These F&B chains are winning over the taste buds of Singaporeans

“I support foreign F&B [brands] over local ones.”

It’s a statement that sparked debate on a Reddit thread—and it reflects a growing trend in Singapore’s dining scene. While Singaporeans still love their local fare, an increasing number are showing support for foreign F&B brands.

This shift is evident in the wave of international F&B chains expanding and growing their presence here.

Over the past few years, Singapore has seen a significant influx of international food and beverage operators. As of 2025, around 85 Chinese F&B brands alone were operating roughly 405 outlets in Singapore, a sharp increase from just 32 brands running 184 outlets in 2024.

Western brands are also entering the market, with names like Chick-fil-A and Yochi among those seeking to capture local diners.

Many of these international F&B brands cite Singapore’s strategic location, strong infrastructure, and vibrant business environment as ideal for testing and localising products for Asian markets, as well as coordinating regional operations and supply chains.

But potential alone isn’t enough—demand ultimately determines success. In Singapore, these brands have not only managed to establish a foothold but have also seen enough consumer support to thrive in a competitive market.

So why are Singaporeans turning towards these brands?

Over the last decade, consumer preferences have reshaped Singapore’s culinary landscape.

Today’s diners are increasingly health-conscious, environmentally aware, and eager to explore global flavours, often influenced by overseas travel. This openness has created opportunities for international brands offering novel concepts, regional specialities, and fusion menus.

But for some consumers, the shift isn’t about novelty. It’s about value.

In online discussions about the growing presence of foreign F&B chains in Singapore, one comment summed up a recurring sentiment:

“Some of these foreign F&B provide better value, like free napkins, free-flow rice and water. Most local establishments charge for these, and they add up.”

It sounds trivial until you realise how price-sensitive Singapore’s mass dining market actually is. In a high-cost city, diners are acutely aware of incremental add-ons, like:

• S$0.30–S$0.50 for takeaway containers
• S$0.50 for water
• Extra charges for rice top-ups
• Service charge and GST

Individually, they seem negligible.

Collectively, a casual meal that costs S$10 could easily edge closer to S$15 after factoring in these add-ons—S$0.50 for water, another S$0.50 for a takeaway container, extra rice portions, plus service charge and GST.

For frequent diners, these incremental costs quickly add up, making international chains that offer bundled extras feel significantly more attractive, even if the base price is similar.

The ability of international chains to offer these perks ultimately comes down to scale and resources.

Many are backed by established parent companies, venture funding, or large franchise groups. That backing provides access to capital during early expansion, standardised operations, and lower costs through bulk purchasing and centralised procurement across multiple markets.

A single-outlet local eatery sourcing from domestic distributors, on the other hand, does not enjoy the same leverage. It would likely pay market rates for ingredients and double-digit monthly rents, hence, absorbing the cost and providing free-flow rice or drinks is far more challenging.

Beyond cost advantages, many international F&B brands have leveraged their resources to streamline operations from the outset, creating a customer experience that feels efficient, fuss-free, and reliable.

Take Luckin Coffee, for example: from the moment it launched in Singapore, the brand used app-based ordering, cashless payments, and standardised store layouts to minimise wait times and optimise service flow. For busy urban diners, this translates into convenience as much as value.

Other brands have focused on consistency across outlets, a factor that independent operators often struggle to match. Portion sizes, ingredient quality, and menu offerings are carefully standardised, meaning diners know exactly what to expect regardless of location.

CHAGEE is a case in point: a tea from its Plaza Singapura outlet tastes the same as one from Pagoda Street, thanks to strict SOPs, centralised ingredient sourcing, and staff training.

In contrast, local eateries may vary slightly between outlets, or even from day to day, depending on ingredient availability and staffing.

Why this matters

All of this is to say that it appears Singaporean diners are increasingly gravitating towards brands that can consistently deliver value, convenience, and quality—traits that larger, well-resourced F&B chains are often better equipped to provide.

For the industry, this intensifies competition. F&B operators in Singapore already operate on thin profit margins of 5–7%, leaving little room for error.

The first 10 months of 2025 alone saw 2,431 food business closures, underscoring the sector’s volatility. Alarmingly, over 60% of these businesses shuttered within five years of opening, and 82% were unprofitable, highlighting how difficult it is to survive in the current climate.

In this environment, businesses that can maintain operational efficiency, predictable quality, and value for money have a structural advantage in meeting these evolving expectations.

International F&B brands have a clear advantage: they can leverage scale, operational systems, and financial backing to meet evolving tastes and lifestyles, and capture Singaporean diners’ loyalty.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: @the_xw via Instagram/ SDQ International Productions

Samsung’s latest Galaxy smartphones—the Galaxy S26 series—are all about optimization and AI. Announced at its Galaxy Unpacked event in San Francisco, the phones are not hugely different from last year’s Galaxy S25 models, but the company is hyping up performance optimizations that purportedly boost AI processing. Naturally, there are a bunch of new AI features baked into the phones too.

The headline hardware change is reserved for the top-tier Galaxy S26 Ultra: the Privacy Display. It prevents stray eyes from peeping over your shoulder at sensitive information on your screen—no need to apply a third-party privacy screen protector. The Ultra otherwise doesn’t look as visually distinct next to the Galaxy S26+ and Galaxy S26; unlike the previous flagships, they now all share the same look.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Series

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

The Galaxy S26 series is available for preorder now, with official sales kicking off on March 11. The Galaxy S26 and S26+ are getting a $100 price increase—likely due to a RAM bump, as RAM is expensive these days. They start at $900 and $1,100, respectively. The Galaxy S26 Ultra remains at the same price as its predecessor: $1,300. Samsung also unveiled a new pair of wireless earbuds, the Galaxy Buds4 ($179) and Buds4 Pro ($249), also arriving March 11. Here’s everything you need to know.

The Privacy Display

The Galaxy S26 Ultra has something you’ve never seen on a smartphone: a built-in privacy screen. This is a hardware-driven feature; there are two types of pixels on the OLED panel, one that shoots light directly to your eyes, and another next to it that is wider, allowing the light to reach the sides. That allows you to view the screen from all angles. When the Privacy Display is enabled, the latter pixels are turned off, severely limiting what people around you can see. It’s not just blocking the left and right sides of the smartphone like most two-way privacy screen protectors, but also the top and bottom.

What makes it more powerful than your usual privacy screen protector is that the Privacy Display can be customized via the software. You can toggle it on for the entire screen with a simple tap on the Quick Settings tile, or you can enable it for all incoming notifications, on a per-app basis, or for any app that requires a pin or passcode, like banking apps. Samsung says it’ll even work with its Routines, so you can automatically turn it on via geolocation, like when you leave the office.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Fletcher Heisler was beaten by chess hustlers in the park, so he wanted revenge, but regular practice wasn’t cutting it. So he reasoned, “Maybe I need some negative reinforcement,” thus taser chess was born, or a chessboard that would literally penalize you for making blunders by delivering an electric shock.

Each square on this regular 8×8 grid has a secret. A mechanical keyboard switch sits underneath, activated by a magnet in the conductive chess pieces. When you lift a piece, the Raspberry Pi running Python chess library software detects it. When you put it back in the wrong spot, one of the relay switches turns on, and a TENS unit with the maximum setting shoots a shock straight through the metal square into your arm, which is strapped to the board. The discomfort brings the point home quickly.

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The chess pieces began as low-cost Amazon buys, and he used acetone to remove the lacquer as well as make them conductive. The felt bottoms melted away. He covered half of the squares with copper tape to show the colors without interrupting the circuit. There are four relay boards in there, each with 16 squares, to keep the electricity separated. To be honest, he didn’t bother with en passant; who does that anyway? The Pi just assumes a normal starting position and maintains track of when you lift or drop the pieces, thus it is simple, dependable, and quite effective at surprising you.

The system’s settings provide a wide range of punishment. The “illegal move” setting shocks you simply for picking the wrong piece up on your turn. The “capture” mode illuminates a little display to indicate you where you can go and, if you touch the wrong location, the board bites.The “Engine” option allows you to compete against stockfish and becomes extremely harsh if you make any mistakes. The “Timed” setting forces you to move quickly because you only have 5 seconds, and the pain increases if you stay too long. If you try to solve a puzzle and get it wrong, the board will punish you severely. When you fail, a current travels straight through your muscles, causing your arm to jerk, similar to a terrible handshake.

It took him a year to assemble the thing, starting with prototypes crammed in diaper boxes and breadboards, and spending the most of his time traveling with the wiring in disarray in Airbnb homes, with people becoming suspicious in the Cat Café lab, which he used as a makeshift workshop. The airline broke the checked luggage on its way to the Open Sauce Maker Fair, and one of the hotel rebuilds nearly set the room on fire by getting the wiring backwards and melting the power rails. In the end, duct tape held the final version together during demos.

The shocks begin mildly, with a tingling sensation at level 2, but by level 8, you are experiencing full-body flinches. The pads did not last long, and the voltage continued to diminish. Heisler ended up spending far more time rewiring than attempting to understand the openings. As a result, chess expertise stalled; the whole thing was too delicate to continue working with.The board was constantly breaking down and needing to be repaired, until he acquired some conductive epoxy and sealed up all the loose connections. He also found a purpose for a bunch of old Ethernet cables, which provided him enough extra wire to fix some of the other wiring, including several battery adapters to make it more portable.

Taser chess completely reverses the learning process, since it turns out that the pain it causes is far more effective at getting ideas stuck in your head than repetition alone. As it turns, behavioral research actually supports this strategy, dating back to those old Skinner boxes and the penalties in video games; basically, both humans and animals are extremely attentive to consequences. This board, however, takes things to a whole new level. One solid game against some of those hustlers, and the surprises might just start working in your favor. Until then, every jolt feels like progress, even if it’s the hard way.
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Once the most talked-about TV show in the country, South Park, is on Paramount+. Don’t you want to know what got Trump in such a tizzy?

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Samsung took over San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on February 25 for Galaxy Unpacked 2026 — and left little to the imagination. Three new phones, a new pair of earbuds, and a pile of AI features. Here’s the full breakdown.

The Galaxy S26 series arrives with familiar naming

The S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra all share a rounder, more cohesive design this year — which sounds minor until you remember the Ultra used to look like it came from a completely different product line.

Pick one up, and you notice the difference straight away — it sits better in the hand, feels less aggressive in the pocket. Under the hood, all three run on a slightly overclocked version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (denoted by the “For Galaxy” branding).

Samsung also quietly killed off the 128GB base model this year; every S26 model now starts at 256GB, and nobody is disappointed about that. What people are disappointed about is the price — both the S26 and S26+ crept up by $100 this cycle.

S26 Ultra: The Privacy Screen nobody knew they needed

The Ultra’s headline feature is a Privacy Display that darkens the screen from side angles and blurs sensitive notifications when someone nearby is clearly being nosy. In my opinion, it is one of the most useful innovations from Samsung in a while, and future Android flagships (even MacBooks) are likely to copy it.

The camera system gets a bump too, with wider apertures on the 200MP main and 5x telephoto sensors, but the selfie camera remains the same old tiny 12MP shooter.

Third-generation Galaxy AI features are cool, too

Now Brief gives you a personalized morning snapshot — weather, calendar, reminders — before you’ve unlocked your phone. Now Nudge surfaces relevant actions based on whatever’s on your screen.

Google jumped in too: Gemini-powered Scam Detection silently handles spam calls so you never have to, and Circle to Search can now identify multiple objects at once, like scanning a full outfit instead of a single item.

Galaxy Buds 4 and Buds 4 Pro

Samsung released two models — the standard Buds 4 and the Buds 4 Pro. The Pro is the one doing the heavy lifting, with adaptive ANC, improved spatial audio, and that upgraded call clarity. The base Buds 4 keep things simpler and more affordable, but still get the core Galaxy AI treatment.

All S26 models and the Buds 4 are available for pre-order now.

WARNING: spoilers for Bridgerton season 4 part 2 ahead.

I was pretty annoyed that Netflix decided to split another of its hit shows into two parts, but I think the payoff in Bridgerton season 4 part 2 is worth it.