§4.4The Family Name Royalty

• SELF-FINANCING · ESCROW-ADMINISTERED

The most valuable thing many hawkers own is the name above the stall – and today their families inherit none of it. The royalty fixes that at the source of the value:

• 2.5% of gross revenue, for ten years at most, paid to the master's family whenever a heritage stall, licensed product or successor business trades under the master's own name – administered through the same escrow as §4.3. The business that pays it may buy it out at any time, at a multiple of the last year's royalty that the Seed Bank publishes in advance, so no one haggles over it at a hard moment. A licensee that uses the Heritage Plate mark pays the mark's fee instead (§5.5). No sale pays both. It is charged on takings, not profit, on purpose: the one hawker licence I could find that paid on profit, Lao Chaozhou's with a catering group, paid the founders nothing before the licensed outlet closed in November 2023, because the cook was no longer there to "taste the food as it was being prepared, and adjust" (Nigel Chua, IPS, 2024, pp. 44–47). Most licensed expansions on record shrank or closed, so the plan counts on few of them.
• A heritage stall grossing $220,000/year pays the family about $5,500/year, for ten years: about $55,000 in all. Small beside the stall's sales, though at typical margins it is about 14% of profit, so the royalty starts once the Succession Mortgage is paid off: the successor never carries both at once, and the ten years run from the royalty's first month, not the hand-over's. Like the payment, it never takes the successor's monthly profit below the protected $1,500. Why ten years, and not for ever, as version 1.2 had it? Because a successor who has cooked under the name for a decade has made it partly his own, and a charge with no end would sit on the stall long after anyone remembered why it was there. Ten years is long enough to matter to a family: the children who declined the wok hold a real stake in their parent's name being cooked well and often, for as long as it is still their parent's dish that is being cooked.
• Whose name, and which family. Hawker names are often contested within families. A founder's son and grandson run rival bowls of the same noodles, one with a Michelin star and the other a Bib Gourmand; the son's suit of 2008 over the name ended, by Chua's account, with nominal damages of $1,000 (Nigel Chua, IPS, 2024, citing The Straits Times, 13 Oct 2010), and Hill Street Tai Hwa's "only authentic" newspaper notice of 2021 shows the quarrel goes on. So no royalty runs until the name is registered as a trade mark by a named holder, and the family sets in writing how the royalty divides among heirs. And a royalty on a name is not rent from a sublet, which NEA bars: it is paid only where a business trades under the name, it buys a licence of the name and the documented dish, never the right to occupy a stall, and the successor holds the tenancy in his own right.
• Families also receive the digital legacy package – a private copy of the full documentation for family use, separate from any commercial licence.