Consumers will be able to find out how much their favourite hawker dish should cost by visiting the CASE website from next month.

CONSUMERS will be able to find out how much their favourite hawker dish should cost by visiting the Consumers Association of Singapore (Case) website from next month.

The average prices of 10 popular dishes by area will be listed, which means consumers will be able to compare prices of cooked food. The guide will also list the stalls with the highest and lowest prices for each dish.

To gather this data, over 30 'mystery shoppers' will fan out across the island for two weeks next month.

Case president Yeo Guat Kwang said this will not only make prices more transparent and enable consumers to make better choices, but it will also deter hawkers from profiteering.

He said Case did not know how widespread profiteering was, so the survey would 'give us an understanding of the magnitude of the problem'.

He said the consumer watchdog was concerned that some hawkers - claiming the need to cover the rising cost of raw ingredients such as rice and noodles - are getting away with charging exorbitant prices.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry has disclosed that more hawkers have raised their prices in the last two months: 65 per cent are holding their prices steady, down from 75 per cent two months ago.

The ministry conducts price checks on 1,271 randomly chosen stalls in hawker centres and markets. Every two weeks, it dispatches about half a dozen officers to check for price increases at these stalls.

Case has received 14 public complaints regarding overcharging at hawker centres and coffee shops since the start of the year - against 38 such complaints for the whole of last year.

Besides publishing cooked-food prices, Case plans to help consumers battle the rising cost of living by making its annual publication of grocery prices a monthly affair from this month.

The survey, which establishes baseline prices for common household items and groceries in supermarkets here, will also be published online and updated for the next four to six months.

Mr Seah Seng Choon, Case's executive director, said: 'Right now, market prices are changing rapidly. So we are trying to keep our data up to date.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on April 16, 2008.