"There is no autumn in 2021" is a proverb.
The day before, the street was full of short-sleeved T-shirts, and the next day there were even friends wearing thin cotton jackets, plummeting by tens of degrees Celsius, which inevitably made people feel cold and depressed.
Hot food is the best footnote in autumn and winter, and ramen is a cost-effective "national food", but when we look around, we are surprised by the Lanzhou beef noodle restaurant that "came out overnight": unconsciously, a bowl of noodles sold for 40?
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="10" > a good bowl of "expensive" noodles</h1>
"Lanzhou ramen" or "Lanzhou beef noodles"? This complicated lawsuit will not be repeated, let alone which one, we all know that it is the noodles that pay attention to "one clear, two white, three red, four green, and five yellow".
More importantly, Lanzhou ramen with yellow braised chicken, spicy hot and Shaxian snacks can be called the "four kings" of Chinese fast food, and its most significant feature is "cost performance", that is, cheap. About 15 yuan per capita, making it a favorite of the workers, but who would have thought that Lanzhou ramen has also begun to "upgrade".
Friends in the north, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen may have the same feeling, suddenly like a spring breeze coming overnight, the Lanzhou beef noodle restaurant in the shopping mall "blossomed everywhere" overnight. Taking advantage of the weekday lunch time, 58 sisters went to punch in the Jincheng Lanzhou Noodle Restaurant located in Qiantan.
At 11:45, it was the peak period for meals, and after about ten minutes of queuing, I successfully sat down to order. The recommended set menu on the menu, there are mainly 37 yuan and 41 yuan two sets, the former contains tea eggs, beef and beef noodles, the latter on this basis and a plate of cold dishes, if a single order a bowl of noodles, it is 26 yuan, only for the category of beef noodles, this price is obviously not cheap.
According to the "Lanzhou Beef Noodle Big Data Report" released in 2020, the number of stores selling Lanzhou beef noodles in 4 super first-tier cities with a unit price of 20-30 yuan / bowl is the largest, followed by 10-20 yuan / bowl, and the average price of beef noodles in super first-tier cities is 24 yuan / bowl. This also means that beef noodles plus snacks, per capita consumption breaks through 40 is almost a foregone conclusion.
This data is verified. From the review website, it is seen that in Shanghai Qiantan, which is known as the "second Lujiazui", there are two Ma Jiyong noodle restaurants that are in the limelight, and the software shows that "41 yuan per capita", and the noodle restaurant that punched the card is pressed again with a per capita consumption of 43 yuan.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Beijing ranked first in the country with an average salary of 6909 yuan in 2020, compared with nearly 3400 yuan per capita monthly rent. After subtracting the rent and commuting costs, a meal worth 40 yuan of beef noodles is obviously no longer a cost-effective choice.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="31" > ramen upgrade, capital breakthrough</h1>
How does a bowl of beef noodles become more and more expensive?
When we carefully observe the single-store model of the new ramen shop, from shop decoration to dish service, everything is "consumption upgrade":
From the side of the street into the core shopping mall, the corner of the office building; from the dim few square meters of small shops to the bright decoration; the desktop scanning code intelligent ordering experience; as well as the fully transparent pastry production environment, more storytelling and integration of the store scene... These new consumer experiences subvert traditional ramen shops, making ramen, an ordinary delicacy, "makeovers" itself.
The evaluation tags on the review website clearly show the reasons for the new noodle restaurant, and behind the upgrades such as decoration, taste, and marketing, it is a rapidly increasing cost.
Of course, behind the heavy investment, it is inseparable from the figure of capital, and this year's noodle track can be said to be the racetrack of capital.
According to the data provided by Qichacha, since 2014, a total of 36 financings have occurred in the pasta track alone, and only 20 financings have occurred from 2014 to 2020, but there have been 16 financings since 2020, and the frequency of capital investment has begun to accelerate visibly.
According to other data, the total scale of financing disclosed this year has exceeded 1 billion yuan, including Chen Xianggui, Ma Jiyong, Zhang Lala and other ramen upstarts, who were established at similar times and have similar financing scales. In April this year, Zhang Lala, who did not open a store and got financing with PPT, added a bit of legend.
The spotlight of capital focuses on the ramen market, in addition to the endless "mengxin" brands, investment institutions with "heads and faces" are competing to enter. According to incomplete statistics, more than a dozen capitals such as Sequoia, GSR Venture Capital, Source Code, Gao Rong, Shunwei, Kaihui, Challenger Capital, and Jianfeng Evergreen have entered this "ramen fight".
The valuation of the ramen brand has also repeatedly reached new highs. According to the "Late Point" report, when Ma Jiyong, who competed for the "most fierce", got sequoia investment, Chen Xianggui's valuation also came to a neat 1 billion, and the slightly smaller Zhang Lala was valued at 390 million.
The competition for head brands is intensifying, and the brands of the second echelon are not far behind, and brands such as Fulao Noodles, Meet Small Noodles, and Wuye Mixed Noodles have also attracted multi-party investment. It is worth mentioning that according to media reports, the new entrepreneurial project Fun Small Noodles, the new entrepreneurial project of lu Zhengyao, the former chairman of Luckin Coffee, is seeking financing of 100 million yuan, and it is revealed that the current round of financing Fun Small Noodles is valued at 1 billion yuan.
According to the incomplete statistics of 58 shops and office buildings, these brands have won the favor of capital this year:
Whether it is an old noodle restaurant or a ramen upstart, under the surging market, capital has "killed" crazy.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="62" > would the new ramen be a good story? </h1>
With a history of hundreds of years, why did ramen break through the siege this year and become the C position of venture capital?
From the perspective of the industry, although the recognition of Lanzhou ramen has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, there are few head brands. Our first reaction when we talk about foreign fast food is KFC and McDonald's, but when we talk about Lanzhou ramen, there is no brand that can be called.
According to a white paper released by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, the chain rate of China's restaurant chain market increased from 13.3% in 2019 to 15.0% in 2020, but compared with the more than 50% restaurant chain rate in the United States, the market prospects of chain ramen brands are quite broad, and the upside is still very large, and capitals of course also expect to create a "KFC" in ramen.
From the perspective of consumer experience, even traditional catering needs to be "renewed" and then started, and the new models and new experiences brought by brand stories and store upgrades are also needed by a new generation of consumers. Judging from the brands that are currently emerging, they all have more exciting stories and more interesting models. Young people need a way for ramen brands to provide a "fresh opening", which is also the added value of a bowl of ramen.
In addition, the reshuffle of physical business by the epidemic has also enabled emerging brands to find shortcuts to shopping malls and the core CBD areas of the city.
The heavily invested capital wants to make the "KFC" in beef ramen, but behind the competition of "inner rolls", the expansion of noodle shops also faces serious challenges.
As long as it can be standardized in production, it is easy to quickly copy and expand. This is also the consistent way of playing in the capital market, discovering demand, opening up the supply chain, and then occupying the market with a fast-opening style of play, but the "standardization" of Lanzhou ramen is not necessarily simple.
"Lanzhou beef noodles" and "beef ramen", no matter what the contrast angle, the word "pull" is a key. From capillary to wide, the craftsmanship of the ramen master determines the quality of the noodles, and once it is comprehensively promoted and rapidly expanded, the efficiency of the production of noodles is bound to become a problem: whether to take the machine or the manual will become a difficult choice. Even if manual noodle making is chosen, how to carry out systematic training of ramen masters is also an urgent problem to be solved.
Second, can the revenue capacity of opening a ramen shop in a shopping mall meet expectations?
To the 58 sisters of the Jincheng Lanzhou noodle restaurant, the whole store 70 seats, the noon hotel table turnover rate is about 3 times, with a per capita consumption of 43 yuan, a month's revenue is about "70×3×2×43×30", that is, 540,000 yuan, plus the sales data of the two major takeaway platforms of Meituan and Ele.me, the monthly revenue is about 560,000.
Looking at the revenue data of a single store is indeed good, but when we calculate its operating costs, we find that this is not the case. Also taking the store as an example, located in the golden location of Qiantan, the unit price of the shop rent may be higher than the regional rental price of 17.08 yuan / ㎡ / day shown on the 58 same city; and considering the labor costs, water, electricity and gas costs and food costs of more than 10 employees in the store, the net revenue of the shop has shrunk a lot, not to mention the cost of new store decoration and so on...
58 rent data of commercial districts in the same city
Capital that wants to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in the short term may not be able to do so. Or maybe the fight for market share and the right to speak is the core of the expansion of ramen shops, so this is another story.
People take food as the sky, catering is not a "vote with the foot" market, the good or bad of the product, the sincerity of the operation, will be the first reflected in the operating data.
Brands that only tell stories are doomed to not go far.