Our Long and Expensive Delivery Route

Covid-19 has turned many bored people in Singapore into small-time home-based business owners, selling everything from handmade soy candles, homebrewed coffee to all kinds of grandma recipes on platforms like Instagram, Cococart, Carousell and Shopee.

My husband David and I jumped on the bandwagon in Dec 2020 too. We sell a Hakka heritage dish called Lei Cha, or Lui Cha -- depending on whether you're pronouncing it in Mandarin Chinese or the Hakka/Cantonese dialect. It's been widely (mis)translated as Thunder Tea although it's got nothing to do with thunder, thunderstorm or Thor.

You can think of Lei Cha as the Chinese Hakka version of Japanese ochazuke, Korean bibimbap, Hawaiian poke bowl, or simply a healthy and hearty salad bowl. The dressing that comes with it is a basilicious paste that we blend using a number of herbs, peanuts and sesame seeds. It can be diluted with hot water or tea, and served as a soup on the side.

Our Lei Cha soup paste has been quite a hit with our customers, in particular among health-concious and weight-conscious women. We've sold over 800 jars of them on Shopee and another 400 or so on Instagram - a result that we are pretty happy with considering how little marketing we do.

Making the Lei Cha paste is a laborious affair, but an even bigger problem we've been facing is the delivery cost. The charges for engaging professional logistics companies to deliver our chilled paste to many locations across the island within a few hours are prohibitive. Hence, we've been doing it ourselves, spending hours and hours on the road every Saturday to fulfill the orders for the week.

Here's an example of our very long delivery route on July 2, the day when fuel price in Singapore surged to $3.15 or higher per liter - depending on the brand and type of fuel.

While we're happy to receive and fulfill many orders, we are also keenly aware that our profit margin has been eroded as a result of inflated fuel prices - courtesy of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Take our delivery on July 2 for example. Around 15 per cent of our earnings would have gone to pay for petrol.

Besides, our ingredient costs and packaging costs have also increased sharply, as our suppliers, too, are grappling with higher transportation costs. And we haven't even talked about the soaring utility bills.

In any case, the pain is likely to persist as long as the war wages on and the embargo of Russian oil remains. We just have to bite the bullet in the meantime while continuing to delight our customers with our homemade goodness.