On December 13, Health Times combed the "Notice on the Inspection of the City's Catering Industry" issued by the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Supervision and Administration and found that since the official website of the Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Supervision and Administration announced the safety inspection of the city's catering industry on August 30 this year, as of December 13, in nearly 200 notifications, different Wallace restaurants in Beijing have been notified a total of 24 times, and on September 1 alone, 13 stores have been notified. It was notified that the stores involved 9 districts of Fengtai, Mentougou, Fangshan, Tongzhou, Miyun, Haidian, Changping, Dongcheng and Shijingshan.
In fact, as early as July this year, Wallace Beijing Huoying franchise store was widely concerned by netizens because of the existence of "fried chicken without masks and gloves", "fried chicken fell to the ground to pick up the re-frying", "cleaning agent dripped into the pot" and other issues, when Wallace apologized to the public. Subsequently, the restaurant involved in the beijing Huoying store has been closed for rectification. On September 2, the store was reported to have been investigated for using filthy and unclean food raw materials.
On October 10 this year, the Beijing Consumers Association released a list of catering enterprises with food safety problems in Beijing recently, and Wallace ranked first with 17 problem stores.
Wallace, as a well-known local fried chicken and burger brand, has stores all over the country. According to the information on its official website, the main body of the "Wallace" brand is Fujian Wallace Food Co., Ltd., which was established in 2009, and Wallace's stores have exceeded 10,000. In April 2016, it was listed on the New Third Board under the name of "Huashi Food". From the financial report of Huashi Food from 2016 to 2019, the company's revenue and net profit have continued to rise, with revenues of 1.108 billion yuan, 1.645 billion yuan, 2.326 billion yuan and 2.55 billion yuan in 4 years, respectively, and in 2020, despite the impact of the epidemic, the company still achieved operating income of 3.494 billion yuan, an increase of 37.0% year-on-year, and net profit of 0.92 billion yuan, an increase of 68.66% year-on-year.
However, with the continuous growth of revenue and net profit, Wallace has repeatedly been exposed to food safety problems. In December 2020, according to the website of the Huangzhou District People's Government of Huanggang City, Hubei Province, 7 local Wallace restaurants were seized by the local law enforcement department for illegally purchasing and selling frozen and refrigerated meat that had not been monitored by the disease control department, and the relevant responsible persons were detained; in September 2019, 24 Wallace stores in Hohhot illegally sold waste oil and fat, and were severely punished by the local regulatory authorities; in March 2019, Jiangxi Jiangnan Metropolis Daily exposed the local store chicken wings falling on the ground to continue to sell after conducting an undercover investigation of Wallace. The hamburger embryo expires for two days and continues to be used, and the kitchen environment is dirty and messy.
An industry insider told Health Times that Wallace's food safety problems are related to overly aggressive expansion strategies, cooperative chain systems and low gross margins. In terms of store expansion, Wallace chose the cooperative chain model with "store crowdfunding, employee partnership, and direct management" as the core, that is, the equity was delegated to employees or collaborators, and in this model, the number of Wallace stores rose rapidly. According to the narrow door restaurant data, as of the first half of this year, wallace's stores have exceeded 18,000. The combined number of KFC and McDonald's stores does not exceed 13,000. The above-mentioned industry insiders said that Wallace's partnership system is destined to take the recovery cost as the first orientation, and profit and performance are the core KPIs.
Sun Wei, director of the Brand Marketing Center of Tsinghua University, said in an interview with Caijing Tianxia, "Wallace's frequent outbreaks of food safety problems are related to its high-speed partnership expansion. Usually, high-speed fission runaway will bring a series of problems, and high-speed performance growth will often mask many problems, such as food safety hazards. Brand chains have always had a paradox, if you want to expand fast, you need to join the decentralization; direct chains are easy to control, but the expansion is slow. Therefore, Wallace needs to upgrade the existing control model, while increasing profit margins to solve fundamental contradictions. ”
