Jakarta’s roadside food sellers

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Hana is one of the roughly 50,000 street food vendors in Jakarta. These sellers, who are often seen in groups at more permanent markets, alongside busy streets, or walking the streets selling their wares, are known locally as “pedagang kaki lima” or “kaki lima sellers”. Another term used to describe them is “pedagang keliling”, or travelling salesperson. 

The term “kaki lima” literally translates to “five feet”. The exact origin of the term is unclear, but one explanation lies in the five-foot-wide covered walkways of buildings that popped up during colonial times. Traders would use these sheltered spaces to sell food and other wares. The term could also be a reference to the five “legs” of a vendor with a cart—two of the vendor, two of the cart’s wheels, plus a balancing stick when the cart is parked. 

Kaki lima sellers have become part of the landscape of not only Jakarta, but many parts of Indonesia. This story looks at the experiences of a group of street vendors predominantly plying their trade in East Jakarta, as well as the larger issues facing this group across the rest of Jakarta.

The routes of kaki lima sellers entangle with the everyday rituals of the people in their neighbourhoods, forming a bustling social network that gives the city its charm. Daily life is accompanied by the soundtrack of their familiar calls, often unique to each seller. 

The timings below reflect the experiences of kaki lima sellers based in Kramat Jati, East Jakarta.

There have been some attempts to register street food vendors, but they continue to be counted amongst the considerable number of informal workers in Indonesia. 

Informal workers in Jakarta make up around 38 percent of the total workforce, and numbers have been growing in recent years. This trend is reflected in the rest of Indonesia, where COVID has caused a major shift in the workforce from the formal to the informal sector.

As informal workers, kaki lima sellers do not enjoy the benefits of formal employment arrangements, and do not have much legal protections. Their informality also means it is harder for them to receive government support.  

Like Naufal, many kaki lima sellers migrated to Jakarta from smaller towns or villages, looking for better opportunities. The low barriers to entry to becoming a kaki lima seller make it attractive to new migrants from rural areas who want to start a small business in the capital city. However, sometimes it is because they have no choice—like other vulnerable groups, some migrants enter into informal work because they are shut off from other opportunities.

While they are an integral part of the informal economy and local culture, kaki lima sellers can be a source of discomfort and potential violence in the urban city. Their activities—which may include making unofficial payments of “security money” for them to secure spaces for trade—are often viewed with suspicion, and questioned for their legitimacy. Their operations are also often associated with a lack of hygiene. 

In colonial times, anti-hawker policies were enacted as they went against the logic of modern city planning, where pavements were supposed to be kept clear for pedestrian use. Today, kaki lima sellers are perceived as a nuisance as they often block roads and pavements.

These policies are often interrelated, and do sometimes instil an element of safety and security beneficial for both sellers and consumers. However, they are often not consistently applied, due to the sheer size of the kaki lima scene, and the number of ministries and agencies involved across the country.

A clear example are the vendors of the bustling Tanah Abang marketplace in Central Jakarta. A massive effort in 2013 to move almost 1,000 vendors from congested roads to a floor in the market building was initially deemed successful, only for vendors to move back by 2014. As of 2019, a Jakarta city councillor is hoping to clear them off the streets—and has Indonesia’s Supreme Court on his side. However, Jakarta’s governor Arnies Baswedan appears to waver between forcibly relocating vendors to a new skybridge in the market, trying to placate vendors with genuine concerns over their livelihoods, and dealing with violent responses.

In terms of mobile penetration rates, Indonesia is in third place with over 365 million total mobile phone subscriptions in 2021—with a population of roughly 273 million, that’s about 1.3 subscriptions per resident. Over 76 percent of the Indonesian population owned a smartphone in 2021. 

Given this landscape, bringing kaki lima sellers into the digital ecosystem is seen as an untapped opportunity, which e-commerce companies like Bukalapak and Warung Pintar are looking to exploit. (“Bukalapak'' means “to open a market stall”, while “Warung Pintar” means “smart stall”.) 

Complementing the development of the e-commerce market in Indonesia is the rise in popularity of food delivery services, such as GoFood (Gojek) and Grab. Indonesia had the largest market for food delivery services in Southeast Asia in 2020, valued at USD 3.7 billion. This growth in food delivery services was largely a result of the pandemic, as social distancing and restrictions on outdoor dining pushed more people to eat at home.

The pandemic has also led to a growth of the cloud kitchen scene in Indonesia, injecting variety into the food and beverage landscape of Jakarta. A cloud kitchen, or a “ghost kitchen”, typically refers to a restaurant mainly comprising a kitchen that only does deliveries.

These cloud kitchens are diverse and feature different business models. They may come in the form of a standalone building, divided into smaller kitchen pods which are each rented to a different brand or tenant, or a “co-working style” kitchen shared by multiple brands from the same or different owners. 

After Grab and Gojek launched their cloud kitchen pilots in 2018, several other players entered the market including Everplate, Hangry, Yummy Corp, and Legit Group. In 2021, seven operators ran an estimated 70 cloud kitchen branches containing over 500 kitchen pods across Jakarta. The market is set to grow, buoyed by large sums of investor funds. 

Everplate is one of the largest cloud kitchen operators in Jakarta. It has eight kitchen facilities strategically located across the different regions in Jakarta, with an average order value of IDR 100,000 (USD 6.66). To make sense of that figure, a bowl of bakso bought from a kaki lima seller costs about IDR 8,000 to 12,000 (USD 0.53 to 0.80).

The cloud kitchen industry is full of investor-friendly words like “revolutionise the food and beverage industry” and “high growth potential”, reflecting the changing trends in consumer behaviour in Indonesia. In particular, the younger generation are leading this change, as they are willing to pay a premium in the name of convenience and almost-instant gratification. Busier lifestyles, combined with Jakarta’s notorious traffic jams, have also contributed to this demand.  

In this new era of food demand and rapid urban development, it is worth asking if there is still room for kaki lima sellers.

When it comes to talking about Indonesia’s kaki lima sellers, there is a natural tendency to be nostalgic. There is a longing for a past when relationships felt more organic and interactions were easier. 

But it feels premature to count the kaki lima sellers out totally. It is precisely the people who occupy the margins that have the resilience to forge on, in the spirit of enterprise and resistance. In fact, it has been argued that Indonesia’s informal economy makes it better able to weather global crises. 

Looking ahead, formalisation may not be out of the picture—some kaki lima sellers want to open more permanent shops. These ambitions are supported by the Association of Kaki Lima Sellers (APKLI), which aims to professionalise the scene. If their efforts are successful, more sellers may one day be folded into Indonesia’s thriving e-commerce economy. Only time will tell how this changes the social relations and rituals we associate with kaki lima sellers.

As long as kaki lima sellers continue to occupy an important role in Indonesia’s society, it is unlikely that their signature sights and sounds will vanish from the streets of Jakarta. The forms they take may evolve, but one can imagine them finding their footing in a future rooted in grit, service, and kinship.