The nightmare of the takeaway restaurant, the second spring of the central kitchen restaurant
I never thought that a helpless “Chinese New Year on the spot” has spurred a super outlet:
Pre-made dishes.
The top ten new year goods data released by Tmall shows that the sales of pre-made vegetables have increased 16 times compared with last year, ranking first in the “top ten new year goods”. Some local traditional specialties, such as Guangdong’s Poon Choi and Hangzhou’s Eight Treasure Rice, have become popular items in Tmall’s New Year’s live broadcast.
In the same period, JD Big Data showed that since January 20, the turnover of small-package semi-finished vegetables for 1 to 2 people has increased by 3.5 times year-on-year.
In addition, the search volume of “New Year’s Eve Dinner” on the food delivery platform Ele.me App has also increased by 4 times year-on-year. The semi-finished products and the home version of the New Year’s Eve dinner correspond to different catering businesses to provide services.
As a semi-finished product that used to be a 2B business, it suddenly “serves the table” on a large scale and officially enters the family kitchen: For catering companies that independently control the food supply chain and have the ability to process food, it will be a new opportunity to take off; For food to be more standardized, it may be a nightmare to rely on new brands that have joined the rise and take-out shops that rely on the take-out platform.
In addition, this great change in retail catering has also given group meal central kitchen companies the opportunity to “serve the table.”
Selling crazy! Semi-finished New Year’s Eve Dinner “Hundred Flowers”
“The dishes can be supplied, but the gift boxes can’t be supplied” Pu Wenming, the founder of the new pre-sale dish brand “Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan”, confessed to reporters his ” Sweet troubles”.
During the Spring Festival of 2021, Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan, which was established only half a year ago, has a revenue of over 10 million yuan, and some products have been sold out 10 days before the Spring Festival.
A number of old catering brands, including Xinya Cantonese Restaurant, Xinghualou, Meizhou Dongpo, etc., have also sold more than 10,000 semi-finished products developed by themselves through their flagship stores on major e-commerce platforms.
Today, it is not difficult to save time, effort, and money to eat a healthy, nutritious and hearty New Year’s Eve dinner at home with a sense of ritual.
Under the wind, in addition to new brands running into the Nuggets, old catering players take advantage of the momentum, and the food giants in the upper reaches of the industry chain have been planning for a long time.
On April 14, 2018, Luoyang Zhengda launched a series of pre-made convenience dishes represented by the Chinese cuisine series at the new product promotion conference. Among them, braised pork, fermented bean curd pork, and Mei Cai buckle pork can be served after simple heating. It greatly reduces the processing time of the kitchen after catering and the family kitchen.
In 2019, Sanquan Foods launched black fish fillets and other products, officially Nuggets Prefabricated Vegetable Market. Earlier, Sanquan also launched a series of “one bowl rice” products such as fish-flavored shredded pork, braised beef, curry chicken, and pickled pork with pickled vegetables. It is an early warm-up.
Anjing Group, another listed food company in China, set up a subsidiary last year to develop and sell hot pot peripheral products and pre-made dishes.
The introduction of these traditional food giants’ pre-prepared dishes did not heat up the track, which really transformed it from 2B to 2C, and it was the new retail sector that contributed to this “kitchen revolution”. The players.
Pre-made dishes, “Secrets that can’t be told”
For a long time, in order to pursue the standardization of taste, the stability of the quality of the dishes, the improvement of meal efficiency and the reduction of the cost of back chefs, pre-made dishes are the “unspeakable secrets” in some franchised restaurants.
For example, if a restaurant hires a professional chef, the monthly salary is about 6,000 yuan, but after using the cooking package, only one operator is needed, and the salary is only half of the chef’s salary. In addition, professional stoves are no longer required, and a kitchen area of 3 to 5 square meters is sufficient.
Therefore, some takeaway chains have a huge demand for semi-finished pre-made dishes.
As a taste bud who has been educated by the cooking method of “frying and cooking” for a long time, and once the main force of catering consumption, older Chinese consumers have sneered at this and have suspicions.
Therefore, both the restaurant and the market have tried their best to “evade” this type of meal preparation.
But as the pace of life accelerates, people become more time-conscious.
Especially young people who are busy with work in the city, making a home-cooked meal at home has become an increasingly luxury. At the same time, more and more women are moving from home to the workplace, reducing the overall cooking time at home. Cooking time has become or is becoming an important cost of living that consumers need to calculate.
A survey on the changing trend of food consumption concepts among Chinese residents in the past ten years shows that 67.1% of people think that traditional cooking methods are troublesome, 90.10% can accept quick-frozen staple foods, and only 8.8% of people in the 18-30 age group said Enjoy the joy of cooking.
On the other hand, eating out and ordering takeout have hidden dangers to hygiene and food safety.
In addition, affected by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the consumption habits of online shopping have been embedded in the minds of most Chinese people, and their own awareness of food safety has also been further awakened.
“Behind the rise of pre-prepared dishes are the requirements for the industrialization of B-end kitchens to reduce costs and improve efficiency, as well as the changes in the C-end lifestyle-the actual demand for becoming busier and lazier.” Guohai Securities Food and Beverage Chief Analyst Teacher Yu Chunsheng said.
In addition, the main consumer groups are changing, and the consumption scene is also changing.
The changes in consumption scenes have reshaped the public’s consumption habits
The first change in the consumption scene is the emergence of new retail.
As we all know, the emergence of new retail has reconstructed the format of offline supermarkets.
It is not only a supermarket, a restaurant, or a vegetable market, but consumers can buy at the store and enjoy instant cooking, or they can place orders online and deliver them to their homes offline. It can be said that the maximum capacity of new retail meets different age groups. The crowd, almost all local life needs.
As a model of the “concretization” of new retail, it is also the most powerful practitioner of the retail trend of catering. According to the data of Hema Fresh Food, 54% of post-95 Hema consumers often buy ingredients to cook by themselves. Semi-finished dishes are one of their favorite products, and the purchase ratio has doubled that of those after 65.
For this reason, Hema Xiansheng specially created the “Hema Workshop” brand and established a 3R business department to specialize in the integration of catering and retail.
The positioning of Hema Workshop: To provide customers with three meals a day solutions, providing instant cooking (RTC), instant heat (RTH), and instant meal (RTE) catering solutions. This positioning is the positioning of the retail industry for pre-made dishes.
Hema Workshop not only sells its own brand semi-finished dishes, but also sells semi-finished products of catering brands such as Xinya, Zhiweiguan, Fengshou Day, etc. In the future, it will evenTake the road of independent shop.
JD “Qixian” and “Yonghui Supermarket” invested by Tencent have also opened up special areas or new brands for the prefabricated vegetable market.
In addition, the fresh O2O e-commerce platform Daily Youxian also launched the “Famous Stores and Famous Dishes” channel. The products sold are mainly semi-finished products of well-known catering companies, including signature dishes such as Sibei hand-grilled meat and tomato stew.
The second change in the consumption scene is the rise of live streaming.
In the past, people used to shop in supermarkets and farmer’s markets, but now it’s enough to follow KOLs in the live broadcast room.
The newly established brands of pre-prepared dishes generally regard live delivery of goods as an important starting point.
Pu Wenming, the founder of the pre-made vegetable brand Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan, said that since January this year, Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan’s products have been in more than 50 live broadcast rooms, and nearly 250,000 packages have been sold in Wei Ya’s live broadcast. Chicken fillet.
At the same time, Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan also planned a joint event with “Assassination of the Novelist”, adding promotional materials of “Assassination of the Novelist” to some of the products in the live broadcast room, and used Lunar New Year films to guide its own brand.
“Live broadcast is not only a sales channel, but also a way to communicate with customers and establish brand communication” Li Jian, founder of the aquatic product supply chain brand Xinliangji, told reporters.
Live broadcasting has reshaped the consumption habits of the public, and brands need to seize the dividends of the live broadcasting era as soon as possible. Last year, Xinliangji sold 170,000 copies of pre-made crayfish products in Luo Yonghao’s live studio in 10 minutes, with sales exceeding 20 million yuan.
“We want to become a “broadcast brand”” Li Jian emphasized.
In addition to the accelerated pace of life, the impact of the epidemic, and changes in consumption scenarios, which detonated the prefabricated dishes, there is another important reason:
Breakthroughs in cold chain technology and cold chain logistics infrastructureThe continuous improvement of the application allows the pre-made dishes to ensure the maximum restoration of the taste, while also expanding the sales radius.
For example, liquid nitrogen freezing technology can achieve super quick freezing (30-40 times faster than general freezing methods), so that the water in the cells and in the intercellular space freezes into ice crystals at the same time, so that the cell tissue is not destroyed, so the food after thawing It can restore to the original fresh state and original nutrients to the greatest extent.
For another example, the cold chain logistics at the B-side is already relatively mature, which can realize point-to-point, frozen transportation throughout, and the cost is not high.
On the other hand, the capital market is also very optimistic about the development of the semi-finished product market.
Trillions of semi-finished vegetable market, to be nuggets
The research report of Guohai Securities shows that my country’s current prefabricated vegetable market stock is about 300 billion yuan, and the market size is expected to reach one trillion yuan in the next 6-7 years. There are more than 20,000 prefabricated vegetable companies in the upstream, but a dominant brand has not yet been born.
From the perspective of competition, although the domestic prefabricated vegetable industry is still dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises as a whole, the market concentration is low, the regional characteristics are obvious, the market share of each enterprise in the industry is limited, and the large-scale national operation enterprise Less in quantity.
But not long ago, there was still a semi-finished vegetable company that took the lead in “passing the meeting” and was about to land on the main board.
In December 2020, “Weizhixiang”, a leader in the semi-finished vegetable industry, passed an IPO application and plans to be listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The brand was founded in 2008 and is mainly engaged in the research and development, production and sales of semi-finished vegetables. It has a product system with two major brands, “Weizhixiang” and “Fuyu” as the core.
In addition, the semi-finished food supply platform “Three Meals Youliu” under the new retail brand “He Miao Youpin” independently incubated by Frozen Foods Online Group has also received two rounds of financing in the past three months, trying to build itself into The top brand of semi-finished household products in China.
In the catering industry, whether it is the hot pot giant Haidilao, the star social restaurant Xibei, or Debao, one of the top three group meals, constantly trial and error, the new brand has not yet run through the model, and it is profitable. They are all working hard on the prefabricated vegetable market.
“Stomach’s attention” battle: falling behind means out
For example, Haidilao has successively launched the noodle shop brand “Eighteen Boil”, fastAfter the restaurant brand “Lao Pai You Nian’er”, the rice bowl brand “Fan Fan Lin”, and the Shaan-flavored rice noodle brand “Qin Xiaoxian”, they will be launched non-stop in the official flagship stores of multiple e-commerce platforms and their own apps in March 2020. A series of semi-finished dishes “It’s ready”.
“It’s Open” series of products include a total of 12 dishes, 4 kinds of soup, the ingredients have been pre-cooked, consumers can eat it after heating for 3-5 minutes. The current dishes include Gong Bao shrimp balls, fish-flavored pork shreds, etc., which are divided into single meals and multi-person meals, and the price is between 36-125 yuan.
It has shown the strongest posture of competing with ordinary restaurants.
Xibei moves even more.
Not only has it invested nearly 2 billion yuan to build central kitchens for pre-made dishes in Inner Mongolia and Tianjin, but also the first experience store “Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine” has opened in Beijing Century Golden Resources Center in a low-key manner.
Jia Guolong said, In the future, there will be 100-1,000 super experience stores, 10,000-100,000 retail outlets, and 100,000 “passengers”, so that it will become a population of 100 million households and 300 million people. “Family Canteen”. And jokingly said, “I use my own name this time. If I don’t do it well, my father will scold me to death.”
In the field of group meals, the group catering industry learned from Debao that the nine pre-sale vegetable products developed by it have entered offline businesses in Shenzhen such as Hema, Tianhong Daojia, Junshang Supermarket in Shenzhen during the Spring Festival this year. ultra.
In addition to the once-in-a-lifetime market opportunities, more reasons for these catering giants to spare no effort to develop pre-made dishes may stem fromAnxiety:
After all, high customer unit price does not necessarily bring high gross profit. High customer unit price means giving up the largest mass market in the market, while providing innovative products and services with the ultimate cost-effectiveness is the kingly way through the cycle. .
Furthermore, they know that competition never stops at present.
Within the radius, the space and number of human stomachs are limited. This great change in retail catering-the battle for “stomach attention”, falling behind means being out.
The choice is painful, but it is better to reform yourself in advance than to wait to be revolutionized by others.
Reference Materials:
“These days, the track has a one trillion rise: sales up by 16 times.” Source: pencil road, author: Classical Code
“prefabricated dish: busier, more lazy pushed the 3 trillion kitchen revolution” Source: New Fortune, author: Yu Chunsheng