Household Ingredients Compared  ›  Mantou (Singapore)

Mantou: what's actually in them?

Mantou are plain steamed buns — wheat flour, water, sugar, yeast and a little fat, steamed rather than baked, so they stay white, soft and mildly sweet. Filled mantou add a filling (chocolate, lotus, pandan, red bean) on top of the same dough. This page covers plain and filled frozen mantou sold in Singapore; filled pau with meat or savoury fillings are a different product and are noted, not panelled, here.

This page does not give a health score or a "best" pick. It shows the ingredient list as printed, with the country of manufacture as printed where a source states it.

Completeness statement — checked 12 November 2026

Stores/channels checked 12 November 2026: FairPrice (web search of its product pages), Cold Storage (availability only — Cold Storage publishes no ingredient lists), Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, RedMart, Lazada SG, Shopee SG, Open Food Facts (secondary). Panelled: 4 products. Seen-but-not-verified: 6 products. This is extensive at the check date only — stock and formulations change, and no page claims permanent 100% completeness.

At a glance

Panelled with verbatim lists: 4 products. Seen-but-not-verified: see the list below. No prices are shown: they change weekly and would go stale.

Seen but not verified — do not panel until checked

• Bee Sim Lotus Paste Pau / Mini Lotus Paste Pau / Red Bean Pau — FairPrice ingredient sections exist for these filled pau (flour, lotus bean/red bean, sugar, vegetable oil, baking powder, yeast) — but they are filled pau from a Singapore pau maker, a different product family from frozen mantou, so they are noted here and not panelled on this page.
• Bee Sim Small / Big Pork Pau — Savoury filled pau (pork, egg); out of this page's mantou scope.
• Mdm Ling Yam Paste Bun / Black Sesame Pau — FairPrice ingredient sections exist; filled pau, not plain mantou — noted, not panelled here.
• Other Fortune mantou flavours (e.g. pandan mantou, brown sugar mantou) — May be sold in Singapore; no FairPrice ingredient section was retrieved in this pass.
• Donki / Meidi-Ya imported mantou — Parallel-import mantou may be on these shelves; no list was retrieved in this pass.
• Fresh mantou from hawker / bakery stalls — No pack and no list; out of scope for verbatim panelling.

Nutrition — what the numbers say

All figures in the sortable table are as sold, per 100g or per 100ml, as printed by the source. Click a column header to sort low to high; click again for high to low. Cells marked "not stated" always sort last — a dash is missing data, not zero. No per-100g nutrition panel was verified for any mantou in this pass; the table is all not stated rather than filled from another variant.

Salt and sodium: salt = sodium × 2.5. The table shows sodium as printed (in mg) with the salt equivalent in brackets. Sodium is not presented as salt, and salt is not presented as sodium.

Total vs added sugars: most Singapore packs list total sugars, not added sugars. A total-sugars figure is never labelled here as "added sugar". Where a source states an added-sugars figure separately, it is noted. The ingredient list remains the evidence for added sugar (sucrose, sugar, glucose syrup, maltitol) versus naturally occurring sugars (lactose in milk, fructose in fruit).

Open Food Facts is a community database and is flagged as secondary where used: the pack and the retailer nutrition section take precedence if they disagree. Figures marked "not stated" were not in the source retrieved; they are not estimated, borrowed from another variant, or copied across flavours.

Seen but not verified (nutrition): all four panelled mantou — no per-100g nutrition panel was verified in this pass.

How to read a label — the jargon, in plain English

Mantou

A plain steamed bun from northern Chinese cooking; no filling, mildly sweet, eaten with savoury dishes or on its own.

Pau / bao

A steamed bun with a filling; the dough is the same family as mantou, the filling makes it a different product.

Dough improver (E481, E482)

Sodium and calcium stearoyl lactylate, emulsifiers that keep steamed dough soft and white.

E500 / E541

Baking powder raising agents: sodium bicarbonate (E500) and sodium aluminium phosphate (E541).

E102 / E133

Tartrazine (yellow) and brilliant blue FCF (blue) — together they make the green colour of the pandan mini bun.

What this page is not

• Not a health score, and not a "best" pick. This page does not rank products.
• Not a taste test, and not a price comparison. Prices change weekly; ingredients change less often, but still change.
• Not complete. The products in seen-but-not-verified are not yet panelled, for the verification reasons given, not hidden.

Sources and method

Checked 12 November 2026 from: FairPrice Singapore ingredient sections for Oriental Fortune (Fortune) Frozen Mantou Plain and Chocolate and Frozen Mini Bun Peach (Lotus) and Jade (Pandan); FairPrice ingredient sections for Bee Sim and Mdm Ling filled pau (noted in seen-but-not-verified only). Cold Storage publishes no ingredient lists. No SG pack was transcribed in this pass.