US, primarily through ethnic supermarkets and boutique grocers. According to Jameson, frozen ethnic food brands in the US are growing twice as fast as the frozen food category overall.
The brand has also captured the hearts of some unexpected fans. Jameson shared that Lebanese customers shopping at Middle Eastern grocers have taken to laksa’s rich coconut-and-seafood profile, while South American customers are drawn to the fried bee hoon, whose vermicelli reminds them of dishes from home.
Jameson looks up to Fly By Jing, the Sichuan chilli crisp brand now stocked on major US supermarket shelves, as proof of what’s achievable.
It tastes “like home”
So far, the feedback from customers has been consistently warm: “tastes like home,” “brings back memories.”
But what stayed with Jameson were messages from young parents telling him their children—kids who had never set foot in Singapore—were finally tasting the food their parents had grown up with.
Some customers have even told him that opening a packet and smelling the food brought them to tears. Others have become loyal enough to travel two hours by train just to pick up an order.
Riding on growing demand, Singapore Hawker Haven has been profitable since its first year in 2024.
Revenue doubled from year one to year two, and the company is on track to more than double again in year three. The team projects roughly sixfold growth in year four as it pushes into new markets.
But Jameson’s long-term ambition extends well beyond selling frozen Singaporean dishes.
In 2020, Singapore’s hawker culture was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity—a global recognition of the culture, but one without a global reference brand to carry it, unlike Japan’s ramen or Thailand’s pad thai. That gap, Jameson believes, is the real opportunity for Singapore Hawker Haven.
His 10-year goal is to become that reference brand, with hawker families still at the centre of it, and to be established enough in key markets that Singapore Hawker Haven no longer has to explain what hawker food is.
