§5.5The Heritage Plate Mark

• SELF-FINANCING · LICENCE INCOME
• BUILDS ON · IPOS CERTIFICATION MARKS

A master's dish should earn for the master's family when others cook it, not only at the stall. The Heritage Plate is a certification mark, registered with IPOS (Intellectual Property Office of Singapore) under the certification-mark provisions of the Trade Marks Act 1998, that restaurants, hotels, caterers, airlines and packaged-food makers can license. It launches once the first masters are certified, in about Year 3.

• What it certifies. One master's documented recipe and lineage – this master's laksa, as recorded in the Seed Bank – never "authentic" laksa. No one owns a dish (§3.7).
• What is licensed. Recipes stay open (§3.2); the licence covers the mark, the master's name, and training by Master Fellows.
• What the diner pays. A disclosed 50 cents a certified plate, priced in and shown on the menu, so diners opt in by ordering. Packaged foods sold under the mark (pastes, ready meals) pay a royalty of about 3% of retail sales instead, split the same way. Every licensee names the master and links to the master's stall.
• Where the money goes. 40% to the master's family, 40% to the hawker retirement match (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.8.1), and 20% to the Seed Bank for training and checks.
• What it is not. Not another award: FMAS's Hawker Heritage Award honours a hawker and Michelin's Bib Gourmand rates a stall, and neither licenses a dish nor pays a family. Not NHB's SG Heritage Business Scheme either, which gives long-running businesses a plaque and logos, with no money or IP. Its nearest relatives are abroad: the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana's collective mark, kept up by a fee per location, a binding specification and revocation for breach, and Thai SELECT, Thailand's state mark for Thai restaurants abroad (the Record, A.7).
• Consent and veto. No dish carries the mark without the master's consent, and the Hawker Council's documentation veto applies (§3.8). Checks fall on licensees' kitchens, never on hawkers' stalls.
• What it must not become. When UNESCO inscribed hawker culture it warned that "the excessive and uncontrolled marketing of the element has been identified as a potential unintended consequence", and proposed that the centres be watched (decision 15.COM 8.B.6, 2020). Singapore's report of 2024 does not take the point up either way. The Heritage Plate is marketing, so it must be the controlled kind: only with the master's consent; only one master's documented dish; never on a stall's own signboard; capped in number, with every licensee and every certified plate counted in a public register that the evaluator audits each year; and with the money going back to the cook's family. If the mark ever reads as "authentic laksa", it has failed.

One charge per sale. The Family Name Royalty (§4.4) applies to businesses and products that trade under the master's own name; the Heritage Plate's fee or royalty applies to licensees that use the mark. No sale pays both. Licence income is a later stream (§7.6, the Budget Book, B.6.1); Government might match it in the first three years, an idea, not yet an ask (§7.9).