Eight months in, they’re looking to set up a physical stall to meet growing demand
When brothers Gary Wong, 32, and James Wong, 31, were growing up, food was always part of their lives.
They were born into a family of cooks who ran dim sum and zi char stalls, though those ventures never quite took off. While F&B was, as Gary put it, “in our blood,” their family actively discouraged the brothers from entering the industry.
That changed at the start of 2026, when the brothers and their wives launched Hippopotato, a home-based rösti business operating out of their mother’s executive flat in Tampines.
We spoke to Gary and his wife, Yiying Tan, about how the family scaled the business to sell around 150 rostis a day, generating between S$30,000 and S$35,000 in monthly revenue, with plans to open a physical store soon.
Starting out as a canteen stall
James holds a degree in culinary arts from the Culinary Institute of America—one of the world’s most prestigious institutions for aspiring chefs—through a joint programme with the Singapore Institute of Technology.
Before Hippopotato, he worked as the head chef at a café, giving him a firsthand understanding of the industry’s demands: long hours, capped pay, and little upside working for someone else.
That convinced him he wanted to build an F&B business of his own.
For Gary, who had spent years in private equity and venture capital, the motivation was different. He saw Hippopotato as a side project at first—a chance to test whether the idea could work before committing to it fully.
Gary and James’s wives would eventually join the business, but in its early days, Hippopotato looked very different. The brothers weren’t selling rosti yet.
Their first venture was a cai fan (mixed economy rice) stall at a local junior college, which they secured in Jul 2025, selling a rotating menu of up to 16 dishes daily.
While schools mandate that canteen vendors stay open until 2PM, the food was almost always sold out by noon. Faced with a choice between going home and cooking another batch, they’d top up, but doing so came with a risk: anything that didn’t sell by closing time would go to waste, eating directly into their already-thin margins.
For every dollar of sales we made from the cai fan stall, 60% was just food cost. If you don’t sell, you’re screwed.
Gary Wong
The waste problem pushed them to rethink. Instead of preparing food in advance, what if they sold something made to order? Ideally, it would also appeal to junior college students without requiring them to cook 16 different dishes before dawn.
The answer came from one of James’s earliest F&B jobs: a brief stint at Marché’s rosti station nearly a decade earlier. The brothers decided to give the Swiss potato dish a shot at their canteen stall.
And it was the right call. Students started queuing almost immediately, with lines growing long enough that the school principal joined in.
To manage volume, the brothers capped sales at 30 portions a day, first-come, first-served—and even that wasn’t enough.
“It was similar to the scene at those Pokémon card queues at Plaza Singapura,” Gary said.
Escaping the limits of the school calendar
The school canteen proved successful for the rosti concept, but it came with its own problem: schools would close for holidays. Long breaks meant canteens would be empty of customers, and there was no income to be made.
To fill those gaps and to avoid being entirely dependent on a school calendar, Gary and James decided to launch Hippopotato as a home-based business in Nov 2025, while continuing to operate the canteen hall.
Although business was slow in the first week or two, with only one or two orders a day, business picked up gradually after that.
By the new year, momentum had built. Media coverage followed, while new menu items kept customers coming back. Orders climbed steadily from just a handful a day to an average of 100 to 150 rostis daily.
Hippopotato operates out of Gary and James’s mother’s 1,500 sq ft executive flat in Tampines, which the family shares. As Gary put it, the business is very much a family affair, with his wife, James’s wife, and their 70-year-old mother all playing a role in its day-to-day operations.
Even so, Gary has not left his full-time job, saying he still sees Hippopotato as a business in its early stages.
What makes a good rosti?
James’s culinary training shaped everything about how Hippopotato approaches the product, from the ingredients to the cooking process. They only use 100% USA Russet potatoes, and everything, even the sauces, is freshly made on the same day.
“If we want to do it, we will do it right,” Gary said.
Using Russet potatoes gives the rostis a crispy, golden crust while keeping the inside moist and fluffy, Gary said. Just as importantly, the brothers have kept prices deliberately accessible: a chicken schnitzel with rosti costs S$12.50, compared with around S$35 for a similar dish at Marché.
The brothers have also experimented with flavours such as the Salted Egg Chick rosti and Okonomirosti—a rosti topped with okonomiyaki sauce, Japanese mayo, and bonito flakes—which have become customer favourites.
There are more flavours the brothers want to explore, but the constraints of a shared home kitchen have kept the menu tightly curated for now.
Every new item adds prep work, ingredients, and storage requirements, while Singapore’s Home-Based Business Scheme means they can’t hire staff from outside the household to cope with the extra workload.
That said, for a business still finding its feet, the numbers made financial sense.
Without rent or significant overheads, the main cost is ingredients, and those margins are covered quickly. Compared to the cai fan stall’s punishing 60% food cost and pre-dawn starts, running Hippopotato from home five days a week gave them the room to breathe, refine the product, and build a customer base before committing to a commercial space.
Forging the road ahead for Hippopotato
Taking all this into account, it only made sense to the Wongs to close the canteen stall.
Running both simultaneously—the cai fan stall from the early hours of the morning until 2PM, followed by Hippopotato’s evening service and the prep work in between—was burning the family out.
The final confirmation came during the Mar school holidays, when the canteen closed, and the team focused solely on Hippopotato. The experience reinforced what they had already suspected: the rosti business delivered stronger returns, generated less waste, and made better use of their time.
With that, the family decided not to renew the cai fan stall’s lease when it expired in May, choosing instead to focus entirely on Hippopotato.
But Hippopotato’s home-based model was always meant to be a stepping stone, not a destination. The constraints of a shared domestic kitchen have a ceiling, and the brothers are aware of it.
Thus, Hippopotato has plans to open its first physical store later in 2026, with a potential second location to follow. The customer base it has built makes a compelling case for the expansion: the business has amassed more than 200 five-star Google reviews, while customers travel from across Singapore for its rostis.
For the Wongs, it’s a sign that Hippopotato has outgrown the home kitchen where it all began.
Featured Image Credit: Hippopotato
