B.6.1Who gives: diners and the businesses that feed them

• Diners. Direct gifts of any size through the campaign, and an opt-in "add a dollar for the Seed Bank" at the till of participating restaurants, food courts and coffeeshops – never added to the bill without asking. During the campaign each dollar is matched until the $10M pool is used. Once the Seed Bank has IPC (Institution of a Public Character, a charity whose donors get a tax deduction) status (B.6.2), households can also give through the CDC Vouchers (Government vouchers for every household) Donation Scheme, which moved about $1.19m from some 9,880 households to 245 IPCs in 2023.
• Profitable F&B businesses – Founding Plate Partners. A five-year pledge of 0.5% of average pre-tax profit over the last three years, and 1% from firms whose business sells hawker heritage directly; a loss year counts as zero. Coffeeshop and food-court operators may meet up to half of theirs as rent rebates to the heritage stalls they host (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.12), so the benefit lands at the stall. Regional groups pledge on the profit they earn in Singapore. With the 250% tax deduction (donors deduct two and a half times their gift from taxable income) for gifts to IPCs, a 1% pledge costs a company about 0.6% of its profit after tax. Why a pledge, and not another campaign? Because giving to hawkers by companies and foundations has so far come in campaigns: Tiger's fund in 2017, Temasek Foundation's hawker meals in 2020, platform commission waivers in 2020–21, DBS's cashback runs each year since 2023 (the Record, A.1.2). Each helped, and each had an end date. The pledge asks for something that stays.
• Beyond F&B. The same pledge is open to the landlords of mall food courts, banks, hotels and tourism firms – everyone whose business is better because Singapore eats this way.
• Later: the Heritage Plate. From about Year 3, businesses that license the Heritage Plate mark (the Plan, §5.5) pay a disclosed 50 cents a certified plate: 40% to the master's family, 40% to the retirement match (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.8.1) and 20% to the Seed Bank. Central estimate of licence income: about $60,000 in its first year (Year 3, at 15 licensed outlets), rising to about $2.0M a year from Year 7 at 400 licensed outlets and growing packaged-goods sales, net of a third of licensees failing each year (assumption, after Chua's finding that most licensed hawker expansions shrank or closed; B.9.5); the Seed Bank's 20% share is about $400,000 a year at that scale.

Sized honestly: companies that give typically give about 1% of pre-tax profit across all causes, so half of that for one cause is an ask a board can accept. Singapore's listed restaurant and coffeeshop groups earned about $50M in their latest year, and Singapore-based regional F&B groups about $350M more. If half of them pledge, counting only the profit regional groups earn in Singapore, that is about $630,000 a year, about $100,000 of it as rent rebates; the cash part is matched while the pool lasts. Diners add more than partners do – about $2.3M in gifts and $1.9M at the till over the campaign – but the campaign still needs about $5.7M from major donors and family foundations to close on time (B.9). After the campaign the order reverses: the small, steady dollars from diners are what keep the programme running – and at three centres about two-thirds of them are spent each year, while the rest join the corpus (the endowment's invested capital).