A Fujian-born merchant and Singapore’s first flour mill.

Prima Taste is the consumer food brand of a Singapore flour miller. Its parent, Prima Limited, was founded in 1961 as the first flour mill in Singapore, the company says, and it describes the mill as the start of locally milled wheat flour replacing imported flour in the region. Today the group trades as Prima Group, with its headquarters on Keppel Road, near the port.

The company’s account of its founder is detailed. It says Cheng Tsang Man was born in Yongchun, in China’s Fujian province, moved to Makassar in Indonesia as a boy of eight, and worked at jobs including watch and bicycle repair before becoming a merchant. In 1961, it says, he was selected by the Singapore government to set up the country’s first flour mill, choosing milling because he saw an opportunity to export to neighbouring countries. The mill began operating on 18 August 1963, by the company’s dating.

Prima grew outward from Singapore. The company says it went on to build flour mills in Indonesia and Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 1980s and later expanded into China, and that Cheng Tsang Man retired as executive chairman in 1998, after 37 years, to become honorary life president. The group now says it employs about 4,000 people and has manufacturing in Singapore, Sri Lanka, China and Australia, with products sold in more than 40 markets. Its brands include Prima Flour, the iBake frozen-dough range and PrimaDéli waffles, alongside Prima Taste. The company also counts among its “firsts” what it calls the world’s first revolving restaurant built over grain silos.

The group sets out its values as three “H” principles: to build a healthy organisation, to be an honourable winner and to make an honest fortune. Its website breaks its export reach down by region, listing 22 markets in Asia, 15 in Europe, four in Oceania, three in North America and two in Africa.

Laksa in a packet, for Singaporeans abroad.

Prima Taste was launched in 1998. The brand’s own history credits Primus Cheng, whom it names as chairman and chief executive of Prima Ltd, and says the idea was to preserve Singapore’s hawker cooking, which risked being lost to modernisation, and to make it convenient for Singaporeans and people all over the world. English Wikipedia says the brand was created with Singaporeans living abroad in mind, and gives its Chinese name as 百胜厨, “hundred victory kitchen.” The brand is managed by Prima Food Pte Ltd, a Prima Limited subsidiary.

The company describes a methodical development process. It says its team worked to unravel the cooking behind popular hawker dishes, tested recipes with blind panels of management and 50 to 100 consumers before release, and had custom food-preparation equipment fabricated to reproduce wok hei, the smoky “breath of the wok” of Chinese stir-frying. Its range today is built around complete sauces and meal sauce kits for dishes such as laksa, with cooking sauces, Hokkien noodle kits, non-fried noodles and party packs.

For a time Prima Taste was also a restaurant name. English Wikipedia, citing the Prima Group’s own 2003 news release and other sources, says the first concept restaurant opened at Orchard Centrepoint in 2000, followed by outlets at One Fullerton and The Atrium Orchard by 2003 and a Changi Airport Terminal 3 restaurant from 2011 to January 2014; between 2003 and 2005 eight franchised restaurants opened abroad, including in Jakarta and a flagship in Shanghai. Most of the overseas restaurants have since closed, it says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group make coffee, tea, noodles and sauces, and they come from Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam and Malaysia: Prima Taste, Indocafe, Kopiko, Acecook, Chin-su, OLDTOWN White Coffee and BOH. Drink and food brands of this kind in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a coffee shop counter to a supermarket shelf.

A drink or food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the cup or bowl it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A noodle that topped the reviewers’ lists.

The product that made Prima Taste widely known outside Singapore is a noodle. In 2011, English Wikipedia says, the brand launched its Singapore Laksa LaMian, a premium instant noodle. In The Ramen Rater’s list of the top ten instant noodles of 2013, Prima Taste’s Laksa LaMian and Curry LaMian took the top two places, according to English Wikipedia. Its Wholegrain Laksa LaMian then led the same reviewer’s list three years running, The Straits Times reported in April 2018. The Ramen Rater’s own reviews list the noodles as products of Singapore.

In 2015 the brand added ready meals: rice-and-protein dishes sealed in pouches that can be reheated, which The Straits Times covered that September and October, English Wikipedia notes. When Singapore hosted the North Korea–United States summit in June 2018, the pastry chef Janice Wong suggested Prima Taste laksa kits as a foodie souvenir, The Straits Times reported.

The brand’s reach is described in slightly different terms by different sources. Prima Taste’s own site says its products are sold in more than 30 markets; English Wikipedia says more than 40 countries, the same figure the Prima Group gives for the group as a whole. The brand’s stated promises are short and plain: “Only the Best Ingredients” and “The Choice of Singaporeans.”

For a design guide, Prima Taste shows how a brand can turn a whole street-food culture into a pantry product, naming its packs after the dishes Singaporeans already know. Compare Yeo’s, another Singapore sauce and drinks maker, and Khong Guan, the Singapore biscuit house. For this guide we use laksa orange, coconut cream and pandan green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Prima Taste’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.