The food: Singaporean White Carrot Cake
Where to find it: He Zhong Carrot Cake, Bukit Temah Food Hawker Centre, Singapore
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Welcome to another edition of #FoodEntrepreneurs Friday, where I serve up an order of international food with a side of insight for entrepreneurs.
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The Singaporean people consider eating a national pastime. This is my kind of town. It’s a playground of ultra-modern mishmashes of east-meets-west culinary delights. Ideas for food recipes sprout up faster than hawker centre stalls—the destination for Singaporeans to chow on delicious, ubiquitous eats.
On my last day filming in Singapore, my host took me to a hawker stall serving a curious dish and idea: the Singaporean carrot cake. Mysteriously, this carrot cake has no carrots in it whatsoever. Hawker centres prepare it with radishes, eggs, garlic, flour, salt and generous amounts of oil. People across Singapore know the dish well.
The dish engrains itself in Singaporean culture and consciousness because of an important entrepreneurial lesson: don’t keep your business idea secret. To think, what if Lau Goh, the supposed originator of the carrot cake, kept the recipe a secret? What if he just cooked it for himself with fear that someone would steal his recipe? Not only would others miss out on his carrot cake (obviously), but he’d miss out on countless business opportunities. He wouldn’t be able to sell and capitalize on his unique creation. He wouldn’t get customer feedback on how to improve his recipe. And he certainly wouldn’t get the credit he deserves for thinking up such a carrot-less concoction. If he didn’t share it, then Singaporeans wouldn’t have the opportunity to literally eat up his food idea.
Thankfully, the idea of carrot cake has been shared, and people across Singapore eat it up in oh-so-many ways. There’s “white” plain carrot cake, there’s “black” carrot cake seasoned with sweet soya sauce—an endless supply of variations. But Lau Goh still gets the most people lining up for his carrot cake because, like most consumers, Singaporeans love an innovator with a passion to share his innovations.
As the saying goes in the Silicon Valley, “no one will steal your crappy business idea.” So share it. Often, rather than stealing your idea, people will challenge it. They’ll say you and your idea are crazy and go on with their lives. If your business idea made that much sense to everybody, then it’s often easily duplicatable, which allows for easy competition.
Share your business idea. Challenge reality. And perhaps you’ll offer a business concoction as wacky (but wonderful) as a carrot cake without carrots. As the true innovator Thomas Edison once said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninty-nine percent perspiration.” So don’t keep your business idea secret. Share it with true perspiration and people will come in droves to your business, from hawker stall to hardware shop.
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1 So what’s my business idea? I’m glad you asked. I’m creating a documentary series about the stories of food entrepreneurs: from the aspiring chefs to the billion-dollar food enterprisers. If you have thoughts about the idea or would like to learn more, then reach out to TASTE with Kevin Longa on our Facebook page. And if you’re a food entrepreneur who feels like they have a story to share, then please fill out this email form.