After seeing the customer's picture of the noodles, stall owner Tan Lee Seng realised it had not come from his stall.

Food delivery company WhyQ has sacked one of its couriers after it emerged that he had passed off a packet of char kway teow he picked up for a customer as coming from the Lao Fu Zi Fried Kway Teow stall at the Old Airport Road Food Centre.

Stall owner Tan Lee Seng said he learnt of the incident on Sunday after a customer complained to him that the standard of his char kway teow had dropped.

When the customer showed him a picture of the fried noodles he had received, Mr Tan realised that it was not from his stall.

In an interview with The Straits Times, Mr Rishabh Singhvi, co-founder of food delivery app WhyQ, said the courier has been banned from the app after the company found out about the incident.

He has also removed the popular char kway teow stall from the app after the owner complained that he had never agreed to be listed.

Mr Tan, 53, said he had received complaints from at least eight customers about the quality of his fried noodles.

"Such incidents damage the reputation of my stall that I built over the years," Mr Tan added.

Mr Rishabh, 29, said WhyQ has signed or had verbal agreements with all stalls listed on the app.

"We have signed agreements with about 95 per cent of our stalls to enable us to list them and place orders using the app or over the counter," he said.

He claimed WhyQ has had a signed agreement with the Lao Fu Zi Fried Kway Teow stall since May last year.

But when shown the agreement, Mr Tan said that although the mobile number listed is his, the signature is not.

The stall was removed from the app on May 26. An e-mail was sent to all WhyQ customers explaining the incident.

APOLOGISED

The company also apologised to the stall and its customers for the courier's actions.

"We only work with independent contractors, who also work with other delivery services throughout the day. It is the courier's responsibility to place orders over the counter at the hawker stall," said Mr Rishabh.

WhyQ has about 100 independent contractors on its delivery team.

The company, which launched in 2017, currently has 1,200 stalls listed on its platform. It has 85,000 customers and makes about 1,500 deliveries daily.