Overview
Umi Supermarket is a compact, no-frills grocery store tucked along Geylang Road, positioning itself as a budget-friendly destination for hotpot enthusiasts. With Chinese New Year 2026 around the corner, its current store-wide price freeze until 16 February makes it particularly timely for reunion dinner shoppers.
Ingredient Analysis
Frozen Hotpot Staples — $1.00 per pack The centrepiece of the store is a pair of large freezers stocked with standard hotpot fare. Offerings include Crab Sticks, Fish Ball, and Fishcake — all workhorses of any hotpot spread. At $1 per pack, these are competitively priced against mainstream supermarkets like NTUC FairPrice or Sheng Siong, where similar products typically retail between $2–$4 per pack. Value here is strong for budget-conscious shoppers.
Premium Frozen Items — $1.50 per pack A step up from the basics, the premium tier includes Fish Ball With Fish Roe, Cheese Tofu, and Seafood Tofu. These are slightly more indulgent options that add variety to a hotpot spread. At $1.50, they remain well below market rate for comparable specialty items, making them worth picking up even if just to round out a meal.
Meat Section — $3.33–$10 per 200g This is where things get more nuanced. Beef cuts are priced at $10 per 200g, which is broadly in line with — or slightly above — what you’d pay for mid-range shabu shabu beef at major supermarkets. However, the pork deal is notably more attractive: $10 for three 200g boxes works out to just $3.33 per box. Popular cuts include Pork Belly, Pork Roll, and Sliced Beef Shoulder. For pork-heavy hotpot spreads, this pricing represents genuine savings.
Fresh Vegetables — from $1.40 The vegetable selection covers the essential hotpot greens: Cabbage ($1.40), Tomato ($1.40), Baby Corn ($1.50), Lotus Root ($1.50), and Mushroom ($1.60). These are priced similarly to wet market rates, which is a plus — you’re not paying supermarket markup for produce that should be affordable to begin with.
Instant Noodles — $0.50 per packet The standout deal of the store. Five flavour variants are available including Carrot, Pumpkin, Spinach, and the reportedly popular Sweet Potato. At $0.50 each, these are exceptionally cheap and make for a great hotpot base or side. Stock up while the price freeze holds.
Pricing Summary
| Category | Price Range | Value Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Frozen staples | $1.00/pack | Excellent |
| Premium frozen | $1.50/pack | Very good |
| Pork (shabu shabu) | $3.33/200g box | Very good |
| Beef cuts | $10/200g | Fair |
| Fresh vegetables | $1.40–$1.60 | Good |
| Instant noodles | $0.50/packet | Exceptional |
Delivery Options
The article does not mention any delivery services, online ordering, or third-party platform availability (e.g. GrabMart, Redmart, Foodpanda). Given its nature as a small independent mini-mart, delivery may not be available. I’d recommend calling ahead or checking their social media — unfortunately no contact details were included in the article.
Verdict
Umi Supermarket punches well above its weight for a small independent grocer. The frozen hotpot staples and instant noodles are priced aggressively, the produce selection is practical and reasonably priced, and the pork deals are legitimately good value. The beef pricing is less remarkable but not unreasonable. The price freeze until 16 February 2026 adds urgency for CNY shoppers.
Best for: Budget hotpot nights, last-minute CNY grocery runs, bulk noodle stocking. Less ideal for: Premium meat cuts, one-stop shopping for a large spread, or anyone needing delivery.
Address: 797 Geylang Road, Singapore 389679 Hours: Daily, 11am – 9pm Nearest MRT: Paya Lebar (~8 min walk)The Reunion Pot
A CNY Story
The plastic bags from Umi Supermarket crinkled against Wei Ling’s wrist as she pushed open the front door of her mother’s HDB flat in Tampines. It was the 13th of February, two days before Chinese New Year, and the hallway already smelled of tiger balm and mandarin oranges.
“You’re late,” her mother called from the kitchen, not unkindly.
“I stopped at Geylang,” Wei Ling called back, setting the bags down on the dining table and unloading them one by one. Fish balls. Crab sticks. Fishcake. A packet of Fish Ball With Fish Roe — the premium ones, $1.50, a small indulgence. Two packs of pork belly, thin-sliced and pale pink through the plastic. Lotus root. Cabbage. A fistful of mushrooms. And at the very bottom of the bag, four packets of Sweet Potato noodles, $0.50 each, their orange packaging cheerful under the fluorescent light.
Her mother appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a faded floral apron. She looked at the haul on the table and said nothing for a moment. Then: “Fish roe somemore. So extravagant.”
Wei Ling laughed. “It’s CNY, Ma.”
By six o’clock, the portable gas stove was centred on the round table, the steamboat pot — the old one, blackened at the rim from decades of reunion dinners — filled with a light anchovy broth that had been simmering since afternoon. Wei Ling’s brother Marcus arrived with his wife and their two kids, who immediately took off their shoes and ran to the television. Her Aunty Helen came shortly after, bearing a tupperware of homemade ngoh hiang and a loud opinion about the traffic on the PIE.
They arranged everything on small plates around the pot. The fish balls went into a shallow bowl, pale and round and promising. The crab sticks were unpeeled and fanned out. The fishcake was sliced thin on a diagonal. The Fish Ball With Fish Roe sat in a separate saucer — Wei Ling’s mother had relented and admitted they looked quite good, actually. The pork belly was draped across a ceramic plate in overlapping sheets, glistening faintly.
Wei Ling washed the cabbage and tore it into rough pieces. She sliced the lotus root into coins, each one revealing its delicate lace of holes. The mushrooms were left whole. The tomatoes — two of them, $1.40 at Umi, bursting red — were quartered and arranged at the edge of the plate like a garnish nobody had asked for but everyone appreciated.
The Baby Corn went in last. Her nephew Joshua, age seven, immediately pointed at it and said it looked like a tiny cob from a fairy tale, and nobody disagreed.
When the broth began to bubble, the table fell into a comfortable, wordless rhythm.
Her mother dropped in the lotus root first — it needed the most time, she said, same as every year. Then the mushrooms. Marcus dunked three fish balls at once and was told off. Aunty Helen added a tomato wedge and declared it would make the broth sweeter. The children were given fishcake, deemed safe and familiar.
Wei Ling lowered a sheet of pork belly into the rolling broth with chopsticks, watching it curl and whiten at the edges within seconds. She retrieved it just past pink, dipped it in sesame sauce, and ate it standing up because there was no room to sit — someone had added a spare chair and now the table was one chair too many for the space and one person too few for the silence that sometimes settled over families in the in-between hours before a new year.
The Sweet Potato noodles went in during the second round, soft and slightly translucent, soaking up the broth which had by now deepened with the flavour of everything that had passed through it. Joshua declared them his favourite thing. His mother reminded him he said that about everything. He said: yes, but this time he meant it.
At some point between the first pot of broth and the second, between the fish balls and the pork roll, between Aunty Helen’s third retelling of a story from 1987 and Marcus pretending to fall asleep in his chair, Wei Ling looked around the table and thought about the $0.50 noodles and the $1 fish balls and the carefully counted coins of lotus root, and felt something that she could not quite name but that felt like the opposite of emptiness.
Outside, Geylang Road was still humming. The supermarket was still open. The freezers were still full.
But here, around this table, in this broth, everything had already become something else entirely.
Gong Xi Fa Cai.