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Wen 丨 Red Food Network
Just after the National Day in 2015, a news that Huang Taiji completed a B round of financing of 180 million yuan quickly occupied social topics in the hot spot after the holiday, and the brand founder He Chang's bold words of "subverting the industry with Internet thinking" were also hotly discussed.
At that time, the domestic mobile Internet was in an explosive period, and dividends in various industries were everywhere. The catering industry has also ushered in the attention of capital, huang Taiji, carved beef brisket and other internet red restaurant companies have emerged, and the track is very lively.
However, with the short-lived appearance of this group of net red restaurant companies, investors realized the contradiction between high-frequency demand and business uncertainty in the bursting of the bubble, and became more and more cautious.
After 5 years, investors have undergone a 180-degree change, changed their conservative style, and rushed into the catering industry, and the density of investment institutions and the amount of financing shocked the inner circle and the outside of the circle. In this year alone, the catering industry has been listed, investment and financing events have been frequent, and many points have blossomed and the amount is considerable.
Banu, Baman, Hefu Noodles, Ma Jiyong, Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau, Kwa Father Fried Skewers, Wen HeYou... Many well-known restaurant companies have stretched out the investment list longer and longer, covering various categories such as hot pot, pasta, fast food, snacks, dim sum, and baking.
According to the data of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, as of August 2021, there were 86 investment and financing incidents in the catering industry, and the amount of investment and financing reached 43.91 billion yuan, more than twice that of 2020; there were also dozens of financing projects with more than 100 million yuan.
This grand situation has even been called the "second round of capital cycle in the catering industry".
From "respecting and staying away" to "thunder attack", the attitude change of capital roller coaster is guided by the situation, and it is also the clarion call of the transformation and change period of the catering industry.
<h2>01, foraging: from the new tea to drink</h2>
New Catering Capital's attention to catering can be traced back to 2008, when Quanjude, Ajisen Ramen, Xiang'eqing and other restaurant companies were listed successively, but the return on capital was low and the capital side replaced the founding team of Pretty Jiangnan, which became a boycott of the two.
Nowadays, capital has re-shook hands with catering, which is the "honeymoon period" opened after taking the new tea drink, the temptation of the catering industry that is also an offline format, and the ice breaking.
High consumption frequency, low brand operation threshold, easy replication of the model, easy standardization, asset-light operation, these characteristics of the new tea drink fit the capital's vision of high-quality assets, attracting the attention and enthusiasm of investors.
However, with the continuous increase of capital, new tea brands have formed a clear head echelon, with billions of high valuation thresholds and forced appreciation space, making a number of capital prohibitive.
The capital that is difficult to enter the game urgently needs to open up a new track in the value depression, with new tea as the coordinate system, the "new catering" with similar formats has entered the investor's field of vision, and the mature market conditions and potential value-added space have made the new catering more sexy in the eyes of capital.
As a high-frequency consumer demand, the domestic catering industry is a trillion-yuan super track of "thick snow and long slopes". According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the revenue of the catering industry in 2019 was 4.7 trillion yuan, an increase of 9.4% year-on-year, higher than the GDP growth rate. Affected by the epidemic, the revenue of China's catering industry has declined in 2020, but it still reaches 3.95 trillion yuan.
In addition to the vast market, consumption upgrading has also brought more new elements, and the young consumer groups dominated by Generation Z pay attention to the quality and experience of catering, and the demand is more diversified, driving the transformation of the catering industry pattern.
At the same time, in parallel with the upgrading of consumer demand, the infrastructure of the catering supply side is also becoming more and more perfect. Drawing on the success of the retail industry and responding to the impact of the epidemic, the catering industry has greatly increased its acceptance of digital transformation.
On the one hand, restaurant companies are actively using digital tools such as SaaS, CRM systems, mobile payments, and mini programs to improve the transparency and control of various business modules; on the other hand, restaurant companies attach importance to and invest in self-built supply chains and central kitchens, providing a foundation for standardization and branding. These changes extend and optimize the service scenarios, service dimensions and response speed of restaurant enterprises, and the business model of restaurant enterprises is about to change.
As an uncertain factor, the epidemic has also had a direct impact on the pattern of the catering industry. Consumers pay more attention to dietary health and the safety of eating out, which catalyzes the development of "self-heating" food, and also promotes the reshuffle of the catering industry, and the head brand survives due to stronger anti-risk ability, which enhances the concentration of industry resources and accelerates the development of brand chaining. According to PwC research, the total number of Chinese catering enterprises in 2020 decreased by 630,000 compared with 2019, but the number of chain enterprises increased by 30,000, objectively making the industry concentration significantly increased.
Consumption upgrading, digitalization, standardization, branding, the catering industry almost has a similar soil for the rise of new tea drinks, but different from the latter's strong capital promotion, the reform of new catering is not only fueled by capital, but also a reconstruction of catering enterprises themselves with the help of digital power, from thought to marketing and even organization.
<h2>02, alchemy: from the category to the brand, from the public domain to the private domain
</h2>
Compared with the United States, Japan and other markets, the low degree of capitalization of the domestic catering industry has always been an indisputable fact. Although capital pursues data growth and staking land, capital entry can objectively boost the accelerated development of the industry, and Heytea has benefited from the rapid growth of small shops into giants.
At present, capital mainly focuses on key elements such as category, brand, large-scale expansion and operation.
Feng Weidong, founder of Tiantu Capital, believes that "category is the starting point of brand strategy and the ceiling that determines value. "Combined with the current market, the top 3 global catering brand market value are McDonald's, Starbucks and KFC parent company Yum Catering, which come from the two major categories of fast food and coffee and tea, respectively, the reason is that these categories are easy to standardize, and then on the basis of experience and taste unification, it ensures the possibility of chaining and scale."
Therefore, based on the characteristics of categories, the upgrading of brands, products and scenarios through digitalization and standardization has become an important reference for the market to measure the development space of catering enterprises. This logic also holds true in the case of new catering financing.
Based on the homogenization of the baking category and the Z-based customer base, the new catering pet Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau focuses on low sugar and low oil, the brand proposition of making and selling now, and the new product model every month. Compared with the traditional digital reliance on public domain traffic, it also attaches equal importance to "private domain operation", adopts the marketing game of "social media planting + purchase restriction queue", realizes the word-of-mouth fission of the interpersonal relationship chain with the help of traffic topics, and uses this to build a community to expand the consumption scene with the "store + private domain" game and enhance user loyalty to the brand.
△ Image source: Mo Mo Dim Sum Bureau official Weibo
The hegemony of continuous financing of 100 million yuan, combined with the out-of-the-loop rice noodle category in recent years, has formed the concept of "online e-commerce + new retail + takeaway O2O + offline chain experience store" of the boundless catering model, becoming the first Chinese fast food brand selected for harvard's business case study database. By standardizing the handmade process of traditional Hunan rice noodles, it shortens the time and cost of meals; at the same time, it ensures the taste of meals with exclusive formulas and raw materials directly distributed, and through standardized supply chains and opens up online and offline channels, it realizes comprehensive digital management such as delivery, ordering, and store management, and meets consumers' demand for "a bowl of powder" in all channels and scenarios.
△ Image source: Hegemonic brand official blog
In addition, catering brands such as Ma Jiyong and Hefu Lao noodles also have ideal explorations in digitalization and private domain.
Bai Yu, president of Weimob Smart Catering, a third-party service provider dedicated to helping catering brands digital upgrade, concluded that compared with traditional catering brands, digitalization, standardization and attention to private domain are the common characteristics of this batch of new catering brands.
<h2>03, purification: catering digital "100 miles not to 90"</h2>
"Alchemy" is not the result, "purification" is. The digital application of capital boom and head restaurant enterprises does not mean that the entire industry has completed a digital leap.
"The industry's discussion of digitalization is too loud, indicating that everyone's understanding of this matter is not enough, which will be a long process", Bai Yu believes, "many restaurant owners in the store connected to the Network, installed a cashier system or membership system, think that they have achieved digitalization, or with data to think that digitalization, these are actually misunderstandings, but this is also the necessary stage for the continuous development of cognition and technology." ”
Digital transformation is the development of digital technologies and support capabilities to build a dynamic digital business model. This process requires a systematic and radical redefinition of their business – not just IT, but everything from organizational activities, processes, business models, and employee capabilities – to a successful transformation.
As far as the catering industry and the catering enterprises that have recently obtained financing are concerned, most of them have opened up three major business models of dine-in, takeaway and retail, including offline and online two kinds of fields, of which online is divided into many traffic channels such as community, short video, live broadcast, comment, takeaway, etc., which determines the natural traffic, data source and separation in catering operations.
In this regard, Li Gang, general manager of Weimob Smart Catering Operation Service Center, said that restaurant companies need to deploy digital contacts uniformly according to their own category characteristics, and form a global digital transformation plan to achieve integrated management of store operations and member data, fully tap the value of data, and realize mutual guidance between various formats to help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency.
The world-renowned Xiaolongbao monopoly brand Ding Tai Feng is a trialist of the "three stores in one" model. Through cooperation with Weimob Smart Catering, it has realized the online digital management service for offline passenger flow, optimized the menu structure according to the consumption preferences of members, and successfully broke through the business time limit of the category. The result is that the annual turnover of single-store dine-in has exceeded 40 million yuan, which is a big breakthrough in the field of catering.
According to Li Gang, customers who also use the "three stores in one" solution of Weimob smart catering also include California internet red catering brand Baoling Crab, Chinese time-honored brand Tank Duck Dog, and new Hunan cuisine brand Xunxiang Zone, etc., all of which have expanded sales extension (crowds, categories, scenes, etc.) to varying degrees, and have obtained positive market feedback.
As a natural result of the expansion of sales scenarios, "catering retailing" is becoming the key direction for restaurant companies to expand the radius of consumption and increase performance growth.
Under the trend of standardization, the number of self-built supply chain restaurant enterprises is increasing, and this semi-finished product, pre-packaged productization, and retailing weakens the dependence of chefs, ensuring that the brand still achieves a high degree of consistency in dishes and tastes under the scale of 100 stores and 100 stores, and the business model is more controllable, and can achieve global operation and performance growth.
△ Din Tai Fung's prepared dishes, picture source: Din Tai Fung
The retailing of catering is essentially food-based and online. Li Gang believes that the retailing of catering can be divided into four categories: preferred ingredients, pre-packaged foods (self-heating fast food, frozen food, snack cakes, seasoning bases), semi-finished prepared dishes, and peripheral products. As an integration of multiple businesses such as catering, retail, and e-commerce, catering retailing has extremely high cross-border difficulties and thresholds, and it is also necessary to be cautious in the selection of channels such as e-commerce platforms, supermarkets, store tying, and mini program malls.
At present, some catering brands choose to create new retail consumption scenarios. The typical representative is Xibei Catering, which is based on the "Jia Guolong Kung Fu Dish" launched by the central kitchen production capacity before the store and the back warehouse model, focusing on the "family kitchen" in the home scene, which ensures the unity of taste between cross-cuisine dishes with standardization, and supports consumers to experience the store while also directly purchasing pre-made dishes to eat at home.
Compared with Xibei's alternative consumption scenario model, more restaurant companies are adopting the model of "self-built supply chain + online mall". Through Weimob Smart Catering, the fresh beef hot pot brand "Zuoting Right Courtyard" promotes the retailing of catering through the Mini Program member mall, combined with the operation of private domain members to accurately predict consumption preferences, and has successively launched a variety of categories of goods such as base materials, quick-frozen foods, pre-packaged foods, snacks and other products on the member mall. It is understood that the sales of the member mall exceeded 600,000 yuan in the first month of the launch, which undoubtedly opened up another growth curve.
△ Dishes of the left court and the right courtyard, picture source: left court and right courtyard
As Lu Qi, former vice president of Baidu, said, "Any industry is worth doing it again with digitalization." The domestic catering industry, known as "big but not strong", is now under the help of digitalization and capital, and it has begun to have a standardized and refined foundation, and an era that will soon cause the overall change of the industry has arrived.
<h2>epilogue</h2>
Capital never sleeps, but capital recedes. When catering becomes the next saturated new tea track, capital will look for the next value depression. What can the restaurant industry leave behind after the tide recedes?
Different from the light operation of new tea drinks, the catering industry has its special attributes, and it is impossible to completely copy the trajectory of new tea drinks, but according to the existing trend prediction, the current favor and bet of capital on the head brand has laid the groundwork for the Matthew effect of the industry, and the market share of the top 100 Chinese catering brands will be further improved in the future.
Combined with the trend of catering retailing and social media planting out of the circle, Zhang Ye, an early venture capitalist, believes that the packaging and fast food of local characteristics are where entrepreneurial opportunities lie.
Bai Yu believes that the domestic catering market is huge and has a large regionality, the market still has a huge imagination space, these financing of catering brands are currently bringing demonstration to the industry, the future will drive a number of regional catering brands, the formation of the first camp. This benchmarking effect will allow more small and medium-sized catering enterprises to pay attention to digitalization, standardization and private domain operations, forming a three-dimensional business model of "dine-in + takeaway + retail", and the overall level of the domestic catering industry and the gap between the United States are expected to be shortened from 20 years to 5 years.
In any case, the scale of the new tea market has exceeded 100 billion yuan, and the new catering with a larger scope will accelerate the standardization and refinement process of China's catering industry with the help of digitalization and capitalization, and obtain positive development in this capital cycle.