Image source @ Visual China
Text | Consumer world, author 丨 maharajah
The food industry is always in turmoil. When the place on the supermarket shelves that originally belonged to instant noodles was emptied, and the chutney powder in the barrel took advantage of the trend, the self-heating food was lined up and waited for the upper position.
"Self-heating food" refers to convenient food that does not rely on external forces such as electric heating and fire roasting, and only needs moderate cold water to heat anytime and anywhere.
The secret of self-heating lies in its attached independent heating package, because it contains roasted diatomaceous earth, iron powder, aluminum powder, coke powder, activated carbon, salt, quicklime and sodium carbonate and other components, in contact with water can release thermal energy, in 3-5 seconds immediately heated to more than 150 ° C, the resulting steam temperature is as high as 200 ° C, the maximum holding time can be maintained for 2-3 hours, it is easy to heat food.
There are many entrants gathered by the self-heating food that stirs up the storm: Ah Kuan, Zi Hi Pot, Haidilao, Yang Guofu, Three Squirrels, Good Shop...
Behind the increase in the number of giants and the emergence of rookies is the deepening demand of consumers for "convenience", "nutrition", "deliciousness" and "health".
The "foodization" of convenience food is setting off a new wave, and the gold absorption ability of self-heating food itself should not be underestimated.
01 What is self-heating food?
Self-heating food began with military use.
In field military operations, under the condition that it is inconvenient to use heating equipment due to climate or other adverse conditions, self-heating food can still provide soldiers with a hot meal, and it is easy to carry and simple preparation before meals, making it a popular military fast food.
After flowing to the market, self-heating food continues the past use scenario and only meets the demand for hot food under extreme climate and restricted conditions.
The turning point occurred in 2015, when the heavy-flavored self-heating hot pot broke the original consumption scene of self-heating food, upgraded the full-stomach consumption to enjoyable consumption, and swept the market in 2017 with the help of the National Sugar and Wine Festival.
According to public information, in 2017, the sales of self-heating hot pot in Chengdu alone were close to 44 million boxes, and the total sales reached 1.56 billion yuan.
Since then, the magic box of self-heating food has been opened, and the variety has become more abundant and diverse, from self-heating rice, self-heating bone broth to self-heating pasta, showing a development trend in which pre-made ingredients can be self-heating.
According to the statistics of the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the size of China's self-heating food market has doubled in 2015. According to GF Securities, the self-heating food industry may reach a market space of 15 billion yuan in the next 5-7 years, and achieve a compound annual growth rate of 40%-60% in the rapid development stage of the industry.
The image comes from the China Commercial Industry Research Institute
The background to the development of self-heating food is the fire of the entire convenience food track.
Convenience food mainly includes four categories, namely instant noodles, quick-frozen food, microwave food, and self-heating food. As of the end of 2019, the size of the convenience food market was about 450 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 5.7%.
However, the direct reason for the emergence of self-heating food is the promotion of self-heating hot pot.
Short establishment and fast outbreak are the salient characteristics of the self-heating hot pot category. According to the "2019 Taobao Foodie Big Data Report", the self-heating hot pot sold 18 million orders in 2019, and from the perspective of sales, 2018 increased by 64.26% year-on-year compared with 2017.
The self-heating hot pot brand has also received frequent support from capital in the sprint market. For example, Founded in 2018, Zi Hi Pot has completed a C++ round of financing, with a total financing amount of more than 500 million yuan. Founded in 2017, Mo Xiaoxian has also completed two rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of over 100 million.
At present, self-heating hot pot is the well-deserved first category of self-heating food. According to data from Orient Securities, it accounts for 72% of self-heating food, and the market size is expected to be about 3 billion yuan. At this stage, its potential is being unleashed.
Self-heating hot pot can become a unique file among self-heating foods for four main reasons:
First, the product of the lazy economy.
According to the "Lazy Consumption Data" released by Taobao, Chinese spent 16 billion yuan on laziness in 2018, an increase of 70% over 2017, of which the "lazy demand" after 95 grew the fastest. Convenience food is benefiting from the rapid growth of the lazy economy.
Compared with quick-frozen food and microwave food, self-heating hot pot better achieves "one lazy to the end", only need to wait for room temperature water and heat package to react, you can eat; at the same time, it has a heavy and addictive hot pot ingredient bonus, which can better meet the four major needs of the new generation of "delicious", "nutrition", "convenience" and "health", and the consumer experience is better.
Second, adapt to the consumption scenario of one person's food.
The hot pot taste is inclusive and favored by consumers. But the hot pot naturally has social attributes, and the atmosphere of one-person dine-in is weird and reveals embarrassment. Haidilao once wanted to offer a teddy bear to a diner who ate hot pot alone, but this kind of intimate service is not necessarily what social fear consumers want.
Self-heating hot pot has no restrictions on the location and atmosphere, and can perfectly achieve one-person food, and the price is more advantageous than dine-in. In addition, the self-heating hot pot can also be used as a side dish, supper, travel fast food, and the consumption scene is rich.
Third, the promotion of the star effect.
The public influence of celebrities can lead to a rapid increase in product sales. In recent years, Xie Na is eating, Hua Chenyu is eating, Lin Xinxin is eating... The impression that "half of the entertainment circle is eating self-heating hot pot" created by major brands has successfully brought red self-heating hot pot, and then the brand's voice volume has been converted into sales. In the 2019 convenience fast food TOP10 net red items released by Tmall, self-heating hot pot foods occupy more than half of the seats.
Fourth, high profit margins and multiple sales channels have enabled the industry to grow rapidly.
The profit margin of self-heating hot pot enterprises can reach about 25%, and the downstream sales channels are both online platforms, live broadcast rooms, offline supermarkets, convenience stores, etc., with more opportunities to contact consumers and a wider audience. In addition, under the epidemic, some hot pot dine-in brands have suspended business, which has promoted the growth of the market size of the self-heating hot pot industry to a certain extent.
However, on the B side, the self-heating hot pot industry also has constraints that are difficult to avoid.
Due to the low industry threshold, the supervision of self-heating hot pot is weak, the entrants are mixed, and the quality of products is uneven.
At the same time, compared to the simple fried noodle cake with dehydrated vegetables and dried vermicelli with chutney with independent seasoning packages, the self-heating hot pot features complex hot pot ingredients, and the ingredients contain water, making it more difficult to preserve. On the black cat complaint platform, words such as "foreign objects", "moldy", and "lunch box explosion" appeared many times in the self-heating hot pot.
The reaction process between the heating package and the water can release a large amount of heat in an instant, and there are also safety hazards. #2 tons of self-heating convenient hot pot cooked in advance # # Guangxi legislation prohibits the use of self-heating food on trains # Topic has been on the Weibo hot search list.
At present, self-heating hot pot is lacking in both food safety and technical safety. The products and industry environment that are truly worthy of consumer trust still need time to polish.
02 Who is the entrant?
There are many self-heating hot pot entrants.
According to Taobao data, in 2017, there were nearly 200 merchants selling convenient hot pot on the Tmall platform, which expanded to 430 in 2018, and by 2021, hundreds of self-heating foods have emerged, and the industry has shown a blowout trend.
The sales channels of many brands, from offline century Hualian, Carrefour and other supermarkets, familymart, Lawson, convenience bee and other convenience stores, to online Taobao, Jingdong, Pinduoduo and other e-commerce platforms, Dingdong buy vegetables, Hema fresh, daily excellent fresh and other fresh platforms, Douyin, Kuaishou and other live broadcast rooms have layout, market competition has entered the white-hot stage.
The image comes from Ai Media Consulting
On the whole, the industry presents a pattern of three-way power competition:
On one side is a convenience food brand. In this vertical field, emerging brands such as Zi Hi Pot, Mo Xiaoxian and Ah Kuan compete on the same stage with traditional brands such as Unity and Jinmalang, which expand self-heating hot pot products.
The other party is the relevant catering enterprises. The original hot pot enterprises Haidilao, Dalongyi, Xiaolongkan, Dezhuang, and the prefabricated vegetable enterprise pot circle used the advantages of brand and supply chain to lay out the self-heating hot pot business.
The last party is the snack food brand. Three squirrels, good shops, old city south, Weilong and other leisure food brands cross-border production of self-heating hot pot.
As the self-heating hot pot is still in the growth stage, the competitive situation in the industry continues to adjust with the increase of internal participants. Overall, the competition pattern in the industry is scattered, but the market position of leading brands has become increasingly clear.
Whether on Taobao, JD.com, or Pinduoduo, Haidilao, Zi hi pot, Mo Xiaoxian, A Kuan, pot circle, dezhuang are all popular brands on the platform. The shelves of offline terminal channels are also mostly the above brands.
Capital's judgment of who is the "child of tomorrow" is also within this range. For example, Jinding Capital and Asia Food Fund are interested in Mo Xiaoxian, Jingwei China and Xingwang Investment have chosen to choose the self-hi pot, and Hillhouse Venture Capital and Qianhai Fund of Funds believe that Baijia Akuan Food can run out.
03 Who will win?
So who will really win this self-heating food war? In the context of the almost open secret of the food industry formula, the homogenization of products, and the rapid growth of self-heating food, brands are almost on the same running line, and the posture of the circle and the degree of occupation of consumer minds have become the key factors in whether the brand can become the child of tomorrow.
The consumer industry has sorted out the new and old forces in convenience food and the out-of-the-loop action of catering brands:
1. Traditional convenience food enterprises represented by unification: force online channels to open up new markets
Traditional convenience food enterprises have outstanding advantages in product research and development, but they are limited by offline channels, developing physical retail business all year round, and lacking online brand recognition. Therefore, online sales are incomparable to offline sales. Taking unification as an example, its online sales accounted for only 0.31%.
Instant noodles and other categories, due to the many rounds of fighting, the head brand position is stable, whether consumers are online or offline, the choice of brands tends to be consistent. However, as a new category, self-heating hot pot has a variety of brands for consumers to choose from.
Among them, offline consumption is more to solve the immediate demand, consumers do not attach too much importance to the brand, and the brand that occupies the advantage of offline channels can win more. In online consumption, consumers have more factors to consider, and they value brand awareness and praise, so enterprises with outstanding brand power and product power are more attractive to consumers.
Traditional convenience food companies have obviously realized this problem, not only strengthening the research and development of self-heating hot pot flavors, but also increasing brand promotion and online traffic delivery, forming a new growth point. For example, the "open small stove" endorsed by Xiao Zhan and the "big spicy petite" of the white elephant comic elements are relatively high in sales on Tmall.
2. Emerging brands represented by self-hi pot: heavy investment in marketing, continue to build brand awareness
The self-heating pot is an important force in the hot pot category with fire. Before the emergence of the self-hi pot, consumers' understanding of this category was almost blank. The reason why the self-hi pot can have such excellent performance is that in addition to increasing the number of SKUs in research and development, it continues to broaden the product matrix, and also invests heavily in marketing.
It first creates a star effect of "half of the entertainment circle is eating" to open up brand awareness; then with the help of head and waist internet celebrity bloggers, deepen brand influence and expand user scale; and then superimpose e-commerce channels with big V live broadcasts to convert traffic into sales and seize market share.
Emerging brands such as Mo Xiaoxian, Three Squirrels, and Baicaowei and leisure food brands all focus on the combination of brand power + channel power to capture the consumption scene of young people. However, for snack food brands, there are many types of products themselves, internal SKUs are fiercely competitive, and the flow support that can be shared by self-heating hot pot is limited.
3. The catering brands represented by Haidilao use the existing brand resources to complete the traffic realization
Haidilao, Xiaolongkan and other self-heating hot pot brands have product development and supply chain advantages, and benefit from the brand awareness of dine-in food, and the size of the original user group, and the sales volume ranks among the best. With the help of self-heating hot pot brands, catering enterprises have further completed the layout of online and sinking markets.
However, it is difficult to restore the taste of dine-in hot pot, and it cannot be matched with dipping sauce, the user experience is greatly reduced, coupled with the high price, it is easy to cause consumer dissatisfaction, and to a certain extent, it forms dissatisfaction with catering brands.
From the above point of view, the self-heating food track that is fiercely fighting is not currently at a significant disadvantage and there is no breakthrough path for brands. Whoever wins, the bullet will have to fly a little longer.
Resources:
[1] 2021 New Food Era Quality Upgrade White Paper, Machimang Research Institute
[2] Self-heating food network attention analysis report 2020 H1 edition, micro-hotspot
[3] Self-heating hot pot research - "net red hot pot" hit, the lazy group ushered in welfare, head leopard research institute
[4] Autumn Wind Is Coming: HotPot Industry Special Report (III): Supply Chain Toward Branding, Self-Heating Hotpot Shows Its Sharp Edge, Great Wall Securities