Wen | Lianzi
Edited | Vicky Xiao
TikTok, the originator of short videos, crossed over again. This time, to everyone's surprise, TikTok was going to open a restaurant.
This month, TikTok announced its virtual restaurant business, which can be understood as a restaurant that only takes out and does not dine in. What is even more surprising is that this project is not a pop-up event, but a new project that TikTok has been brewing for a long time in North America. According to Bloomberg, the project will be officially launched in March next year and will be expanded to 300 restaurants within a year.
"Douyin" net red food takeaway
Although at first it sounds like TikTok and the restaurant are almost incompatible, but when you think about it, this is not the case.
TikTok has a large number of food bloggers sharing a variety of creative recipes every day, which attracts a large number of foodie audiences to like and watch. In a TikTok data released to the public, TikTok currently has more than 1 billion monthly active fans worldwide. Many of these users are loyal iron fans of short food videos and wild net red recipes. For example, a chicken wing production video posted by blogger Tinekeyounger received 2.4 million likes and 28,000 retweets on the platform, causing a wave of chicken wing making on the platform.
However, most people are limited to collecting these popular Internet celebrity recipes on TikTok short videos, but few people really practice them to reproduce them. As a result, whether the eyes will be able to meet the hands has become a problem faced by most fans.
In order to let everyone not only stare after watching the video, but also directly eat the internet celebrity food into the mouth, TikTok created this restaurant project, specifically to the TikTok on the popular food takeaway to the user's home.
However, TikTok does not open its own offline physical restaurant. It has signed a partnership agreement with a company called Virtual Dining Concepts, and will work with them to attract brick-and-mortar restaurants to complete the "Bring Influencer Food to the Door" project. The following year, they intend to work with more than 300 local U.S. restaurants.
On the official news page, TikTok said that the participating physical restaurants will create a virtual, independent of the original offline store online catering brand, while using their existing offline restaurants to specialize in virtual brand takeaway business. Doing so, for restaurants, will not affect their own brand and tone, nor will it affect their business of eating and self-picking.
In addition, these joined restaurants can only make recipes provided by TikTok. These recipes are the most popular online celebrity menus in TikTok's current short videos. These influencer videos have naturally provided influencer popularity and publicity for partner restaurants. It can be said that this project closely links online internet celebrity videos with the offline real economy.
If you look closely, part of the idea stems from the business philosophy of project partner Virtual Dining Concepts. The agency is currently working with a large number of brick-and-mortar restaurants to open virtual restaurants on the platform, selling completely different foods from the store. At the same time, the agency provides restaurants with its powerful internet celebrity cooperation resources, selling the food of these virtual restaurants online and attracting a large audience. The official cooperation with TikTok is undoubtedly the best way to maximize the "influencer effect".
In the view of Virtual Dining Concepts, this can not only help many restaurants to use existing chefs and kitchen resources to "earn extra money" during non-dining hours, so that these merchants can make money as two stores in one storefront, but also help them reduce some expenses in the case of reduced eating in the next hall of the epidemic, and even eventually rely entirely on the form of virtual restaurant takeaway to make a profit.
Virtual restaurants and front-facing rooms are prevalent
In fact, both the concept of TikTok and Virtual Dining Concepts largely conforms to the current trend of the rise of food delivery platforms in the United States. In the United States, the epidemic has lasted for nearly two years, and eating is still seen by many people as a risk of infection. In addition, some state government regulations require that only vaccinated people eat indoors, causing the number of people eating at restaurants to plummet. High costs and extremely low attendance have led to serious losses for many restaurants.
As a result, more and more catering giants have turned the front of the car and considered abandoning the traditional idea of opening restaurants, but instead shifting to online special takeaways.
Even The Mexican-style fast food Chipotle recently announced its own ambitious takeaway business plans. Chipotle said last week it would open a new form of takeaway restaurant in Ohio. This restaurant only accepts online orders. At the new store, three of the four lanes of Chipsotle's door to pick up food will be arranged for takeaway business. In addition, they allow customers to pick up meals by driving themselves.
Chipotle found that stores with a drive-by-car sales were on average 10 percent higher than those without a self-pickup business. Therefore, they decided that in the future, when opening some new stores, they did not consider the area of eating, and only rented a small area of the storefront for self-pickup and takeaway in the surrounding community, which greatly saved costs and shortened the waiting time for takeaways in the surrounding communities and increased online sales.
Some media outlets see Chipotle's move as inspired by Ghost Kitchen, which doesn't need to set up an area to be face-to-face with customers in the future.
In the two years since the outbreak of the epidemic, the U.S. restaurant industry has undergone earth-shaking changes. Restaurant chains including Jack in the Box, Del Taco and Taco Bell are trying to open this kind of "door-to-door room" that only accepts online ordering and takeaway. For example, Tacco Bell has spent a lot of money to improve the online ordering process of some of its "takeaway front-facing stores" so that users do not have to contact any staff during the ordering and pickup process.
TikTok pattern landed overseas
In fact, this is not the first time that TikTok has done a landing project in terms of catering. As early as the end of 2020, TikTok had made a similar attempt, working with the Us food delivery platform Postmates to deliver four of the most popular desserts on TikTok to users' homes. At the time, though, it was a short-term pop-up project, and it was limited to users in the Los Angeles area. Looking back, the sweets flash mob at that time may have laid the groundwork for the current large-scale entry into the catering industry.
Cooperation with the catering industry is not the only interesting way for TikTok, a short video platform that has gone abroad from China, to play overseas.
For example, TikTok once worked as a British pop-up shop "For You" on the streets of London. This pop-up store in Westfield covers an area of more than 370 square meters, and the decoration is full of influencer elements. During the period of its opening for about half a month, it has always attracted a large number of local young people to the storefront.
At the time, the pop-up shop was like an entire house, including the living room, garden, kitchen and other areas. In-store customers can not only see the hottest videos of the moment, but also interact with their favorite online influencers as fans. In addition, for bloggers in local restaurants, TikTok also provides them with a variety of video production teaching.
These fun offline interactive experiences once drove London's young people crazy. The landing activity of this kind of pop-up store can effectively connect the online virtual world and offline real life, so that many online marketing products and internet celebrity bloggers can be accepted by people in real life.
It can be said that whether it is from internet celebrity recipe videos to takeaway internet celebrities, or online grass planting videos to offline physical pop-up stores, TikTok on live online has been trying to find more connections with people in real life.