Instead of reinventing the wheel, Hong Kong dim sum chain Tim Ho Wan is doubling down on the basics

Eateries have had a tough couple of years. In 2024, Singapore saw its highest number of F&B business closures in 20 years, with over 3,000 establishments shutting their doors. 2025 witnessed a similar trend, with the Ministry of Trade and Industry reporting that 2,431 businesses closed in the first 10 months of the year. 

Apart from local operators, international chains have also shrunk and even succumbed to this rapid pace of closures, with the likes of US’ Eggslut, England’s PizzaExpress and Taiwan’s Hollin proving that scale and recognition are no longer a safety net in Singapore’s F&B scene.

So when Vulcan Post received an exclusive invitation to a media tour and witness the opening of Tim Ho Wan’s tenth store in Hong Kong last week, it was admittedly easy to dismiss the offer as “another store opening.” However, through the tour, we found out how their strategy might be the right counter to Singapore’s tough F&B scene: starting with introducing new products that pay homage to their classics.

Vulcan Post caught up with Yeong Sheng Lee, CEO of Tim Ho Wan, in an exclusive interview to understand how the business plans to continue thriving in Singapore’s cutthroat F&B scene, starting with their products. 

Why Singapore is a tough nut to crack for international brands

Having managed multiple F&B brands in Southeast Asia for almost a decade, Yeong Sheng Lee knows just how challenging the food scene really is, especially in Singapore. 

While Singapore presents itself as an open market for foreign brands, multiple factors can result in costly miscalculations that make even the biggest of brands struggle. Lee acknowledged that the market has seen an increase in challenges post COVID-19, including rising operational costs, a shortage of labour, and meeting customers who have high standards for both food quality and value. 

“What I actually mean by value is that not everyone is looking for things that are cheap, and there’s a clear difference. Cheap is when I always want to go for the lowest pricing, but value is where for the price that I’m paying, am I getting more than what I should actually be expecting?”  

When asked if the pessimism shared by Singaporean netizens and entrepreneurs is impeding the local market, Lee remained optimistic that the brand would continue to grow its presence in the country for the long term rather than pulling back like many other chains. 

“I wouldn’t actually say it’s pessimism. It’s just a phase that we actually go through, like every other market would actually have its highs and lows. No doubt, while it is actually challenging in Singapore for our team, we remain optimistic and confident about the Singapore market.” 

But what is the secret to his confidence? It turns out to be simpler than one might expect. 

Redefining Value for the Singaporean Market 

As the food industry is an extremely trend-sensitive sector, Lee emphasised the importance of constant innovation to keep up with short attention spans, and this comes from introducing seasonal items, from limited-time-only menus to elevated versions of bestsellers. 

For example, the success of Tim Ho Wan’s signature pork bun gave inspiration to a new item. Lee shared that the chefs started working to create a cousin to their signature baked pork bun, and were exploring ingredients that could create a black-coloured crust. They decided on truffle, following the success of truffle food offerings worldwide.

“For the price that I’m paying, I’m getting a black truffle chicken bun, something which would be a strong indication of value to a lot of consumers. So value in this case is what are we actually putting into our products? What are the ingredients we’re using?” 

This ethos also translates into their festive menus. For this year’s Chinese New Year menu, Tim Ho Wan introduced limited edition dishes, such as steamed scallops—an ingredient not often found in fast casual chains—deep-fried nian gao (rice cake) and steamed chicken in wine broth. Localised offerings, including Bak Kut Teh dumplings and Musang Wang durian sesame balls, also help to maintain relevance in the local market.

Lee also added that chefs play a major role in menu innovations, and they are constantly experimenting with new seasonal products based on on-hand customer research. This allows them to avoid introducing products that do not resonate with the local crowd, reducing risk in a market where failed launches are costly.  

Beyond menu innovations, operations also matter. Lee pointed out that food deliveries have been growing in Singapore, and the business has been working on curating its menu with products—including bento sets—that are more durable for deliveries. Tim Ho Wan has been introducing refreshed layouts of their stores, such as its Westgate outlet, with more open layouts and brighter lighting.

While these initiatives seem mundane at first, they are also crucial for the brand’s survival in a time when many restaurants have been experiencing declining traffic. 

Ensuring consistency even as the business scales up

As the brand continued to elevate its offerings, consistency was another factor that Tim Ho Wan had to get right, especially after the brand was acquired by Jollibee Group in Jan 2025.

Instead of giving Tim Ho Wan a total overhaul, the first thing Lee focused on was building upon the brand’s strengths, working with the chefs and backend operation teams to understand how the brand grew and thrived over a decade: from getting their first Michelin Star a year after opening, to expanding to 11 markets in Asia, Australia and the US.

Leveraging on Jollibee’s expertise, Lee helped the company streamline their operations across company-owned establishments, joint ventures and franchises. He also introduced the Experts Chef Program: a training programme where chefs across all markets will come to Hong Kong to learn Tim Ho Wan’s recipes and replicate them to the same standard. 

To verify this on the ground, Vulcan Post also spoke to Chef Cheung Yit Sing, who is also Global Product Innovation Director of Tim Ho Wan, to learn more about the training process and how the business foundation is kept.  

From working at pushcart restaurants to cooking at hotels and conventions, Chef Cheung has been making dim sum since 1982 and is now in charge of teaching Tim Ho Wan’s recipes to other chefs. He shared that as the creator of a specific dish, he starts every training with a lecture, followed by a demonstration of how it’s made. 

The chefs will then get to taste the dish to understand the standard that they need to hit before making it. After learning the recipes, the chefs will then undergo an assessment to be scored for them to maintain their operational benchmarks. 

“Currently, our passing mark is at 90 out of 100, because the standard is really high to ensure that when they are able to match the quality when they leave,” Chef Cheung shared in Mandarin, adding that it will take at least a day for the chefs to learn two recipes. 

Don’t fix what doesn’t need to be fixed 

Globally, Tim Ho Wan has experienced a 5.2% increase in revenue in Q3 2025 compared to the first half of the year, with encouraging results in newer market entries in the United States. Following the opening of their first company-owned outlet in Irvine, California, Lee shared that the country will be a key market for the brand and expressed his ambition to open 20 additional stores by 2028.

In Singapore, Tim Ho Wan saw a 7% growth in the same period, and the brand has nine outlets in the country since its entry 13 years ago. While Lee revealed that the company is constantly looking for new opportunities to introduce more locations, he also emphasised that the team is not rushing to open new locations to meet timelines—a move that differs from other big chains that overstretched after aggressively expanding.  

“We will continue looking at opportunities, but at the same time, we are actually investing in building our organisation’s capability and strengthening our systems and processes,” he explained. “It’s a combination of these factors that we continue to look at how we accelerate our growth in Singapore sustainably, because we are not in this for the short term.”  

In a market where even well-known international names are struggling to stay afloat, Tim Ho Wan’s strategy stands in contrast to the churn. Rather than expanding aggressively or reinventing its identity, the brand focused on offering classics and modern versions of dim sum, while also staying intentional with its expansions.

• Learn more about Tim Ho Wan here.
• Read more stories we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Tim Ho Wan

In August 2019, I walked into an early learning center in Philadelphia with a blank reporter’s notebook, a camera and a whole lot to learn.

Prior to that, I’d covered K-12 education and a bit of higher ed. The worlds of child care and early childhood education were foreign to me. I didn’t know the lingo or the layout. And, as I’d learn moments later, I didn’t have the slightest idea what it entailed to care for and engage babies and toddlers.

Fast forward six years, and now my favorite part of my work as an education journalist is meeting and writing about young children and their caregivers.

It wasn’t long after that program visit in Philly that I began to feel this way. Back then, few news outlets consistently published stories about the early years. EdSurge won grant funding to cover early childhood, and because no one on staff had covered the field before, we were given a sizable budget for travel. The idea was that I’d learn the beat in context. I went to early care and education programs all over the country — in homes, centers, schools and churches. I saw what an early learning environment looked like. I heard the sounds — oh, the glorious sounds of laughter and squeals of delight, the tears of a toy snagged unjustly or an unwanted nap. I smelled the smells. I noted the physicality of the job. I watched closely enough to realize that, as the children played — whether inside or outside, independently or in groups, structured or unstructured, real or imaginative — they were developing critical life skills.

From Utah to Ohio to New Jersey, I was filled with wonder during those initial months on the early childhood beat. I loved watching the way young children think and move about the world. I could not believe the depths of patience their teachers had. I puzzled over how, despite everything I learned about the significance of the early years for brain development and long-term success, child care was sorely underfunded, leaving families, educators and kids to figure it out for themselves.

It is one thing to write about babies’ brain development and skill acquisition, to cover the backwardness of the U.S. early care and education system, to report on the impossible choices parents are asked to make. It’s another to live it.

When I became pregnant with my first child in 2024, I told my husband that, as soon as we heard the baby’s heartbeat, I wanted to begin our child care search.

We hadn’t even told most friends and family when we began touring early learning centers in Denver. I expected to join long waitlists. I expected it would become our biggest or second-biggest expense, after housing. I’d been writing about these realities for years, after all.

But even I was shocked to be told, by more than one program director, that they likely wouldn’t have a slot for our son — who was due in spring 2025 — until 2027 or 2028.

And when we eventually decided to pursue a nanny share — in which our child and another child receive care from the same nanny in one of the family’s homes — I was prepared for a high-stakes hiring process. But I didn’t realize, until I got into it, just how difficult it would be to find someone with whom I felt I could entrust the single most precious thing in my life. Or how conflicted I would feel to be at my desk, writing about other child care arrangements for other people’s kids, when I could hear my own baby laughing and crying and babbling right upstairs.

Then there is the baby himself.

I think back to what I didn’t know and what I assumed back in 2019, and I shake my head. Little kids don’t just come online one day, around age 4 or 5, even though that’s how the education system in America treats them.

Some weeks into his life, I watched my son discover his hands. And then I watched him use those hands to reach for a bell that hung over his playmat. After he figured out how to touch it, he learned to grasp it, and after he learned to grasp it, he mastered ringing it. Now, at 7 months old, he uses those hands to pick up board books and hold camping mugs and shake rattles and grab my face. He picks up foods like crusty bread and roasted carrots and strips of scrambled egg and brings them to his mouth to eat. I marvel.

I’ve heard experts explain for years that close caregiver relationships are what a child needs most in the first year of life. But in recent months, I’ve come to see firsthand how much comfort and encouragement and joy mine and my husband’s presence provide our son. I see him look to us for reactions. Now that he’s crawling, he follows us from room to room. Now that he’s reaching, I know when he wants to be held. Now that he’s been in a nanny share for some time, I know that he’s built a relationship with the nanny because he lights up when she arrives for the day.

I can’t say for certain that early childhood reporting has made me a better mom. Perhaps, in subtle ways, some kernels of knowledge have carried over. But I feel quite sure — at the very least hopeful — that motherhood will make me a more perceptive reporter, keenly aware of the stakes in early childhood and more empathetic to those the field touches.

On that subject, this is my last piece as a senior reporter for EdSurge. It has been a great run, with nearly 300 published stories over more than seven years. I’ve covered K-12 and early childhood education here with enthusiasm and commitment, even amid company mergers, a global pandemic, layoffs, and many seasons of change in my personal life.

The early childhood beat has grown up a bit in that time too, with many major newsrooms now devoting full-time positions to the field.

EdSurge will continue to cover early care and education after my time here is up. And in my next chapter as a journalist, so will I. I expect our paths will cross again and again.

• Control Resonant does not use generative AI content “at all”
• Remedy interim CEO Markus Mäki confirmed that there is “varied interest” in the tech at the company
• He adds that the company is following AI progression to see if anything can be used “ethically” that would “add player value”

Remedy interim CEO Markus Mäki has confirmed that the studio’s next major title, Control Resonant, does not utilize generative AI. However, he admits that there is interest in the tech at the company.

Speaking during Remedy’s most recent earnings Q&A (via Game Developer), Mäki discussed the divisive technology that has been seeping into every facet of the games industry over the past few years.

The fake goods crisis cuts two ways. Luxury brands lose more than $30 billion a year to counterfeits, while buyers in the booming $210 billion second-hand market have no reliable way to verify that what they’re purchasing is genuine. Veritas wants to solve both problems with a solution that combines custom hardware and software.

The startup claims that it has developed a “hack-proof” chip that can’t be bypassed by devices like Flipper Zero, a widely available hacking tool that can be used to tamper with wireless systems. These chips are linked with digital certificates to verify the authenticity of the products.

Vertitas founder Luci Holland has experienced life as both a technologist and an artist. She has worked in different artistic mediums, including mixed media painting and metal sculpture. She has also worked at Tesla as a technical product manager and has held several business development, community growth, and product management roles at tech companies and venture funds.

Holland noted that traditionally, luxury goods makers use various symbols or physical marks to authenticate their products. However, with the growing demand for these goods, counterfeiters have learned to create convincing copies of these marks along with high-quality fake certificates. These goods are often called “superfakes.”

Holland mentioned that she spoke with maisons — established luxury fashion houses — that said that some of their locations had to stop authenticating goods because fakes were becoming too convincing to reliably detect. She said that drawing on her experience in both the tech and art worlds, she wanted to solve the problem.

“For me, as someone who has a background in being a designer and then also has experience in tech, I saw this problem and thought about the different ways we could solve it. I think what’s truly innovative is we’ve used and combined elements from both hardware and software to create this solution that helps protect brands in this way to convey the information,” she said.

“When I think of counterfeiting and I think of the most iconic and legacy brands,” she added, “a lot of these brands have been around for over 100, 150 years. These brands deserve the most advanced protection to protect these designs.”

Veritas worked with different designers to create a chip that is minimally disruptive to the product creation process. The chip is the size of a small gem and can easily be inserted even after a product is made without compromising its integrity. The chip incorporates NFC, or Near Field Communication — the same short-range wireless technology used in contactless payments. This means you can tap your smartphone on the item to verify its authenticity.

Holland said that for security purposes, the startup developed a custom coil and a bridge structure. If someone attempts to tamper with the product, the chip goes dormant and hides the codes related to the product. On the software side, the product information is linked to the Veritas back end, which monitors scanning behavior to prevent fraud. The company also creates a blockchain-based digital clone of the product for possible digital art gallery shows or metaverse activities.

The company didn’t reveal who it is working with, but said that brands can use its software suite to get information about all the chipped products, add team members to manage items and add product information along with the product story — details that can also be used to connect with their community. The startup said that some partners use this to engage customers through exclusive invitations or early access to new products.

While the counterfeiting market is big, Holland thinks the market still needs education around why it needs robust tech solutions.

“It is shocking to see that some of the shelf solutions, like NFC chips that brands are using, are actually so vulnerable and could easily be bypassed. This is the one thing most people don’t know, and we want to educate the ecosystem to adopt safer solutions,” Holland said.

Veritas said that it raised $1.75 million in pre-seed funding led by Seven Seven Six, along with Doordash co-founder Stanley Tang, skincare brand Reys’ co-founder Gloria Zhu, and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. The company plans to use the funding to expand its two-person team.

Seven Seven Six’s Alexis Ohanian said that he was impressed by the combination of design taste and technology expertise of Holland. He thinks that brands know that fake goods are a problem and are constantly looking for robust solutions.

“It’s absolutely an arms race [against fake goods makers], but we’re used to fighting those and consistently winning in tech — and luxury brands need all the help they can get,” Ohanian said.

Microsoft wants to introduce smartphone-style app permission prompts in Windows 11 to request user consent before apps can access sensitive resources such as files, cameras, and microphones.

The “Windows Baseline Security Mode” and “User Transparency and Consent” initiatives represent a major shift for the operating system that now powers more than 1 billion devices.

Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said that this new security model was prompted by applications increasingly overriding settings, installing unwanted software, or even modifying core Windows experiences without obtaining user consent.

After the transparency and consent changes roll out, Windows will prompt for permission when apps try to install unwanted software or access sensitive resources, as on smartphones, allowing users to change their choices at any time after accepting or denying access requests.

Windows Baseline Security Mode will enable runtime integrity safeguards by default, ensuring that only properly signed apps, services, and drivers can run, but still allowing users and IT administrators to override these safeguards for specific apps when needed.

“Just like they do today on their mobile phones, users will be able to clearly see which apps have access to sensitive resources, including file system, devices like camera and microphone, and others. If they see an app that they don’t recognize, they will be able to revoke access,” Iyer said.

“Users will have transparency and consent control over how apps access their personal data and device features. They will receive clear prompts to grant or deny apps permission to access protected data and hardware. Users will also be able to revoke permissions they have previously granted.”

The changes will roll out as part of a phased approach developed “in close partnership” with developers, enterprises, and ecosystem partners, with Microsoft planning to adjust the rollout and the controls based on feedback.

The action is part of Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI), launched in November 2023 after the Cyber Safety Review Board of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tagged the company’s security culture as “inadequate.” The board’s report was issued following an Exchange Online breach by Storm-0558 Chinese hackers who stole a Microsoft consumer signing key in May 2023 to gain widespread access to Microsoft cloud services.

As part of this initiative, Microsoft also announced plans to secure Entra ID sign-ins against script-injection attacks, has disabled all ActiveX controls in Microsoft 365 and Office 2024 Windows apps, and has updated Microsoft 365 security defaults to block access to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office files via legacy authentication protocols.

“Apps and AI agents will also be expected to meet higher transparency standards, giving both users and IT administrators better visibility into their behaviors,” Iyer added. “These updates raise the bar for security and privacy on Windows, while giving you more control and confidence in how your system and data are accessed.”

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

Cloud infrastructure is messy. When an alert fires “EC2 instance unresponsive” or “High CPU utilization”, the initial triage often feels like an archaeological dig. Analysts have to leave their ticketing system, authenticate into the AWS console (cue the MFA prompts), hunt for the specific resource ID, and remember the correct CLI syntax to get the ground truth.

This context-switching tax is heavy. It extends Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and burns out analysts who spend more time gathering data than fixing problems.

This article explores a pre-built Tines workflow—Investigate AWS issues with CLI data using agents—that eliminates this manual data gathering by bringing the CLI directly to the case.

The problem: The “context gap” in incident response

In many organizations, there is a disconnect between where work is tracked (Jira, ServiceNow) and where the data lives (AWS, Azure, internal logs).

A “simple” investigation often involves:

• Access Friction: Logging into multiple consoles and assuming roles.
• Syntax Struggles: Wasting cycles figuring out the correct CLI syntax and flags to look up information, rather than simply retrieving the answer.
• Security Risks: Giving analysts broad read-access to production environments just to check a status.

Manual processes like these are the enemy of scale. As noted in a recent Tines case study, for a major crowdfunding platform, moving from manual spreadsheets to orchestration reduced unpatched vulnerabilities by 83% in just 90 days.

The lesson? “Focus on security work rather than the mundane tasks behind it.”

The solution: automated CLI execution via agents

The Investigate AWS issues with CLI data workflow bridges the gap between your ticket and your cloud environment. It uses Tines agents—secure, lightweight runners that can send commands to AWS using secure credentials—to execute CLI commands safely within an intelligent workflow and return the results to the analyst.

Instead of the analyst going to the CLI, the CLI comes to the analyst.

Here is an overview of how the workflow operates:

1. The trigger – The workflow initiates when a new case or ticket is created regarding an AWS resource. This could be triggered automatically by a CloudWatch alarm or manually by an analyst noticing an anomaly.

2. The Agent intermediary – Tines doesn’t need direct, over-privileged access to your cloud. Instead, it instructs a Tines agent running with specified read-only access to AWS. This ensures your cloud credentials stay local and secure.

3. Dynamic command generation – The workflow doesn’t rely on rigid, pre-defined scripts. Instead, the “magic” lies in the agent’s ability to construct the necessary CLI command from scratch based on the context of the ticket. Whether you need to inspect an S3 bucket policy or check an EC2 instance’s security group, the agent intelligently forms the correct syntax and executes it, providing a level of flexibility that static automation can’t match.

4. AI formatting & enrichment – Raw CLI output (often dense JSON) is difficult for humans to parse quickly. The workflow uses Tines’ transformation capabilities (or an optional AI step) to parse this data into a clean, readable summary or table.

5. Case update – The formatted findings are appended directly to the Tines Case or your ITSM tool. The analyst opens the ticket and immediately sees the current state, security groups, and public IPs of the instance—no login required.

The benefits

Implementing this workflow drives efficiency across the entire incident lifecycle:

• Zero-touch context: Analysts start their investigation with the data already in front of them. There is no “gathering phase,” only a “solving phase.”
• Secure access: You don’t need to grant every junior analyst read access to the AWS console. The Tines agent handles the privilege, acting as a secure proxy for specific, approved commands.
• Standardized documentation: Every investigation has the exact same data snapshot attached. This creates a perfect audit trail, which Tines Cases captures automatically.
• Collaborative resolution: By pulling data into Tines Cases, teams can comment, tag, and collaborate in real-time on the “new or unknown,” preventing the siloed communication that happens when data is stuck in a terminal window.

How to build it

This workflow is available as a template to jumpstart your intelligent workflow journey.

Step 1: Import the story Visit the Tines Library and search for Investigate AWS issues with CLI data using agents. Click “Import” to add it to your tenant.

Step 2: Connect Your AWS Credential To allow the agent to interact with your environment, connect a secure AWS credential (like an IAM role or access key) directly within the Tines tenant. No complex infrastructure deployment or external runners are required.

Step 3: Modify Recommended Commands The template includes a list of example commands to help guide the agent, but these aren’t the only ones it can use. You can edit this list to steer the agent’s behavior, specifying commands you would like it to use more frequently based on your team’s most common tickets

Step 4: Review Case Format The workflow is already pre-wired to send findings to Tines Cases, so no manual connection is needed. However, you should review the Case layout to ensure it suits your analysts. You might want to adjust the order of fields or how the AI summary is presented to ensure the most critical data is visible at a glance.

Step 5: Test and define Run the workflow with a dummy ticket. Verify that the agent executes the command and that the output is formatted correctly in the Case view.

Conclusion

The difference between a stressed SOC and an efficient one is often the “mundane tasks.” When analysts have to manually fetch data for every alert, they drown in noise.

By orchestrating these routine checks with Tines and Tines agents, you flip the script. You give your team the context they need instantly, allowing them to focus on the high-value decision-making that actually protects the organization.

As the crowdfunding tech company discovered, intelligent workflows don’t just save time. When implemented properly, they fundamentally change the security posture.

For a deeper look at how Tines Cases can centralize your investigation data, check out this product spotlight: Tines Cases | Product Spotlight. This video demonstrates how the Cases interface consolidates data, making it the perfect destination for the automated AWS insights generated by this workflow.

Sponsored and written by Tines.