Text | Xinyan, author | Ruan Xue, editor| Sang Mingqiang
The semi-finished fresh track is heading for a watershed.
Founded in 2012, European semi-finished fresh delivery company HelloFresh, an e-commerce platform that mainly provides services around Mail-kit, offers a new solution for the prefabricated vegetable industry, in China, Meal-kit is often understood as semi-finished clean vegetables, that is, we often see in supermarkets, ingredients that have been processed in advance, but Hello Fresh is different in that it provides a more complete service.
Specifically, it provides consumers with recipes and matching ingredient packages to purchase and deliver services.
After browsing the recipes on the website, consumers can complete the order purchase by setting up the number of diners, the number of dishes and the weekly delivery day, and finally someone will deliver the ordered dishes to their home. After a simple cooking following the recipe provided by Hello Fresh, you can harvest a full meal, after which the platform will default to your subscription and then deliver other different dishes at the same time next week, because its recipes are always changing every week.
It seems that Hello Fresh is like a collection of "fresh e-commerce" + "takeaway software", but in fact, it is not so simple. In the early days of China, there were also similar players, represented by young vegetable jun, my kitchen, etc., they were also the first batch of entrepreneurs in the field of fresh e-commerce in China, but the result was that they failed to grow up in the domestic market, and now fresh e-commerce has recovered again, and the subdivision of semi-finished fresh food has also returned to the public vision. To this end, this article we will mainly discuss:
Also making semi-finished products, what is special about Hello fresh?
What kind of dilemma does semi-finished fresh products face in the domestic market?
Where's Hello fresh?
In terms of the end result, Hello Fresh is the world's most popular distributor of semi-finished products.
At the beginning of Hello fresh, the user positioning targeted white-collar workers who were busy in urban life and did not have time to cook every day, and set the theme idea as "fast" and "healthy" for the main pain points of the target users. You can pick from their weekly menus that have been customized, and Hello Fresh will take care of the dishes you used during the week, plus all the spices you need, along with a "step-by-step" recipe.
If it is only to save time, it can not become the main reason for attracting consumers to consume, the reason is very simple, because there are too many ways to provide similar services, as long as the processing and distribution of the platform can be provided, you can ensure that consumers can save time, in other words, health is the main selling point of Hello fresh.
The first is the health of raw materials, as its name suggests, the first meaning of the product is to ensure freshness, Hello fresh through direct harvesting from the grower or from the supplier to the storage center, in the storage center to complete the processing of the ingredients, preservation, and then through the third-party international logistics, local logistics, or self-operated logistics to the hands of consumers. In order to avoid waste and unnecessary transit, the company adopts a predetermined sales model, collects user orders one week in advance, sorts and packages the ingredients in the storage center, and delivers them to households in the next week.
According to the incomplete statistics of New Eye, HelloFresh has at least 8 large warehousing centers in the world, operating in 10 countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc., most of which are concentrated in more developed countries and regions in Europe and the United States, mainly because the local target consumer population is more and more concentrated, and there is a more mature cold chain supply.
And because most of the eating habits of these European and American countries are the same, Hello Fresh provides dishes in the production of most of the products do not have too high technical requirements, of course, in addition to relying on cold chain distribution to ensure freshness, the proposition that the ingredient package wants to reflect health mainly depends on the formulation of recipes to solve, at this point, Hello Fresh's solution is to achieve cooperation with nutritionists, in the recipe will also indicate the nutritional index, professional knowledge also let consumers let down their guard, which is also Hello Fresh distinguishes itself from the highlights of competing services such as Amazon Fresh and Amazon meal kit.
In order to serve more people, Hello Fresh has set up three Types of Plans to choose from: Veggie Plan, Classic Plan, and Family Plan, and you can choose the amount of money you send each week.
Among them, the most distinctive is the program for vegetarians. Facing the niche group makes the platform's service have differentiated characteristics, which is the way many semi-finished fresh players enter: the niche group is difficult to find the right one in the popular products, so it is often more loyal to a certain brand, and the fixed consumer group is reused to harvest more users, and the path of brand communication relatively reduces the cost of Hello fresh.
Prefabricated dishes in the country
In China, products similar to hello fresh food packages are called pre-made dishes, also known as "fast dishes" and "lazy dishes", but if you go deeper, you will find that everyone has not formed a unified definition of prepared dishes.
Pre-made dishes in a broad sense are mainly composed of four types of food: ready-to-eat food, instant hot food, instant cooking food, and ready-to-eat food, under this definition, the quick-frozen dumplings in ordinary life and self-heating hot pot can be defined as pre-made dishes. However, in the narrow sense, the prepared dish is to be made of raw materials, with various auxiliary materials, pre-treated, and then processed by hot (non-thermal) treatment, sterilization packaging, quick-freezing and other processes, requiring strict storage, transportation and sales of dishes under cold chain conditions.
Consumers can simply heat or simply stir-fry to eat dishes close to restaurant standards at home. In the face of the mass consumer market, most of the providers of prepared dishes in China are often hotels, and in 2020, due to the epidemic, advocating the local New Year, many people's Chinese New Year's Eve meals are composed of prepared dishes provided by the hotel.
Similar semi-finished dishes in China are developed from clean vegetables.
Originating in the United States, clean vegetables refer to the simple processing and processing of fresh vegetable raw materials such as grading, cleaning, peeling, cutting, disinfection and packaging to meet the hygienic requirements of direct cooking or raw food. The emergence of clean vegetable processing and distribution factories in China is also due to the entry of American chain fast food restaurants such as McDonald's and KFC in the late 1990s, similar to the high requirements of restaurants for the speed of meals, which have spawned the clean vegetable processing and distribution industry in large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.
However, due to the fact that jingcai was originally only supplied to the catering industry, most consumers at that time did not have direct access to clean vegetable goods, which also made it that although jingcai has existed in China's catering industry for a long time, the market education for mass consumption is far less than that of the takeaway industry.
With the rapid development of the domestic catering industry, the fast food industry, group catering industry, enterprises and institutions logistics supply, etc. have gradually become large-scale, which has further driven the development of clean dishes, from simple raw material processing to semi-finished products of dishes. Around 2000, semi-finished vegetable production enterprises appeared one after another, providing a richer product range than the initial clean vegetables through the further processing of raw materials such as meat, poultry and aquatic products, and further streamlining the cooking process of customers.
It was also after this that the net vegetables that were supplied to the B-end in the past had a channel to the mass consumer market and gradually stepped onto the table of a small number of Chinese.
For semi-finished dishes, the demand for C-end and B-end has a big difference, in the past, the demand of the 2B-end is how to reduce the area of the back kitchen, reduce the loss rate, improve the speed of cooking, ensure the standardization of dishes, enrich the category of dishes, etc., and the demand of the 2C end is how to make a dish quickly, deliciously and healthily, which is both convenient for takeaway fast food and can ensure the health and deliciousness of the diet.
However, many semi-finished delivery merchants are caught in a strange circle: they often focus on the process of delivering dishes, rather than ignoring the finished products that will eventually reach the consumer.
Where are the domestic players?
In 2020, the sales volume of prepared dishes in the United States, Japan and China was 4.332 million tons, 2.064 million tons and 1.693 million tons, respectively, and the per capita consumption was 13.12 kg, 16.42 kg and 1.21 kg, respectively.
According to a survey by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, only 20% of consumers currently choose to buy prepackaged clean dishes. From the demand side, the reasons why consumers do not choose to buy prepared dishes are mainly concentrated in the three aspects of high price, low quality and inconvenient to grasp the portion size, in these three aspects, hello fresh model has certain reference significance for domestic players.
Chart: Market size and growth rate of pre-treated meat and seafood (Source: China Industry Information Network, Guosheng Securities Research Institute)
Compared with the bulk retail of fresh products, prefabricated dishes mainly have three additional costs: manual sorting, packaging costs, cold chain transportation and storage costs. By setting up large warehousing centers for manual sorting and reducing transportation links, Hello fresh can effectively reduce costs and lower the consumption threshold caused by high prices to a certain extent.
Compared with the past youth kitchen and other ways to build a large number of pick-up points in the community, Hello Fresh uses the existing express delivery method, pre-order, choose a fixed time to deliver to the door, on the one hand, reduce the high cost and food waste caused by the construction of self-pick-up points and cold storage, on the other hand, can use the convenience to better cultivate user consumption habits and occupy the customer's mind.
The main factors in the competition of semi-finished fresh e-commerce are brand, price, product quality and safety, convenience, customer service, diversity and flexibility of product provision, etc. The user data accumulated by the Hello fresh platform can help the product to adjust the amount, and even achieve customized services, using the refined production of recipes to ensure the stability of the quality of the finished product, which has become the reason why Hello fresh is leading in the semi-finished fresh track.
At present, the domestic fresh market home business can be divided into six categories, mainly manifested as relying on mobile terminals to achieve fresh home, according to the different business entities, can be divided into: traditional comprehensive e-commerce fresh channel, B2C online supermarket, fresh new format (store warehouse integration, front warehouse), community group, traditional supermarket self-operated O2O platform and O2O third-party platform. Hello fresh's positioning is more in favor of the latter, an O2O third-party platform with fewer players.
In such a market environment, when the country will be able to run out of players like Hello fresh is an interesting topic.