Household Ingredients Compared  ›  Stock Cubes and Paste (Singapore)

Stock cubes and paste: what's actually in it?

Four different products share the stock shelf. A stock cube is a compressed block, usually dissolved in hot water. Stock powder / granules are the same idea in loose form, spooned out instead of crumbled. Stock paste / concentrate is a soft paste or gel, usually in a jar, tub or single-use pot. Liquid stock / broth is ready to use, in a carton or bottle, and is mostly water — its ingredient list starts with water or broth, while a cube or powder list usually starts with salt. The front of the pack rarely makes the salt and flavouring load clear; the ingredient list does.

This page covers stock cubes, stock powder, stock paste/concentrate and liquid stock sold in Singapore — chicken, beef, vegetable, fish, pork, mushroom, dashi and tom yum / hot-pot stock bases, as separate rows per brand and flavour. It does not cover canned soup or broth cartons already panelled as soup (see the canned-soup page for the Heinz and Swanson broths, which are repeated here because they are also liquid stock), curry paste (own page), or instant-noodle seasoning sachets. This page does not give a health score or a "best" pick.

The headline, in 30 seconds

• Only three panels rest on Singapore-facing sources. Knorr Seasoning Chicken Cubes are panelled from a Singapore Shopee listing, and the Heinz Packet Broth — Chicken 1L and Swanson Clear Chicken Broth 250ml are panelled from FairPrice Singapore ingredient sections (already verified on the canned-soup page). Every other panel is a flagged overseas list — see each card — and none of them is presented as the Singapore pack list.
• The Singapore Knorr chicken cube list contradicts its own listing title. The Shopee Singapore listing is titled "KNORR SEASONING CHICKEN NO ADDED MSG", but the ingredient list it prints includes monosodium glutamate (plus sodium inosinate and guanylate). The title claim and the list cannot both be right; the list is quoted verbatim and the conflict is stated, not resolved.
• The same brand name hides several different cubes. Three different Knorr chicken-cube lists were retrieved in this pass — the Singapore Shopee list (salt, MSG, maltodextrin, cornstarch, sugar, chicken, palm fat…), a 54g Open Food Facts list (salt, palm fat, corn starch, sugar, maltodextrin, yeast extract… with chicken fat 1.6% and chicken 0.7% and no MSG named), and the UK 200g list (salt, starch, vegetable fats, yeast extract, sugar, chicken fat 3%, chicken 1%). They are different formulations; do not copy one onto another.
• Salt is first in almost every cube and powder. The exceptions are the paste/concentrate pots (Knorr Chicken Stock Pot starts with concentrated chicken stock, 63%) and the liquid broths (96–98% broth). The named meat or vegetable is usually a small percentage — Knorr UK chicken cubes are 1% chicken, Massel-style cubes are plant-based by design, and Hondashi's flavour comes from bonito powder and extract, not from a large fish content.
• Flavour enhancers are the norm, not the exception. MSG (E621), disodium inosinate (E631) and disodium guanylate (E627) appear across the Knorr, Maggi, Oxo, Lee Kum Kee and Haidilao lists. The products that avoid them say so by formulation — Massel cubes (yeast extract, no MSG), Knorr Zero Salt cubes (no salt, no added MSG) and Kallo-style organic cubes — but none of those three has a verified Singapore pack list yet.
• No Singapore supermarket category listing could be read in full in this pass. FairPrice, Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart and Lazada produced no retrievable stock-category inventory with ingredient sections in this web pass, so the shelf beyond Knorr/Shopee is inventoried from search results only. That is a gap, not evidence that nothing else is sold — see the seen-but-not-verified list.

At a glance

Panelled with verbatim lists: 22 products — 3 with Singapore-facing sources (Knorr chicken cubes via Shopee SG; Heinz and Swanson broths via FairPrice SG ingredient sections) and 19 flagged overseas lists (UK, US, JP, AU or market-unstated), none presented as the Singapore pack list. Seen-but-not-verified: see the list below.

Prices are deliberately not shown here: they change weekly and would go stale. This site compares ingredients only.

Stock cubes — panelled products

Stock powder and granules — panelled products

Stock paste, concentrate and liquid stock — panelled products

Seen but not verified — do not panel until checked

• Knorr Seasoning Cubes — Beef, Tom Yam, Ikan Bilis (Anchovies) variants, 6 cubes — sold on Shopee Singapore as variants of the multi-variant listing, but the listing prints only the chicken list for all five variants. No flavour-specific list was retrieved for any of them. Do not copy the chicken list onto them.
• Knorr Chicken Stock Powder 1kg / Bouillon Chicken Powder 1kg (foodservice) — named in a foodservice offer list (Knorr Chicken Stock Cubes 60's 600g, Knorr Bouillon Chicken 8 × 9g = 72g, Knorr Bouillon Chicken Powder 1kg, Knorr Beef Stock Cubes 60's 600g) and in a UAE foodservice catalogue (Knorr Chicken Stock Powder 1.1kg, Knorr Vegetable Stock Soup Powder 1.1kg, Knorr Ikan Bilis Seasoning Powder 1kg, Knorr Beef Stock Bouillon 1.1kg). Foodservice-only in those sources; no Singapore retail list retrieved. The 60's 600g Knorr cubes are a foodservice pack size, not the retail 6-cube box.
• Knorr Vegetable Bouillon cubes, Knorr Shrimp Bouillon, Knorr Chicken Flavor Bouillon powder (US 15.9oz) — listed on iHerb Singapore's broths and bouillon category; no verbatim list retrieved for the iHerb SG listings in this pass.
• Maggi Beef Bouillon Cubes; Maggi Chicken Base (No Added MSG) paste, US foodservice — US lists exist for the chicken base paste (chicken and chicken broth, salt, maltodextrin, chicken fat, hydrolyzed soy and corn proteins, sugar…), but no Singapore sale or SG list was confirmed for any Maggi stock product in this pass. Maggi seasoning sauce is a seasoning, not stock — check before panelling any Maggi product here.
• Oxo Lamb Stock Cubes, Oxo Reduced Salt Beef Stock Cubes, Oxo Meat-Free Beef Flavour Cubes, Oxo Stock Pots, Oxo Chicken and Herb Thickening Stock Powder — UK lists retrieved for several of these (reduced-salt beef: wheat flour, salt, flavour enhancers, maize starch, yeast extract, colour, sugar, beef fat 4.5%…), but no Singapore sale was confirmed for any Oxo product in this pass. Not panelled as SG products.
• Massel Stock Powder — Chicken Style, Beef Style, Vegetable; Massel Liquid Stock — Chicken Style 1L, Beef Flavour — Australian product range (stock powder lists retrieved from Australian foodservice specs: beef style — southern ocean sea salt, maize maltodextrin, cane sugar, yeast extract, dehydrated vegetables, rice flour, natural vegetable flavours, caramelised sugar syrup, disodium guanylate and inosinate, canola oil; chicken style liquid — water, southern ocean sea salt, cane sugar, maize maltodextrin, natural vegetable flavours, yeast extract, turmeric). No Singapore sale was confirmed in this pass, so none is panelled as an SG product. Note the Massel liquid stock list is a genuine liquid-stock list, not a cube list — do not conflate the two.
• Kallo (Kallø) Organic Chicken, Vegetable and Beef Stock Cubes — UK lists retrieved (chicken: sea salt, potato starch, sustainable palm fat, sugar, chicken fat 3.5%, yeast extract, natural chicken flavour, chicken powder 1%…; vegetable: sea salt, potato starch, sustainable palm oil, sugar, vegetables 6.8%…), but no Singapore sale evidence was found in this pass. Not panelled as SG products.
• Swanson Chicken Broth 1L; Swanson Pork Bone Broth 500ml — listed at Cold Storage Singapore; no verbatim lists retrieved. Do not copy the SG 250ml Clear Chicken Broth list onto the 1L or onto the pork bone variant.
• Heinz Packet Broth — Chicken 250ml; Heinz Chicken Broth 25% Reduced Salt 1L — sold in Singapore; no verbatim lists retrieved. Do not copy the 1L regular-broth list onto either of them.
• Lee Kum Kee Premium Chicken Bouillon Powder (No MSG Added) — US specification retrieved (see the Lee Kum Kee card for the variant conflict), but no Singapore list. Also: Lee Kum Kee sells many sauces and pastes that are not stock — check each product before panelling.
• Ayam Brand and Woh Hup stock/broth products — no stock product with a retrievable verbatim list was found for either brand in this pass. Both brands sell sauces and pastes that are not stock; do not assume a sauce listing is a stock listing.
• Prima Taste Laksa Hot Pot Soup Base; Prima Taste Tom Yum / laksa paste kits — Prima Taste laksa kits are sold in Singapore, but their contents are a laksa paste plus a coconut premix (a meal kit, not a stock cube/powder/paste), and no verbatim list for a Prima Taste stock-base-only product was retrieved. Curry pastes belong to the curry-paste category and are not duplicated here.
• Haidilao (HDL) Spicy Hot Pot Soup Base Cubes, 4 cubes per pack — sold at selected Singapore supermarkets including FairPrice and Sheng Siong (Shout.sg); no ingredient list retrieved for the cubes as sold in Singapore. Needs a pack photo. The 220g block list panelled above is not the cubes' list.
• Other dashi: Marushima Bonito Soup Base, Dashiya Drinking Dashi, Tetsujin Dashi No Moto, Ajinomoto Whole Chicken Stock Powder — Japanese lists retrieved from Japanese retailers (Marushima: glucose, salt, flavour ingredients (bonito powder, kombu powder), powdered soy sauce, seasonings (amino acids, etc.); Dashiya: katsuobushi, dried sardines, coarse kelp, no additives, salt equivalent 3.2g per 100g as printed), but no Singapore sale was confirmed for any of them in this pass. Not panelled as SG products.
• Better Than Bouillon — Beef, Vegetable, Mushroom, Lobster and other bases — only the Organic Roasted Chicken Base is panelled (US list). The other flavours have US lists but no SG listing with a verbatim list was retrieved; iHerb Singapore names the Organic Roasted Beef Base in its category, without a list in this pass.
• House-brand stock cubes / powder / liquid (FairPrice, Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong) — no house-brand stock product was confirmed on sale in this pass, and no list was retrieved. Confirm whether each chain actually sells one before panelling.
• Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart and Lazada stock ranges — no named stock product with a retrievable verbatim list was found for any of these channels in this web pass. That is a gap in this page, not evidence that nothing is sold there: Donki and Meidi-Ya in particular sell Japanese dashi and stock that need an in-store shelf check and pack photos. See research notes.

Nutrition — what the numbers say

All figures in the table are as sold, per 100 g / 100 ml, except the two rows flagged per serving, which are quoted exactly as printed and not converted. For cubes, powder and paste, "as sold" means the concentrated cube/powder/paste in the pack — its salt figure looks very high because the product is diluted before eating. The "as prepared" figure (one cube in 450–500ml of water, or one teaspoon of paste in a cup) is roughly 40–50 times lower, and the two must never be compared directly. Liquid stock rows are as sold and ready to use, so their per-100ml figures are comparable with each other but not with a cube's per-100g figure. No official Singapore Nutri-Grade (A–D) was found printed on any stock listing in this pass, so none is quoted here; no grade has been assigned.

Salt and sodium: salt = sodium × 2.5. The table shows sodium as printed (in mg) with the salt equivalent in brackets. Where a source printed salt rather than sodium, sodium is derived as salt ÷ 2.5 and flagged as derived. Total vs added sugars: most 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 in the research notes. The ingredient list remains the evidence for added sugar (sugar, glucose, dextrose, glucose syrup) versus naturally occurring sugars.

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. Two Open Food Facts entries for Knorr chicken cubes disagree wildly on prepared-product figures (one gives 5 kcal and 1g salt per 100g prepared, another 7 kcal and 0.93g salt) because they describe different products' prepared values — neither is used here; only as-sold figures from a foodservice specification are tabled for the Knorr UK cube.

Observed numbers, no verdict: the Knorr UK chicken cube lists 41.3 g salt per 100 g as sold, against 23.5 g for the Nigerian Maggi cube — both are concentrated cubes, and both figures are as sold, before dilution. The two liquid broths are far lower per 100 ml as sold: Heinz Packet Broth 1,163 mg sodium per 100 ml, Swanson 907 mg sodium per 250 ml serving as printed. The Massel per-serving row is quoted exactly as printed by Open Food Facts, but its own numbers do not line up cleanly (the ingredient text embedded in the same OFF entry says "sodium 460mg… total sugars 0.54g includes 0.5g added sugars" while the nutrition table on the same page says sugars 0.045g per serving) — the discrepancy is stated here, not resolved, and the row must not be converted to per-100g figures because the serving size (2.6g) is too small for that calculation, as Open Food Facts itself warns.

Seen but not verified (nutrition): no per-100 g/ml nutrition panel was verified in this pass for the Shopee Singapore Knorr chicken cubes, the Knorr 54g cubes, Knorr Zero Salt cubes, Knorr Beef cubes, any Oxo cube, the US Maggi cubes, Knorr Chicken Powder, Lee Kum Kee Chicken Bouillon Powder, Maggi Powder Chicken Bouillon, either Hondashi variant, Marutomo dashi, either Knorr Stock Pot, Better Than Bouillon Organic Roasted Chicken Base, or the Haidilao soup base. Their ingredient panels are unchanged; their nutrition figures are not estimated here. The Maggi nutrition row above belongs to the Nigerian Maggi cube variant, not to the US Maggi cubes panelled on this page — do not read it as the US cubes' figures.

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

Stock cube / bouillon cube

A compressed block of salt, flavourings, fat and flavour enhancers, dissolved in hot water to make stock. One cube usually makes a stated volume (for example 500ml for Knorr, 190ml for Oxo) — check the pack, because cube sizes differ.

Stock powder / granules

The same idea in loose form. A spoonful makes a stated volume of stock. Granules dissolve faster than a cube; the ingredient logic is usually similar, but the chicken content can be higher — Knorr Chicken Powder lists 5.7% chicken meat powder against 0.7–1% chicken in its cubes.

Stock paste / concentrate / stock pot

A soft paste or gel, usually in a jar, tub or single-use pot. A spoonful (or one pot) is diluted in hot water. Because it is a paste, it can contain more water than a cube — compare "as sold" and "as prepared" figures carefully. Knorr Stock Pots start with concentrated stock (63% for chicken), not salt.

Liquid stock / broth

Ready-to-use stock in a carton or bottle. It is mostly water or broth, so its ingredient list usually starts with water or broth, and its per-100ml salt is far lower than a cube's per-100g salt — the two are not comparable without the dilution basis.

Dashi / Hondashi

Japanese stock, usually made from bonito (tuna) flakes and kombu (kelp), sold as granules or liquid concentrate. Hondashi is Ajinomoto's brand of instant dashi granules. It is stock, so it belongs on this page; it is not a soy sauce or a curry paste. It contains fish and usually wheat.

Flavour enhancers (MSG, E621 and others)

Ingredients added to boost savoury (umami) flavour. Monosodium glutamate is E621; disodium inosinate is E631; disodium guanylate is E627; disodium 5'-ribonucleotides is E635. A list may name them as "monosodium glutamate", "flavour enhancer (621)" or "E621" — check the exact wording on the pack. "No added MSG" on the front is a claim to check against the list, not a substitute for the list — the Shopee Knorr listing on this page shows why.

Yeast extract

A savoury ingredient made from yeast, often used in stocks that claim "no added MSG". It naturally contains glutamates. Its presence is not the same as added MSG, and the two should not be conflated.

"As sold" vs "as prepared"

"As sold" is the product in the pack (per 100g). "As prepared" is the stock after dilution as directed (per 100ml). For cubes, powder and paste the as-sold salt figure looks very high; the as-prepared figure is the one comparable with liquid stock. Never compare one product's as-sold figure with another's as-prepared figure.

Salt vs sodium

Packs usually print sodium (Singapore) or salt (UK/EU). Salt = sodium × 2.5; sodium = salt ÷ 2.5. The table on this site shows sodium as printed, with the salt equivalent in brackets, and flags derived figures.

Hot-pot soup base

A concentrated block or paste (for example Haidilao mala base) diluted in water to make a hot-pot broth. It is a stock base, so it belongs on this page; it is not a curry paste, and its chilli and Sichuan pepper content makes it a different product from a plain stock cube.

What this page is not

• Not a health score, and not a "best" pick. Cubes, powder, paste and liquid stock are different products, and this page does not rank them.
• Not a taste test, and not a price comparison. Prices change weekly; ingredients change less often, but still change.
• Not complete. Only three panels rest on Singapore-facing sources; the rest are flagged overseas lists, and the FairPrice, Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong, Don Don Donki, Mustafa, Meidi-Ya, Le Petit Depot, Little Farms, RedMart and Lazada stock shelves were not inventoried with verified lists in this pass. The gaps are listed above, not hidden.
• Not a source for the Singapore pack list of any overseas-flagged product. A UK, US or Japanese list is quoted as that market's list, never as the Singapore pack list.

Sources and method

Checked 5–6 November 2026. Web search only — no in-store shelf check and no pack photos in this pass. Singapore-facing sources: Shopee Singapore listings for Knorr Seasoning Chicken Cubes 6 × 60g (seller asean.os) and the five-variant Knorr listing (seller Nestz); Knorr SG recipe site confirming Knorr Chicken Stock Cubes in Singapore; FairPrice Singapore ingredient sections for Heinz Packet Broth — Chicken 1L and Swanson Clear Chicken Broth 250ml (already verified on the canned-soup page); Shout.sg for Haidilao soup-base cubes at FairPrice and Sheng Siong; iHerb Singapore category page for Better Than Bouillon and Knorr bouillon listings; Eatbook.sg for Knorr Chicken Stock Cube use in Singapore. Overseas/secondary sources: Open Food Facts (Knorr chicken cubes 54g and 200g UK, Maggi US cubes, Knorr chicken powder, Massel chicken cubes, Better Than Bouillon, Heinz broth barcode 4897003340327); Knorr UK, ASDA, Ocado and Tesco for the UK Knorr and Oxo lists; Premier Foods foodservice data and Henderson foodservice for Oxo and Knorr UK nutrition; Nestlé Family for Maggi powder; Lee Kum Kee USA specification via WebstaurantStore; Spoonful for Massel and Lee Kum Kee variant lists; Ajinomoto via misosoup.site and Japacle for Hondashi; Wanahong for Marutomo; Pinoys.eu and eBay for Haidilao. Cold Storage publishes no ingredient list on any product page, so its shelf is inventoried from listings only. Full per-fact source list is in the accompanying research notes. Nutrition section added 5–6 November 2026: figures are standardised to per 100 g or per 100 ml where the source gives per-100 figures; per-serving-only figures are labelled as such and are not converted; sugars are total sugars as printed, not added sugars, unless the source states added sugars; salt = sodium × 2.5, with derived figures flagged. Where a full pack list could not be verified, the product is in seen-but-not-verified instead of being panelled. Note on the previous version: the 5 November 2026 scaffold for this page panelled 0 products because every search that day returned HTTP 429; search worked again on 5–6 November 2026 and this re-run replaces that scaffold in full.