Sheng Siong Brand Guidelines: Three Brothers, an Ang Mo Kio Store in 1985 & a 2011 Listing

A pig farm, a pork stall and a store taken over.

Sheng Siong began in 1985 in Ang Mo Kio, a public-housing town in the north-east of Singapore. The company says it was founded by three brothers, Lim Hock Eng, Lim Hock Chee and Lim Hock Leng, who had been helping at their father’s pig farm in Punggol. English Wikipedia gives the same three founders and the same year, and gives the group’s Chinese name as 昇菘集团.

The company’s own account starts with surplus pork. When the farm had more pigs than it could sell, Lim Hock Chee and his wife rented a stall inside a supermarket chain’s store in Ang Mo Kio to sell chilled pork; English Wikipedia names the chain as Savewell and dates the stall to 1984. When that chain ran into financial difficulty and offered its stores to tenants and others, and as pig farming in Singapore was being phased out, the brothers took over the store with seed capital from their father, Lim Kim Siong, the company says. It adds that this first store still trades today.

English Wikipedia says the early business concentrated on a wide range of no-frills products and accepted lower margins, and that it held down costs by employing fewer staff and avoiding in-house plastic bags.

The group built a back office alongside the shops. The company says its sister company, C M M Marketing Management, was incorporated in 2000 as the warehousing and logistics arm of the supermarkets and later became the headquarters for the related companies, handling purchasing, marketing, finance and human resources. A central distribution centre in Mandai Link was completed in 2011, the company says. It says the centre’s processing of fish, seafood, meat and vegetables received HACCP certification in March 2013, and that it has held ISO 22000 certification since early 2016.

Wet and dry shopping in the heartlands.

Sheng Siong is a neighbourhood supermarket chain. Its stores are mostly in the heartlands, Singapore’s public-housing estates, the company says, and are set up for “wet and dry” shopping: live, fresh and chilled seafood, meat, fruit and vegetables alongside packaged and preserved food, toiletries and household goods. The company says its house brands now run to more than 1,750 products.

The store count is clearest when read by date. The Business Times reported 69 outlets in Singapore in September 2023, and in March 2026 that the group had opened 12 new stores during 2025. The Straits Times said the company’s website listed 82 outlets in August 2025, the majority in the north-east, and reported a network of 90 stores in July 2026.

The chain has also moved toward the centre. In August 2025 it opened a 6,500-square-foot basement store at The Cathay, near Dhoby Ghaut, which The Straits Times described as its first in the Orchard Road area; a spokesperson told the paper that Sheng Siong had earlier run a store in the Tekka area. Vulcan Post reported in November 2025 that the outlet trades under the same single Sheng Siong name rather than a separate upmarket label, and is built for quick trips, with ready-to-eat food and self-checkout lanes.

Online, the company says it started a grocery website, allforyou.sg, in 2014 and renamed it Sheng Siong Online in 2021.

Television is part of the brand. English Wikipedia says The Sheng Siong Show, a variety programme hosted by Dasmond Koh and Kym Ng, premiered on Channel 8 on 13 May 2007, and that a Malay-language programme, Sheng Siong Live!, has aired on Suria since 2009; it describes both as aimed at publicity and sales promotion for the chain. The company’s own site still posts winner lists for the show by season.

How the region’s retailers present themselves.

Retailers in Singapore and the Philippines tend to present themselves through the store itself before any campaign. Opening hours, location and the name over the door carry much of the identity: a 24-hour department store in Little India, a supermarket in a public-housing estate, a department store anchoring a mall, or a bookshop whose aisles fill up at the start of each school year. The companies in this guide publish store locators, opening hours and seasonal promotions on their own websites, and those pages show how each one wants to be seen.

Store naming is usually plain. Many of these businesses carry a founder’s name, a family name or the name of a parent group. Some keep a single name across every format; others run several store names under one parent. Where a chain runs several store types, its own pages set out which name goes on which fascia, and those choices are described in each guide as the companies publish them.

Corporate pages add the history. Listed groups publish founders, management, parent companies and stock-exchange listings on their investor and about pages, while family-owned businesses often tell their origin story in their own words: a market stall, a small shop or a single store taken over and renamed. Each guide marks which details come from the company and which from newspapers, trade press, heritage bodies or encyclopaedias, with dates.

This guide covers grocers, department stores, electronics retailers and booksellers across both countries. It sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it, when it listed, and how many stores it ran according to a dated source. Colours and type in each guide are an unofficial interpretation, chosen for this guide, and no logo or store sign is reproduced.

A listed group still run by its founders.

Sheng Siong Group Ltd has been listed on the Singapore Exchange since 17 August 2011, English Wikipedia says; the company describes its listing as on the Mainboard. The founding brothers still lead it, with Lim Hock Eng as executive chairman, Lim Hock Chee as chief executive and Lim Hock Leng as managing director, according to the company’s management page.

Its overseas venture is in China. The company says it entered a conditional joint-venture agreement with Kunming LuChen Group towards the end of 2014, and that its subsidiary, Sheng Siong (China) Supermarket, opened its first store in Kunming in November 2017, with about 50,000 square feet of retail space. In January 2023 The Business Times reported a lease for a fifth outlet in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, noting that all the China operations were in that city, and in September 2023 it reported a lease for a sixth, at the Yunnan Aegean Shopping Park.

At home the group is building a larger base. On 13 July 2026 Sheng Siong broke ground on an integrated headquarters and distribution centre in Sungei Kadut, The Straits Times reported, on a site about two and a half times the size of the Mandai Link centre, with automated storage and retrieval systems and multi-temperature storage zones.

For a design guide, Sheng Siong shows how a family supermarket can keep a single name and a neighbourhood register from one Ang Mo Kio store to a listed national chain, with television as part of its voice. Compare Mustafa Centre, another Singapore retailer founded by a family, and Cold Storage, a Singapore supermarket chain. For this guide we use a market green, a citrus yellow and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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