Singapore's #1 seafood brand ran one Taiwan store for 8 years — then gave up

JUMBO Seafood is a Singapore institution founded in 1987 and once named the No.1 restaurant among the Singapore Tourism Board's top ten seafood restaurants, best known for chili crab and pepper crab. At its peak it ran 16 branches across Singapore, China, Taiwan and Vietnam.

JUMBO entered Taiwan in late 2017 with a Taipei Xinyi store, and opened a Taichung branch in 2018. By 2021 the Taichung store had already closed, leaving Taipei as the brand's only Taiwan outpost.

On 13 August 2025 JUMBO announced on its Taiwan Facebook page that it was leaving Taiwan, and the last store — the Xinyi A8 department-store outlet — closed on 31 August 2025. After it, Taiwanese wanting JUMBO's signature crabs would have to fly to Singapore.

Food writer Chen Jingyi (陳靜宜) pointed to two reasons the brand failed to take root. In Singapore, JUMBO's branches sit by piers or rivers, creating a distinctive immersive dining atmosphere; the Taiwan store was embedded in a department store and never conveyed that. And after years, JUMBO never became the mental default for Singaporean crab in Taiwan the way Din Tai Fung is for xiaolongbao — few Taiwanese sought out its heavy-flavoured dishes.