From "the star's favorite hot pot" to becoming a new choice for young people's hot pot, Hui Ge Group has used 14 years to give the answer to the question at the beginning of its founding - hot pot can not only become a serious meal, but also a big business.
To this day, the freshness, quality and service represented by Hui ge are still the same, and the changes and attempts related to youth, the Internet, and big data have never stopped.
"Can a hot pot become a serious meal?" One day more than ten years ago, Su Jincun, who had just arrived in Shanghai, and a few friends suddenly chatted about such a topic.
At that time, the per capita consumption of hot pot restaurants in Shanghai was still 20-30 yuan, and most of them were roadside shops. For many people, eating hot pot "is to eat enough". However, in the eyes of these few people who have experienced the hot pot industry, this phenomenon quickly transformed into a business opportunity and quickly became a reality.
In December 2004, the first Hong Kong-style seafood-themed hot pot opened in an old bungalow on Julu Road in Shanghai. That was the first Hui ge hot pot.
Specially appointed from Hong Kong celebrity chefs, featuring exquisite, fresh seafood and Japan's top beef, coupled with carefully decorated private boxes, this high-end hot pot restaurant that can eat "serious rice" has quickly attracted many Hong Kong businessmen and artists in Shanghai. Hui Ge hot pot is also called "the most beloved hot pot of stars" by the media because of the visit of Hong Kong and Taiwan stars such as Jackie Chan, Nicholas Tse, Jay Chou, she, etc., and there are rumors that "in Hong Kong, there are no stars who have not eaten Hui Ge".
Under the star effect, Hui Ge hot pot has been boiling in Shanghai for many years, and after a few years of establishment, it has gone north to the capital and has nearly ten branches. Some people call it the "first brother" in the Hong Kong-style hot pot. Its per capita consumption is usually around 500 yuan, and it is common to spend thousands of dollars, most of the time, Hui Ge hot pot is only a part of the business people and celebrities and other dining groups.
In 2011, a new question was asked in front of these Hui ge hot pot partners: Can hot pot become a big business?
"Hui Ge hot pot service is a strong consumption power, the top class of society, which determines that when we open more than a dozen Hui Ge hot pot, the whole amount has reached the limit." Founder Su Jincun said, "We still want to make the business bigger, so later, there is Xiaohui Brother." ”
After consultation, the management of Hui Ge hot pot felt that on the one hand, it was necessary to continue the characteristics of fresh ingredients and exquisite stores of Hui Ge hot pot, and on the other hand, it was necessary to create a new hot pot brand for the level of mass consumption. On April 27, 2012, in Shanghai's Wujiaochang, the first Xiaohuige hot pot appeared in the sight of diners and quickly became popular. Xiaohuige hot pot has become the "rich second generation of the hot pot industry".
Walking into the shop of Xiaohuige hot pot, you can quickly find the difference with Huige hot pot. For example, no longer a large street-facing store, The small Hui Ge hot pot restaurant is located in the city's large business district; no longer a table and a pot, but the use of "one person, one pot" dining method; no longer a classical, luxurious "Hui Ge style", but more with avant-garde, fashionable tableware, lighting decoration façade.
"We have clearly targeted our customers to young people. Because the young population is large enough to bring in a larger market share. Su Jincun told reporters that after determining the main target consumer group, the team has carried out corresponding design in terms of restaurant location, dining form, environmental decoration and other aspects.
In recent years, with the improvement of the consumption power of the post-80s and post-90s, in the field of catering consumption, young people love to try new brands, prefer healthier foods, and have more personalized characteristics. It can be said that the emergence of Xiaohuige hot pot is just in line with the rhythm of consumption upgrading in first-tier cities.
For the "Hui Ge" who are good at making high-end hot pot, he chooses to improve the cost performance by "embracing the Internet in principle".
In 2013, when the Hundred Regiments War was in full swing, Xiaohuige Hotpot began to try to sell coupons on major Internet group buying platforms. Unlike other stores that offer steep discounts, Xiaohuige hot pot adopts a "10% discount strategy" of "89 yuan to 100 yuan".
"We must actively embrace the Internet and show the brand of Xiaohuige in front of them in a form that young people like." Su Jincun said frankly, "In order to ensure the quality of Xiaohuige hot pot, so the requirements for labor, ingredients, environment and so on are very high, so it is not a high-margin industry." I can't just let go of my insistence in order to cater to a wave. ”
Group buying is only the most basic marketing method, Xiaohuige hot pot is more interested in the Internet-based service, accurate understanding of consumer needs at the same time, reduce labor costs, and improve labor efficiency.
In 2015, Xiaohuige Hotpot entered Alibaba's local life service platform Word-of-Mouth, and tried new restaurants through the onlineization of various links. "Traditional catering is changing, and order data will be the first step in new catering in the future."
Based on this understanding, Su Jin exists in The Xiaohui Ge hot pot to test the water and scan the code to order food. In his view, when the paper menu is replaced by an electronic menu, it not only saves the labor cost of the waiter, but also can replace the menu more conveniently and save printing costs.
Inside the Xiaohuige hot pot, there is a huge disagreement about this. In the view of the operation director of Xiaohuige hot pot, mobile phone ordering will lead to too little interaction with customers, affecting the unit price of customers. To this end, they bet that for a one-month period, is the traditional catering industry suitable for using the Internet to improve efficiency? A set of data makes the data transformation of Xiaohuige hot pot more firm: after using mobile phones to order food, the unit price of each customer increased by 3 yuan, and the peak turnover rate increased by 10%.
What surprised Su Jincun was the ability to scan codes to order food in cost savings. The data shows that Xiaohuige hot pot has about 180,000 orders per month, which means that 180,000 pieces of paper need to be ordered, and the monthly printing cost is about 27,000 yuan. At present, the proportion of mobile phone ordering accounts for 61%, which can save 16470 yuan per month. In addition, in the past, each store needed to provide 150 large menus, the cost of each book was 20 yuan, and now each store only provides 10 books, saving 2800 yuan per store, the general large menu loss period is 6 months, and the Xiaohuige hot pot with more than 90 stores can save 40,000 yuan per month on the big menu. In this way, scanning the code to order food can save more than 50,000 yuan per month for Xiaohuige hot pot.
"The new restaurant means that traditional restaurants should pay more attention to data, analyze and identify problems through data, and assist management in making user decisions." Su Jincun believes that big data in the Internet era is also becoming more and more important for traditional catering.
"70% of the consumers of Xiaohuige hot pot are women, and 60% of them are young mothers with young children. Here you can also see the age of consumers, education level, consumption frequency, cycle and so on. Su Jincun showed the backstage of Xiaohuige hot pot in the word-of-mouth platform, and the Xiaohuige hot pot membership system was also upgraded.
Su Jincun, who has been in the catering industry for more than 20 years, sighed, "Now it is really different from before. ”
He also remembers that when Hui Ge hot pot first opened, the management team spent "a lot of effort" on service -
"We want to make our customers feel at home, so service is particularly important. At that time, we asked every employee to remember the preferences of regular customers. Then, manually enter the guest's mobile phone number and preferences into the computer. The next time he comes back, he will know whether he likes to eat seafood or beef, what kind of pot bottom he likes, and when he is received, he will be able to provide more accurate service. ”
Nowadays, Xiaohuige hot pot can better understand consumers through the data label of word-of-mouth to consumers. "Recently, we have noticed that the group of young mothers is gradually increasing, and we have started to offer baby meals in restaurants." Zhang Ming, head of marketing promotion of Xiaohuige hot pot, explained, "We also provide corresponding preferential activities to consumers according to their characteristics, and increase the secondary arrival rate of consumers through secondary coupons." ”
Recently, the Huige team also entered the new retail test field Hema Fresh through the Chaozhou brine flavor "One Goose Wind Flow" sub-brand. For hot pot connoisseur Hui Ge, the marinade is brand new. Before the birth of the "One Goose Wind Flow" brand, the team spent almost a year doing research in Chaozhou, "Every brine shop we go to see and eat, from how to choose geese, how many days the geese raise, what feed to eat, how to kill, how to wash and pluck hair a little bit." ”
Su Jincun said frankly: "In fact, Hema Fresh is still in the small-scale exploration period, but for the Huige brand, it is using a new category, in a new consumption scenario, to do a new retail experiment. ”