Chicken wings will return after supplier is found: Ikea Singapore
Ikea South-east Asia’s retail director Mike King said that the furniture giant’s two outlets had sold a total of 3.3 million chicken wings a year, or about 10,000 a day, adding that the Tampines restaurant was the busiest in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. PHOTO: Koh Mui Fong
SINGAPORE — It is unclear when Ikea Singapore will reintroduce its famous chicken wings to its menu after the furniture giant said yesterday that it was still hunting for an alternative supplier.
Its original supplier from Malaysia — its source of chicken wings for the last 18 months — had had to slaughter chickens when they were younger because of a surge in global demand, causing smaller wings to be supplied to Ikea in the last “two to three months”.
“The manufacturer in Malaysia is under pressure in terms of the global demand for chicken because of some issues that have happened around food supply,” Ikea South-east Asia’s retail director Mike King, 46, told TODAY.
He was referring to the tainted meat scandal in Brazil, which resulted in a drop in chicken exports from the world’s top supplier.
“(Because) there is a big demand for chicken, the supplier was basically slaughtering the chickens earlier,” he said. “The wings that they were sending us were getting smaller and smaller, so we decided it’s best that we don’t sell them until we get the size and the quality up.”
It is not just about the size of the wings, he added. “If the chicken wing is not big, when you cook it, it doesn’t stay juicy; it dries out.”
Ikea Singapore triggered a social media outcry when it announced on May 19 that it would be temporarily stopping the sale of its chicken wings from May 23.
The decision to stop the sale of its chicken wings was not a difficult one, Mr King said.
The retailer was already receiving feedback from not only customers on social media and in its two restaurants at Alexandra and Tampines, but the cooks themselves who noted a reduction in size of the chicken wings in the daily deliveries.
“For every 10 (chicken wings) that made their way on to the servery for the customer, we were getting rid of three,” he said. “We weren’t prepared to cook them ... because the quality wasn’t there.”
However, fans of the chicken wings can be assured that they will return, as the Swedish chain had begun looking for other suppliers even before it stopped its sale.
“For Singapore at least, the chicken wing is a staple line,” Mr King said, citing it, along with Ikea’s meatballs, as “among the top five best sellers” in the restaurants.
He added that Ikea’s two outlets had sold a total of 3.3 million chicken wings a year, or about 10,000 a day, adding that the Tampines restaurant was the busiest in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
“One thing we can assure customers is, when (the wings) come back, they will have the right quality, we know where they’ve come from … and we’ll have served them in a responsible way,” Mr King said.
