Millennial Hawkers Set Up Hip Speciality Coffee Stall At Amoy St Food Centre
Following in the footsteps of young hawkerpreneurs behind hipster kopi stalls Generation Coffee Roasters and Mad Roaster is Daylight Coffee, a new entrant at Amoy Street Food Centre serving up specialty coffee at hawker prices. The shop opened in October 2023, with a cute cartoon logo of a coffee cup with googly eyes.
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The trendy-looking stall is owned by cousins Jass, 27 (left in pic), Aaron, 29, and their friend Han, 29 (right in pic).
This is the trio’s first hawker venture — Jass worked in marketing, while Han used to be a technician and Aaron a mechanic. Currently, Jass and Han work full-time at Daylight Coffee, while Aaron still has a day job and visits the stall from time to time.
Jass shares that he “wanted to do F&B all along” but didn’t have a chance in the past. After months of planning, they finally decided on doing something that could make a difference as “coffee prices are rising in cafes due to inflation”.
With the thought that “people deserve to drink better quality coffee beans at a cheaper price”, the young towkays decided to set up shop in a hawker centre.
They invested over $30K in their biz, but admit that they are far from recouping their investment for now. Jass explains that “the crowd isn’t enough, rent is expensive, and goods are expensive”.
The hawkers fork out around $4K per month for rent, which makes it “difficult to cover salary [costs]” at their current slow rate of sales. They also use a rather pricey Nuova Simonelli machine from Italy that costs close to $10K.
He reckons that their low sales might be due to “people thinking [their coffee] is expensive when it’s already the cheapest you can find for such good quality coffee”, and the fact that they have competitors but “aren’t good with the social media stuff”. As a rough comparison, their standard kopi costs $1.90 versus Mad Roaster’s which costs $1.80, and their hot Matcha Latte costs $4, a tad cheaper than Mad Roaster’s $4.20.
They use arabica and robusta coffee beans
Unlike many kopitiam stalls that use Nanyang-style beans (which is mostly just lower-grade robusta beans roasted with butter and sugar), the trio chose to blend their higher “Grade 1” Indonesian robusta with Brazilian and Indonesian arabica beans that are “way more expensive”.
The menu
Daylight Coffee’s cuppas are all brewed with their $10,000 espresso machine, and start from $1.90 for Kopi, Kopi O and Kopi C that’s made with the aforementioned “Grade 1” robusta beans that Jass says is “similar to Nanyang beans but not roasted with [the unhealthier] sugar and margarine”.
Their “specialty coffees” are brewed with more premium arabica beans, and include standard beverages like Black Coffee ($3.30 hot, $3.80 iced), White Coffee ($3.50 hot, $4 iced), Espresso Double Shot ($3.20), and a selection of caramel, chocolate or vanilla lattes ($4 hot, $4.50 iced).
Their most interesting latte, however, is the Spanish Latte ($4.50 iced) — a rich drink made with espresso, milk and condensed milk — a beverage that popular coffee chain % Arabica sells for almost double the price. However, Daylight’s coffee offerings are a tad more expensive than their hawker rivals’ - Generation Coffee sells their cheapest Kopi O at $1.40 and iced Spanish Latte at $4.30.
For an additional $1, customers can also opt for oat milk instead of the regular stuff.
Daylight Coffee is located at #02-126 Amoy St Food Centre, 7 Maxwell Rd, S069111. Open Mon - Fri 7am - 3pm; Sat - Sun 10am - 2.30pm. More info via Instagram.
Photos: Daylight Coffee
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