On December 16, 2021, Mei Catering, the country's leading digital group catering platform, announced that it has received an E2 round of financing from Sodexo. Just a month ago, on November 10, 2021, Catering completed a $100 million E1 round of financing invested by Dapu Capital.
So far, Mei Catering has completed the E series of financing, with an amount of more than 1 billion yuan. After this round of financing, Mei Catering has become the enterprise with the largest number of financing rounds and the largest cumulative financing amount in the field of group catering in China.
It is reported that this round of financing will be mainly used to promote digital innovation, accelerate customer acquisition in the global market, build a diversified supply and supply chain system, and promote the strategic layout of innovative business.
Founded in 2011, Mei Catering has developed into a comprehensive solution provider focusing on providing corporate customers with services such as employee meals, event meals, in-store consumption, and innovative employee restaurants. Along the way, Meidian has also been highly sought after by investors in the capital market, and has experienced a total of 10 rounds of financing so far, attracting a number of star institutions including Zhen Fund, Jiuhe Venture Capital, KPCB, Nokia Growth Fund, Trusttrust Capital, Meituan Dianping, Goldman Sachs, Sunshine Insurance, Sodexo, and Dapu Capital.
In the view of Ren Zili, chief operating officer of Mei Catering, the reason why Mei Catering continues to obtain financing in the institutional catering industry is mainly due to its leading market share, customer satisfaction and continuous innovation of products and services.
"Many enterprises, institutions, hospital customers have sent us thank-you letters, they feedback that the team of the catering is professional and dedicated, the software and hardware products of the catering have helped them improve the management efficiency and turnover, and the diversified supply of the catering has met the dining needs of individuals in the group meal and significantly improved the dining experience of consumers." Ren Zili said.
Monthly trading orders reach tens of millions, products and services have covered nearly 100 cities across the country
In the past 10 years since its establishment, the development of the catering business has mainly gone through three stages, from the canteen-free business for the office scene, to the institutional catering business that carries on from the top to the bottom, and then to the extensive technology system empowerment cooperation, the catering has moved from serving customers to the service industry, helping the deep integration of technology and the institutional catering industry.
In terms of office scene solutions, Mei Catering covers three business forms: takeaway ordering, collective delivery, and in-store consumption to meet the personalized dining needs of enterprises. In addition to solving the problem of enterprise employees eating, Mei Catering also provides more high-quality value-added services for various scenarios of enterprise welfare.
The American Restaurant Innovative Staff Restaurant is equipped with a multi-scenario consumption system to establish a safe and high-quality direct supply staff restaurant for enterprises. The cooperation business of the American catering technology system is mainly based on the tens of thousands of cooperative merchants and advanced employee catering digital platform accumulated by the catering industry, covering parks, office buildings, hospitals, universities and primary and secondary schools, large state-owned enterprises and private enterprises, etc., using technical means to help partners increase turnover, reduce costs and enhance user satisfaction.
Simply put, Mei Catering provides a wide variety of group meal services for a large number of Party A customers. In terms of consumption scenarios, American food covers both on-site + off-site, including takeaway, in-store consumption, innovative employee restaurants, etc., which greatly expands the richness of employee dining methods; on the supply side, American cuisine mainly unites more than 10,000 high-quality cooperative merchants, including brand merchants, a la carte merchants and private brands, etc., to greatly expand the supply category.
At present, the digital group catering platform built by Mei Catering connects the user end, the enterprise end, the merchant end, and the operation end, realizing a complete digital dining process and digital management of group meals, helping Party A's customers to efficiently implement the catering system, supporting terminal performance, and building a complete closed loop of the group meal service chain.
It is worth mentioning that Meidian has also established a data-based group meal technology empowerment system. Through in-depth data mining and analysis, we provide data visualization products for industry partners, and continuously train artificial intelligence models with massive data to assist in the realization of intelligent product recommendation, real-time passenger flow prediction, in-venue sensorless payment, order prediction and visual recognition of dishes, etc., to build a complete digital infrastructure for the institutional catering industry and help the traditional institutional catering model to achieve digital and intelligent transformation.
From the operational point of view, there are two main business models of American cuisine, one is for enterprise-level ordering, that is, to build a complete ordering platform through American cuisine, mainly charging a certain proportion of commission to platform merchants; the other is for the empowerment of the scientific and technological cooperation system, and The american cuisine is mainly for catering industry customers (Party A, group catering companies, catering companies, etc.) to charge a certain cooperation fee or management fee.
It is reported that The catering has long served many customers such as Alibaba, NetEase, SF, China CITIC Bank, Pacific Insurance, SASAC Commercial Center, Peking University People's Hospital, Southwest Aviation College, etc., covering large and medium-sized enterprises, government units, industrial parks, hospitals, universities and other scenarios, continuing to empower the industry, making the traditional group catering field digital and diversified, and promoting industrial digital innovation and change. At the same time, Us Catering can take into account the flexible needs of small and medium-sized customers and the complex needs of large customers, the single-point economic model has performed well, and the business has entered the stage of large-scale replication and expansion.
Today, the number of food service customers has reached thousands, tens of thousands of cooperative merchants, and the number of monthly transaction orders has reached tens of millions. The products and services provided by the company have covered nearly 100 cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuhan and so on.
The market size exceeds one trillion yuan, and the institutional catering industry is in a window of development
In the catering industry, group meals are a very important part and a relatively closed market that has always been overlooked in the past. Driven by rising market demand and new technologies, the current institutional catering industry is in a window of development, accelerating the release of structured dividends.
From the data point of view, in 2020, the number of chinese group meal consumers reached 670 million, the market size exceeded 1.5 trillion yuan, and the compound annual growth rate exceeded 15%. Moreover, the market share of the top 10 players in the US, European, Japanese and Korean markets has reached 60%-80%, and the overall market share of the top 10 domestic institutional catering companies is still less than 5%. It is foreseeable that structural changes will occur in the domestic institutional catering market, and there is an opportunity to breed listed enterprises and industry giants with higher market share and higher valuation.
With the continuous narrowing of the difference between institutional meals and socialized catering brands, institutional catering customers and end users pay more attention to the consumer experience, from basic clean and full to now have higher requirements for the convenience and pleasant experience of dining. This means that the operation and digital capabilities of group meals also need to be continuously improved.
As Hu Guowu, vice president of American Restaurant, said, the reason why the digital group meal market has a great opportunity is because there are two big contradictions behind it: one is the single content of traditional group meals, and the other is the slow digital process.
"First of all, the institutional meal will definitely move towards diversification, replacing the single supply with diversified supply, and the consumption scenarios, the number of suppliers, and the distribution of business formats will be diversified; secondly, the digitalization process of the industry will accelerate, and the overall digitization of the institutional catering industry is now lagging behind, and many businesses are still running offline, but the rapid development of industry infrastructure, including the rapid popularization and development of logistics infrastructure, information products and equipment, brings more mature conditions, which can accelerate the digitalization process of the institutional catering industry." Hu Guowu mentioned.
Zhao Xiao, co-founder and CEO of Meidian, said that with a number of innovations in technology, management and service, Meidian and Sodexo have quickly occupied more industries and larger markets, and exported unique business models and technological capabilities to the global market. In the future, Mei Catering will firmly invest in supply diversification and industrial digitalization, continuously build industrial digital infrastructure, enrich content supply, open up the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, improve the level of standardized management, expand market leadership in the group catering track, help the deep integration of science and technology and industry, and create greater commercial value. Under the synergy effect of the two major businesses of platform catering and technology empowerment, American Catering will accelerate the occupation of the trillion-dollar group meal market outside the social meal, and become the leading digital group meal platform in China.
Martin Boden, President of Sodexo China, said: "We are pleased to further deepen our investment and cooperation in Hemei Catering, which will accelerate the pace of development and enhance our food and beverage transformation in China and the upgrading of the innovative catering ecosystem. With The unique service model and industry solutions of Mei Catering, we look forward to continuing to work closely with Mei Catering to enhance the catering experience of Chinese consumers with more innovation." In addition, we also look forward to achieving high-quality growth in the Chinese market through our partnership with Mei Catering and benefiting the rest of the world." ”
Liu Shaoqiang, partner of Dapu Capital, also said: "Corporate services and catering are two huge tracks, and Mei Catering happens to be at the intersection of the two major industries, and through years of polishing to build a unique service model and industry solutions, it is a very high-quality investment target." We believe that around the catering needs of enterprises and employees, there are a large number of service digitalization, standardization and diversification needs that have not yet been met, and through years of exploration, Mei Catering has not only connected a large number of catering service providers, but also accumulated profound industry experience and corporate customer cases, achieving high-quality growth. We are very pleased to join hands with Mei Catering to help the company accelerate its business layout, continuously upgrade its products and services, better serve partners and enterprise users on the service platform, and boost the digital upgrading and healthy development of the industry." ”
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