(CENTRAL) KITCHEN AID

Central kitchens help food businesses save on time, space and manpower. Can they also help to save the food industry as a whole?

- Cherie Lok

There was a time when all of this would have been done the hard way: 18-hour days that started with a 3am run to the market and ended after an afternoon of physical toil.

Mr Noorman Mubarak still remembers what it was like to chop onions until his eyes watered and to gut fish under the hungry gaze of the neighbourhood cats.

And that was all in the service of one stall. The 47-year-old now runs a small empire of 34 stalls under his hawker brand, Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang. But you will no longer find him in the kitchen, working the deep fryer at the crack of dawn.

Food preparation now starts in a 10,000 sq ft central kitchen in Pandan Loop run by Simple Food Solutions. Here, sambal is prepared in a vat, and workers load packets of spices - packaged and weighed in advance - into a vacuum tumbler, where they are infused into chicken thighs in just 45 minutes.

Ordinarily, Mr Noorman would have had to marinate batches of meat overnight in his stall.

The food is then blast frozen - a process that preserves its taste and juices - and stored in a freezer, where it waits to be distributed to hawker centres and coffee shops.

With day-to-day operations running on their own, Mr Noorman has more time to focus on strategising, innovating and trying to expand.

For the third-generation hawker, centralisation makes expansion possible. His goal is 50 profitable outlets in the next two years, then 200 in the future, likely in overseas markets like Indonesia.

He is not one to dream modestly: "I want us to be the McDonald's of nasi lemak."

THE CASE FOR CENTRAL KITCHENS

Central kitchens do not have the best reputation at the moment, most notorious in recent weeks for dishing out canteen food that has been lambasted online for its unappetising appearance and occasionally causing gastroenteritis.