16 SAF Cookhouses Now Have IKEA Dining Style with Hawker Meals

By
Gianluca Ho
-
Advertisements
 

For those who like to dine at IKEA every now and then, the good news is some of us can have the same experience all around Singapore.

The bad news is it’s not actually IKEA, but a concept that has been adopted by numerous cookhouses in Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) camps around Singapore, which means only military personnel get to experience this.

This is part of the Singapore Food Industry Manufacturing Pte Ltd’s (SFIM’s) Design-Equip-Operate (DEO) initiative to improve efficiency and capability in cookhouses.

Advertisements
 

Instead of having kitchen staff stand behind the counter with a scoop to serve the servicemen and women, 16 cookhouses in Singapore now have their food in plates on shelves that keep them warm behind closed doors, similar to what you would see when eating at IKEA.

Now, these staff members are responsible for plating and replenishing the food on the shelves, which shortens the duration for food collection and allows personnel to choose their meal options at a glance.

The rest of the cookhouses are expected to follow suit by 2028.

Wide Variety with Quality

At the cookhouse, personnel can choose between hawker cuisines like laksa, fried fish noodle soup and bak kut teh, or the traditional “three dishes and one soup” meal like nasi briyani and spaghetti aglio olio with chicken. Apparently, the laksa broth is the same one that is served in-flight on Scoot airlines.

Guess we can all have a taste of the army (pun intended).

The food served at SAF cookhouses also received praises when PIONEER, an online news publication for the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) and SAF, interviewed personnel about their favourite food.

Those who were interviewed used almost every word you can think of when describing something delicious, with one of them saying he would even pay for the fish and chips meal if it were sold outside of camp.

Occasionally, there are collaborations with food and beverage brands like Killiney to serve local specialties like laksa, curry chicken and mee siam, and the SFIM also plans festive meals like the Baked Honey Glazed Chicken Set for Chinese New Year and Ayam Panggang Otah Otah for Hari Raya Puasa this year.

Advertisements
 

Someone at Goody Feed has tried this in a camp during his ICT, and he said that with that, a few of his campmates, who often ate at the canteen during mealtimes, apparently headed to the cookhouse instead because, according to him, the food was indeed much better

Guess that speaks for itself.

Taking Feedback into Consideration

Through consistent engagement with the servicemen and women, the various Executive Sous Chefs in charge of the cookhouse meals gather feedback and plan the meals accordingly while still meeting the nutritional requirements.

For example, the chefs and nutritionists worked together to revise the recipe for the desserts to make them less sweet without compromising on the overall taste and flavour, following feedback from one of the camps to reduce the sweetness of the desserts.

Seeing how servicemen and women are giving feedback on having more alternatives for the cookhouse food, maybe personnel in the future will get to have their meals buffet-style.

Advertisements
 

Here’s what NCMPs are, and what to expect after GE2025:

Read Also:


 
Gianluca Ho