Ex-Engineer Who Sold His Company For $2.5Mil Now Sells Hokkien Mee Cooked By ‘Robot’
“When I was about to graduate from NUS in ’96, my mum warned me that if I dared go into the food biz, she’d ‘kill’ me,” says the successful inventor-turned-hawker who uses AI to fry Hokkien mee. He has loved cooking since he was young & has finally realised his dream of working in F&B.
With over 20 years of experience as an inventor, engineer Ang Chip Hong, 53, has gone from creating the world’s first wi-fi detector to operating his first AI-powered hawker stall, Wok A.I. His quirky unit at Margaret Drive relies on a $14K frying robot to whip up plates of Hokkien mee, which he claims is “better than most average Hokkien mee stalls”.
Chip Hong opened Wok A.I in early November this year, a year after quitting his job as a land IoT (internet of things) director (overseeing the research and development of IoT devices) in SMU. Prior to this, he worked as a researcher in government-supported tech company A*Star for over 20 years. There, he was the lead inventor in the teams that created four patented products: the “world’s first” wi-fi detector to help users in the early 2000s detect areas with wi-fi, the “world’s first” microwave leakage detector, a smart toy that could teach kids to recognise objects, and a smart card for inventory management.
Despite being so accomplished in the tech field, Chip Hong says F&B has always been his true calling. “I feel I’ve contributed enough to science and technology already, so I want to do something in F&B, which is what I really like. This has always been my interest – even in my earlier days at A*Star, my boss knew this, so whenever we organised events, he always asked me to be in charge of food,” he laughs.
No part of this story can be reproduced without permission from 8days.sg.
Love of cooking stemmed from humble background
Chip Hong shares that he has been cooking since he was six years old. “I come from a poorer background, and I have four brothers. My mother was always busy taking care of us while working as a seamstress, so she had no time to cook. I’m very greedy and love to eat good food, but had no money to go out to buy it, so my interest in cooking started there,” he says.
The hawker adds that he decided to focus on Hokkien mee (and char kway teow, which he says is up next on his menu) as it's a dying trade. “In the area of Hokkien mee and char kway teow, there’s always news of older hawkers passing on and the stalls being returned to the NEA – I feel that if this goes on, in five years time there’ll be very few Hokkien mee and char kway teow stalls Left in Singapore,” he explains. His current Hokkien mee recipe is his own.
Mum said she’d 'kill him' if he pursued food instead of engineering after uni
Though he had always wanted to enter the F&B industry, he tells us he pursued engineering because of his mum. “My mum knew about my interest in food since I was young. When I was about to graduate from NUS engineering in 1996, she warned me that if I dared go into the food business after graduating, she would kill me! She wanted me to work as an engineer after she painstakingly raised me through my university years, and felt that I would lead an easier life as an engineer,” he explains.
Why inventor whose company was valued at $3.5Mil became a hawker
Chip Hong tells 8days.sg that his job as a researcher at A*Star earned him up to $20K in royalties for inventing each patented product (he co-invented four), and he drew a five-figure monthly salary.
Between 2004 to 2009, Chip Hong left A*Star temporarily to open his own affiliated research firm, SmartID, which he co-owned with three others. He says the company was eventually “acquired at a valuation of $3.5 million” in 2009, where the buyer bought 75% of its shares for $2.5 million.
For the past couple of years, Chip Hong has already dipped his toes in the F&B scene. He invested in businesses like the Sin Kee Chicken Rice chain and Eureka Taste cafe, which he now co-owns.
Not about the money
“To be honest, running hawker stalls will never bring in as much money as I made in engineering. But the motivation to work in F&B is really not about money to me, it’s my interest. I don’t see it as a salary drop, ’cos even if I didn’t work as a hawker, I would also not be working a full-time job now. I’ve come to a stage where I feel like I’d [rather] make [less] money while doing something I like,” he explains.
He adds: “Financially, I am okay. This hawker business is something that I’ve always wanted to do since I was young, I’m just happy seeing people enjoying the food I cook”.
Chip Hong invested $50K to open his stall, and says he plans to open more outlets in future. Currently, he has one full-time staff and one part-timer running the biz, while he usually drops by in the morning to oversee things. So far, he tells us that his staff have had no problems learning how to use the cooking machine. “It’s too simple to use already! They just have to press one button, and everything will operate [on its own] from there,” he exclaims.
Turned to AI as he couldn’t find a willing cook
Though it seems fitting for a former inventor to sell robot-made Hokkien mee, Chip Hong tells us that he had initially planned to sell prawn mee the traditional way.
He shares: “I tried to look around to hire people, but even after offering a salary as high as $4K to $5K, nobody wanted to work as a Hokkien mee cook. This means that the demand is low, so I felt that I needed to rely on robots to assist”.
That’s when he got the idea to bring in a $14K frying machine, created by a fellow engineer friend from Wuhan, China. According to Chip Hong, this machine – which can cook up to thousands of dishes – is already a widely used contraption in China, mostly in buffet restaurants. The way it works is simple: a stall employee follows instructions on its screen and loads ingredients such as egg, prawns, stock, noodles and pork belly into the machine. The robot will do the rest of the work — it has a chamber with a rotating arm that stir-fries the noodles.
Why didn’t he invent his own frying robot?
Despite being an engineer himself, Chip Hong explains that he didn’t attempt to make his own frying machine as it would be too costly to produce in Singapore. He adds: “My friend from Wuhan spent five years perfecting these robots for cooking, so it would be a huge learning curve [for me]”.
The only thing Chip Hong had to refine in this machine was his Hokkien mee recipe, which he admits he is still perfecting.
The perks of using a robot
While many people are sceptical about the abilities of a robot to cook a dish as good as a human’s, Chip Hong tells us there are benefits to employing the help of AI to whip up a meal. In particular, its consistency: “A Hokkien mee seller might start at [a standard of] 90 percent, but towards the end of the day, they might drop to 60 percent only, because human fatigue will always set in,” he explains. A robot, of course, would be able to whip up a thousand plates of noodles, all tasting nearly identical.
Bird’s-eye view of Chip Hong’s frying machine
However, Chip Hong humbly admits that his Hokkien mee is still “not as good as the top Hokkien mee sellers’”. He jokingly refers to his current ‘edition’ of prawn mee as his ‘4.0’ version (his fourth revision of his recipe) – and tells us he’s working on his fifth, and hopefully final, rendition. His most pressing feedback so far, he says, is that his prawn noodles lack wok hei.
To fix this, the hawker says he now pre-fries the noodles to infuse some smoky flavour before putting it into the machine.
Hokkien mee “70 percent there”
So far, the feedback has been good: “Many people have very low expectations of a robot’s cooking, so they come with the expectation that it’ll only hit the 50 percent mark. But when they’ve eaten it, they tell me that it can honestly hit the 70 to 75 percent mark,” he shares.
Currently, Chip Hong sells a plate of Hokkien mee for $5.50 (regular) and $7 (large). A ‘party pack’ ($28) that feeds four to six pax is also available.
Wok A.I is at #01-34 38A Margaret Dr, S142038. Open daily 9am - 9pm. Tel: 9660 4222.
Photos: Wok A.I, Glyn Seah
No part of this story or photos can be reproduced without permission from 8days.sg.
8days.sg is now on #tiktok! Follow us on www.tiktok.com/@8dayseat
Related Stories
Shopping
