Most family bizs don’t last this long, but Yong Seng Coffee is still roasting after 5 decades
For more than five decades, Yong Seng Coffee has been a fixture at Tiong Bahru Market.
It has weathered the rise of instant coffee, the café boom that’s transformed the neighbourhood in the 2010s, and, more recently, the emergence of a specialty coffee scene that has made Singaporeans increasingly discerning about what goes into their cup.
Through it all, the Tay family has continued roasting the same honest Nanyang-style kopi that they first sold door-to-door in the 1960s.
Vulcan Post spoke with Marcus Tay, 34, the third-generation owner of Yong Seng Coffee, about how a family business built on trust and tradition has remained relevant across generations—and how he is carefully introducing the brand to a new generation of coffee drinkers without losing the values that have sustained it for decades.
Going from door-to-door to sell coffee
The story begins with Marcus’s grandfather, Tay Yiong Theng, who started his career in the coffee industry at just 13 years old, taking orders and delivering drinks at a coffee stall. The stall owner noticed his interest and eventually taught him the art of Nanyang coffee roasting.
Armed with that knowledge, Tay struck out on his own in 1960, roasting coffee in the mornings and selling it in the evenings. Back then, roasting was done in a wok over wood fire, requiring constant attention and careful control of the heat.
To get customers, he did what any resourceful hawker of that era did. He knocked on doors in the neighbourhoods around Tiong Bahru and Jalan Kukoh, moving through the streets on foot with his hawker cart while he roasted coffee beans on the go.
Eventually, the hustle paid off. Tay earned enough to formally incorporate Yong Seng Coffee in 1974, opening a stall at Tiong Bahru Market and pooling resources with partners to operate a shared roastery—giving him the capacity to supply not just walk-in customers but also businesses at coffee shops, school canteens, and other businesses, too.
Marcus’s father joined the fold in the late 1970s and early 1980s, helping with deliveries and working the factory floor. By the time Marcus was old enough for primary school, he was already spending his school holidays following his grandfather around on his coffee deliveries.
A business built on trust
What has kept Yong Seng Coffee going across three generations? Marcus’s answer centred on ethics.
“My grandfather had a very strong principle of being honest and transparent with his customers,” he said. “Because of that, he built a lot of trust, and a lot of our long-term customers have been with us since they were kids.”
Over the years, the trust between customers and Yong Seng Coffee has been tested by rising costs.
According to Marcus, coffee bean prices have climbed two to three times since before COVID-19, driven by adverse weather conditions in the Indonesian archipelago—where most of their beans are sourced—reduced supply, and surging global demand, including from large international coffee chains buying up Indonesian beans in bulk.
Rising energy costs have also followed, making each roasting batch more expensive as gas prices rise.
Faced with that pressure, the family made a difficult choice. Rather than quietly reduce the quality of their coffee while holding prices steady, they raised prices and told their customers why.
“Surprisingly, they understood,” Marcus said. “A lot of them gave feedback that they would rather pay a bit more and have the same quality, than maintain the same price and experience a drop in quality.”
That personal relationship with customers, especially with regulars, has become a defining feature of how Yong Seng Coffee operates.
Keeping the roasting process traditional
Yong Seng’s roastery operation runs through a partner facility today, but the Tay family controls every step of the process and craft detail. The original shared roastery wound down around 2021 when the older partners retired.
The setup involves a 60kg roaster for the core kopi blends and a 15kg roaster for specialty coffees. Each month, the team processes just over 1,000kg of beans, roasted in weekly batches and stored in an 800 sqft processing facility where blending and online orders are also handled.
For traditional kopi specifically, the roasting process runs in two stages: first roasting the beans, then coating them with sugar and margarine, before cooking them, taking roughly 40 minutes per batch.
On the other hand, the specialty coffees undergo a cleaner, shorter process at around 20 minutes.
For every new coffee bean that comes in, Marcus first runs a small-batch test roast on a 1kg machine to develop its ideal roast profile before scaling it up on the main roaster.
The challenge, he said, is that consistency still relies heavily on human skill and intuition. Roasters need to read the beans, account for changes in humidity, and spot subtle differences before the machines can.
Yong Seng’s coffees start at S$7.60 per 300g.
Making the online shift
When Marcus joined the family business in 2019, Yong Seng was entirely a physical operation. He was in his late 20s, coming from a career in internal audit, and the gap between how the business operated and how his generation shopped was immediately obvious.
As such, Marcus went on to modernise Yong Seng Coffee’s packaging and launched a website to open the store to online orders.
The timing turned out to be fortuitous. Not long after, COVID-19 hit, and the wet market was no longer easily accessible. Customers who couldn’t get to Tiong Bahru Market found them online instead, and that period helped establish a digital customer base that has stayed.
Going online also opened the door to expanding the product range in ways that the physical stall—with its early morning hours and limited space—couldn’t accommodate. Yong Seng now offers multiple grind sizes (fine, medium, and coarse), a range of online-exclusive formats including single-serve sachets, batch brew sachets, and drip bags, bringing in new customer profiles by providing convenience.
Expanding Yong Seng’s range of grind sizes was a meaningful shift, particularly for customers buying its specialty coffee beans. For years, offering only a medium grind kept operations simple and order fulfilment efficient.
Introducing more grind options meant processing orders individually rather than in batches, inevitably slowing things down. But for home brewers using equipment such as moka pots, pour-overs, or French presses, the right grind size can make a significant difference to the final cup.
It’s a trade-off Marcus is happy to make—one that reflects the care and craftsmanship he believes good coffee deserves.
We figured we should do it. It allows the coffee to be better presented to the customer, and they’re able to brew it better.
Bridging Asian kopi and specialty coffee
Perhaps the most personal addition Marcus has made to the business is the #dYScover collection—a rotating lineup of single-origin specialty coffees that changes every two months, chosen by Marcus himself, from beans sourced through a trusted trader.
The idea came from his own relationship with coffee. He used to prefer specialty coffee over kopi, and when he first joined the business, he half-wondered whether the future was in moving entirely toward specialty. Moreover, with many café concepts popping up in Singapore over the years, Marcus realised the demand for specialty coffee was becoming on par with local kopi.
What the #dYScover range does is give customers a reason to come back regularly and explore beans from all over the world, from South America to the Caribbean.
Marcus selects each offering with an eye toward variety, avoiding repeated origins and flavour profiles where possible. The current offering for Jun and Jul includes beans from Guatemala, alongside the core collection blends that have been there since the beginning.
The collection has also helped shift some customers’ perceptions of kopi itself. Many older customers, accustomed to the earthier, more bitter profile of traditional Nanyang coffee, initially resist anything that tastes acidic, a quality that’s natural in Arabica beans and which Marcus finds adds sweetness and complexity to a cup.
However, with the #dYScover collection, getting customers to try something new besides kopi, and to understand why it tastes the way it does, has become a norm for Yong Seng Coffee.
“I get to educate my customers, and they get to enjoy good coffee,” he said. “I think that’s a win-win.”
Staying deliberately small
One thing Yong Seng has not done is expand aggressively.
There are no plans for multiple outlets, no wholesale push into supermarkets, and no ambition to see their beans sitting on shelves in chain stores—not because the opportunity hasn’t arisen, but because Marcus is wary of what that would mean for quality.
“We can’t control how quickly it moves,” he said of wholesale retail. “It could sit on the shelf for two or three weeks, and by the time the customer gets it, it’s not the experience we want them to have.”
The business, as Marcus’s grandfather always ran it, has avoided taking on significant debt and prioritised keeping cash flow healthy. Growth has come slowly and deliberately.
The online store expanded its reach without requiring new physical space. “We evolve very slowly, but consistently,” Marcus said.
For now, Marcus is focused on deepening what Yong Seng already does well—roasting honest kopi, introducing customers to good coffee from around the world, and being transparent with the people who keep coming back.
His advice to anyone looking to enter the coffee business in Singapore distils the same philosophy his grandfather started with: offer something consistent, improve openly, and don’t rely on marketing spend to do the work that product quality should.
“Consumers in Singapore are smart enough to see that,” he said. “If you’re consistently improving and transparent about it, I think the local consumers appreciate that and will support the business.”
Featured Image Credit: Yong Seng Coffee
