When it comes to honestbee, you’d tend to associate the brand with three things now: debts, a fancy office and a fancy supermarket called habitat.
After all, the startup used to do everything, from delivering food for us to buying groceries for us. Now? The only sign of its revenue is its fancy supermarket tucked in a middle of nowhere.
But like what a wise man millionaires on YouTube ads said, “All you need is just one product to make you a millionaire.”
So maybe Imran or Benjamin or Dominic has been habitat’s mentor so far.
Apparently not, because once again, despite the nice optics, the pancake shop high-tech supermarket doesn’t look to be their savior.
Owned Landlord Money
Before anything, here are some famous words from the new CEO of honestbee: “Once we do the restructuring and clean up, the prognosis for the business is actually good, and parts of the business have tremendous potential, like Habitat.”
And this:
“There are plans to open Habitat around the region and we have partners that are working with us to develop in other countries.”
From the surface, it looks like habitat is the one product that Benjamin has always spoken about.
But according to new reports, the supermarket owed its landlord a total of $228,000 in rental. However, it has paid close to $115,000 of this debt, with the reminding to be supposedly paid by the end of August.
The landlord is also objecting to honestbee’s request for a 6-month moratorium.
Moratorium…What?
Lest you’ve forgotten what’s happened so far, here’s a summary: honestbee filed an application to the High Court for a six-month moratorium, which means that for six months, creditors cannot legally seek back their money until honestbee has restructured.
It turned out that several creditors objected to the moratorium, including a certain Benjamin Lim Jia Rong (no, not the Benjamen who sells products on Amazon to such a success that he’s teaching others how to do it) who gave a loan of USD$3.8 million to the startup.
Honestbee hasn’t got approval to the moratorium; the High Court has, instead, given them another 30 days to provide more details to support their application, and the case would be heard on 30 September 2019 again.
A check on honestbee’s social media accounts also revealed that honestbee’s main account has been inactive, but habitat’s accounts are still posting regularly.
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