SINGAPORE - One of Singapore's worst mass food poisoning incidents in recent years reached its legal conclusion in July 2025, when caterer Yun Hai Yao was fined S$7,000 over the outbreak at ByteDance's Singapore headquarters that left 171 people sick and 60 hospitalised.
The incident occurred on July 30, 2024, at ByteDance's office at One Raffles Quay, the TikTok owner's regional base. Staff who fell ill had eaten lunch at a cafeteria on the building's 26th floor, where ByteDance contracts licensed external vendors to provide catering. Within hours, employees began reporting symptoms of gastroenteritis, and the scale of the outbreak quickly became apparent as dozens sought medical attention.
The Ministry of Health and the Singapore Food Agency launched an immediate investigation. Laboratory tests found that samples of wok-fried diced chicken served that day contained more than 200,000 colony forming units per gram of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that can cause severe food poisoning. The legal limit is just 100 colony forming units per gram. The chicken was also found to carry staphylococcus enterotoxin A genes.
A joint inspection of Yun Hai Yao's premises at Northpoint City uncovered a litany of hygiene failures. Officers found a cockroach infestation, with more than 10 live cockroaches discovered under a folded plastic mat behind a rack during food preparation. Dirty racks and peelers were also observed, and a food sample collected during the investigation failed safety tests.
Yun Hai Yao, which operates the Yun Nans restaurant chain, appeared in court in June 2025 facing two charges, one under the Environmental Public Health Food Hygiene Regulations and another under the Sale of Food Act. The company indicated its intention to plead guilty. A second caterer involved in the incident, Pu Tien Services, which operates the central kitchen for the Putien restaurant chain, also had its operations suspended.
Both caterers were ordered to suspend operations from July 31 to August 16, 2024, to rectify the lapses. In a statement after the verdict, Yun Hai Yao said it had stopped its corporate catering business line in Singapore and closed the Northpoint City site, apologising for the incident.
The case embarrassed ByteDance, one of the world's most valuable private technology companies, and raised uncomfortable questions about food safety oversight in corporate catering, a sector that serves tens of thousands of office workers daily. For Singapore's food safety authorities, the outbreak reinforced the need for vigilance even among established operators, and the modest size of the fine sparked debate about whether penalties for corporate food safety failures are a sufficient deterrent.