New demand-and-supply initiative to help boost sales of local vegetables and fish

SINGAPORE – A first-of-its-kind industry demand-and-supply initiative will be implemented to help restaurants and retailers buy Singapore-grown produce with more ease, while giving local farmers greater certainty about projected demand.

Under the initiative, the commercial supply of vegetables and fish from local farms will be aggregated, processed, and the produce distributed to buyers such as retailers and F&B establishments.

The move will help to ease perennial demand-and-supply issues that have plagued the local agriculture industry, and give a leg-up to Singapore’s ambition to locally produce 30 per cent of its nutritional needs by the year 2030.

Singapore Agro-Food Enterprises Federation Limited (Safef), a non-profit organisation made up of local farms, signed memorandums of understanding on Tuesday with food distributor At Fresh and Seafood Industries Association Singapore, to jointly boost demand for locally grown vegetables and seafood, and processed food made from such local ingredients.

Under the agreements, the three parties will be doing the aggregating, processing and distributing of supplies.

The agreement was signed at the official opening of the high-tech farm Green Harvest at Neo Tiew Harvest Lane.

In his speech at the event, Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment Koh Poh Koon explained the industry-wide problem producers and buyers face.

Dr Koh said that producers like farms are unable to estimate future market demand and what price their products will sell for by the time they are harvested. Thus, they are unable to plan how much vegetables to grow or fish to breed ahead of time.

On the other hand, retailers are unable to get a commitment from producers on sufficient quantity and quality of fresh produce to meet their customers’ needs.

“So there is a lot of market inefficiency and uncertainty for both buyers and producers. This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Both sides are waiting for each other,” said Dr Koh.

The new initiative “allows longer term purchasing agreements to be given to producers for certainty of demand and pricing, while ensuring constancy of supplies of good quality produce to retailers”, he said.

Elaborating on the initiative, Safef chief executive officer Ken Cheong said it will make it easier for buyers to meet their supply needs.

Currently, buyers would have to talk to multiple farms in order to fulfil their procurement requirements, especially if they are looking to buy different vegetables.

“This is because different farms have different strengths and they produce different vegetables. So it’s easier for us to work together and say, ‘Farm A will give xiao bai cai and Farm B will give us salad greens’…It’s like a butler that makes shopping easier for buyers,” said Mr Cheong.

Boosting local production is one of Singapore’s food security strategies to mitigate against food supply shocks.

Dr Koh said he is heartened that local farms like Green Harvest are seeding the capability to produce food in a sustainable and productive way.

Green Harvest is a joint venture between Kok Fah Technology Farm, which has years of agricultural expertise, and TeamBuild Construction Group, which designed and built the climate-controlled greenhouse with automated features.

Examples include a mobile gully system which automatically moves produce from the planting area to the harvesting area, and a conveyor system that transports heavy trays from the nursery to the transplanting area on the second floor.

The farm is projected to produce up to 1,500 tonnes of leafy vegetables a year, or around four tonnes of vegetables a day, more than five times the average productivity of traditional farming methods. According to figures from the Singapore Food Statistics 2022 report, Singapore produced 19,900 tonnes of vegetables in 2022 – representing 3.9 per cent of vegetables consumed in Singapore that same year.

“For a traditional farm to produce four tonnes of vegetables a day, including packing, you will need about 80 people at least. For us, we are using about 20 to 25 people, that’s almost four times the savings on manpower,” said Mr Dave Huang, business development director at Green Harvest.