Burnt Ends: How Strait Grains ran out of runway before it could run
The build-your-own bowl concept had the right product, the right niche, and a defensible location. What it didn't have was enough money to survive its own early months.
📌 Burnt Ends is a series that dives into F&B business failures and examines the causes behind them.
Note: This week's case study is based on a conversation with a source privy to Strait Grains' operations and finances. I've reached out to the founder for comment at the time of writing but did not get a response. As is standard practice, additional sources are always sought before publication, and individuals beyond the primary source will be referred to without attribution.Singapore has never had a shortage of people who want to eat well, but for a long time, eating well and eating enjoyably felt like two entirely different pursuits.
The push toward healthier eating had been building for years. The Health Promotion Board’s Healthier Dining Programme saw healthier meal sales triple between 2014 and 2017, from 7.5 million to 26 million annually, and by December 2022, 60 per cent of stalls at hawker centres and coffee shops had at least one qualifying option on the menu. By the early 2020s, a growing segment of Singaporeans was going further still — actively tracking macros, reading nutrition labels, and building meals around specific dietary goals, with Euromonitor’s 2024 consumer survey finding that 37 per cent of respondents were managing what they ate specifically to control their weight.
The build-your-own bowl concept had emerged as the most natural commercial response to that behaviour. Daily Cut and Grains & Co. had already built strong followings in the space by the time Strait Grains entered the picture.
Its founder, Elvin, wasn’t approaching this purely as a business opportunity. He had been working through his own weight loss journey and understood something that most people in this space eventually learn: that exercise contributes, but food is where the real work happens, and that staying in a caloric deficit is everything.
Strait Grains was his answer to that — a build-your-own bowl concept that aimed to make eating healthily feel less like a chore, with food that was genuinely tasty and priced accessibly enough for the everyday lunch crowd. The timing was right, the demand was there, and the competition in his corner of the market was thin. What let the business down had nothing to do with any of that.
What Strait Grains got right
Strait Grains understood its customer well. Office workers in Singapore’s knowledge economy are calorie-conscious but time-poor, and they’re willing to pay a modest premium for lunch that doesn’t feel like a compromise. The menu was built around that reality, with bowls priced between $9 and $12 for most configurations and a staff discount that kept the concept accessible to the core audience.
A QR code-based pre-order system through the FMB POS platform allowed the kitchen to begin preparing orders from 10:15am, effectively extending the productive window ahead of the 11am lunch rush. At peak, the kitchen was turning out 25 to 35 bowls an hour, with two staff on the assembly line completing each bowl in one to three minutes. On its strongest days, Strait Grains served close to 200 bowls across a single lunch service.
The location was a deliberate choice, though one with a built-in ceiling. Strait Grains took the shopfront unit within a Smart City Kitchens-operated space at Alice@Mediapolis — a hybrid ghost kitchen and dining concept that paired a private dining area with a shared communal one. Within the five-building cluster of Grab HQ, Infinite Studios, Mediacorp, ST Telemedia, and Alice itself, the only other healthy bowl operator in the immediate vicinity closed right after the lunch service, which meant Strait Grains effectively had the afternoon to itself.
But Biopolis doesn’t draws walk-ins - it’s accessible only by car, or a 10 to 15-minute walk from the nearest MRT station. Shuttle services from the station also required an office access pass. The customer base was, from day one, almost entirely the workers in those five buildings and no one else.
Elvin had planned to mitigate this by running a meal prep operation using the additional kitchen units available at the back of the Smart City Kitchens space. That would have extended the business’s reach beyond the lunch window, but that stage was never reached.
At the same time, not every item on the menu was pulling its weight equally. Pulled beef and sous vide chicken were popular but prep-heavy, with the full brining and sous vide process taking nearly three to four hours per batch. The feta scrambled eggs presented a different kind of problem — customers loved it, but the item couldn’t be batch-prepped beyond 20 portions at a time without being overcooked. Its margins were also eroded by the exorbitant cost of the feta cheese itself.
An insider familiar with Strait Grains’ operations described the broader tension: dishes that appeared profitable on a spreadsheet can be bleeding money in the kitchen without anyone noticing until it’s too late. Strait Grains planned to address this issue , but it never had the time to get there.
What really put the lights out
But as it turns out, what really broke Strait Grains wasn’t operational complexity. . It was financial planning - or the lack therof, and the issue was visible well before the business had served its first customer.
The initial capital Elvin raised was never sufficient to cover what the business actually cost to set up and run. Consulting fees, branding, renovation, and kitchen equipment leasing pushed total expenditure well beyond what he had started with, leaving a gap that could only be financed through loans. A fixed monthly leasing cost began accumulating from day one regardless of how many bowls were sold.
The same company insider noted that Strait Grains’ capital structure had always been precarious, with the operating plan appearing to assume that revenue would cover obligations from early on. That left little tolerance for the softening that almost every new F&B concept experiences once opening promotions wind down. Strait Grains ran a one-for-one medium bowl promotion for its first two weeks, which generated healthy traffic, but when regular pricing took over and volumes dipped, there was nothing to fall back on.
The situation was made worse by how Elvin chose to manage his loan repayments once the deficit began to accumulate. Rather than covering rent, labour, and supplier invoices first, he prioritised paying back his own loans. An insider flagged this as problematic — suppliers, landlords, and employees carry a prior claim that a director’s personal loans do not.
Running Strait Grains alongside a full-time job meant that the monthly deficit, while not catastrophic in absolute terms, began to eat into his personal income. When that pressure became difficult to absorb, Elvin finally made the decision to close.
What they would have done differently
According to a source with direct knowledge of the business, Elvin had been presented with options at each major decision point and understood the risks attached to each, including explicit warnings that the business did not have enough runway to reach break-even. He proceeded anyway. When the moment came that additional funds were needed to keep going, there were none.
It’s a pattern that plays out often in early-stage F&B, where founders who believe deeply in what they are building tend to treat capital warnings as overcaution rather than fact.
Strait Grains built something customers wanted. The food was considered, the operations were lean and competent, and the positioning within the Biopolis ecosystem was as defensible as a concept with a captive lunchtime audience could hope for. What the business could not survive was entering the market underfunded, without the reserves needed to absorb the inevitable dip between opening buzz and sustainable revenue.