Wen 丨 Guan Tide New Consumption (ID: TideSight), Author 丨 Xin Yi, Editor 丨 Shiso
Chicken chips, konjac toast, collagen gummies, seaweed fish crisps, protein bars, low-calorie shakes, tiger skin claws, egg yolk crisps, yogurt fruit cereals... Contemporary young people are becoming more and more particular about eating.
Different from the previous white rabbit milk candy, Shanghaojia potato chips, and even three squirrels, herbs, and good shops are vaguely "getting old". The new brand grasps the psychology of a new generation of consumers who want to eat and are afraid of being fat, and opens up a new category in the field of no man's land.
According to Ai Media Consulting data, since 2010, the scale of China's leisure snack industry has been expanding, and by 2020, the scale of China's leisure snack industry has reached 1,120 billion yuan, and it is expected that the industry scale will reach 1,156.2 billion yuan in 2021.
The snack track is full of brands and bustling. When you look back, you will be surprised to see that China's leisure snack industry has evolved for more than 30 years, and the development trajectory of snack companies has also changed several times.
Behind it is the step-by-step upgrading of China's consumption trends, as well as the ups and downs of snack companies due to product and channel changes.
01, snack 1.0 era: the amount is king
China's first generation of snack giants generally arose in the 1990s, and the post-80s and post-90s who grew up in the most fashionable single of the millennium, "The Spring Breeze of Reform Blows all over the ground", are the first generation of fans of the snack market.
The person who dominated the campus was either the four-eyed prince who had a full set of crisp noodles and water margin hero cards, or the steel-toothed girl who could inadvertently pull out Lonely God during the spring tour.
Behind these bizarre snack bags are the two major Taiwan-funded giants in the leisure food industry at that time, Unity and Wangwang.
Unified Group came to the mainland market in 1990, with advanced marketing, Unified's small dangjia, small raccoon and other crisp noodle products are popular in the leisure food industry.
Almost at the same time, Want Want Group began to build factories in the mainland, after several years of product and channel exploration, it relied on several snacks such as Lang Wei Xian, Want Want Xian Bei, Snow Cake, Wang Zai Milk to lay down half of the domestic market, and landed on the capital market in 1996.
There is also a Taiwanese enterprise that cannot be ignored at the same time as Xu Fuji. From its establishment in 1992 to its top spot in the domestic confectionery industry in 1998, Xu Fuji has long been gradually integrated with the gold coin chocolate that is not popular in the middle and the laughter of Zeng Zhiwei's duck. To this day, the post-80s and post-90s generations will still hear the New Year's BGM when they reflexively emerge from its sound and smile.
In the era of a hundred flowers, local snack brands are not to mention more.
Once given as a "national gift" to then-US President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, it was one of the most disdainful repetitions of the Great White Rabbit Milk Candy. This old-fashioned sugar factory in Shanghai, which has been a "well-known trademark in China" since 1993, even single-handedly undertakes the historical mission of "anti-Western revolution".
In 1993, Kinoro entered the jelly industry with only 400,000 yuan of primitive accumulation, and achieved a monopoly in the field five years later. "Kinoro", "Crystal Love", "CICI Jelly" and so on without exception became the top products in the jelly pudding industry at that time.
In 1998, Chen Xianbao, the father of "Lollipop Ice", aimed at the melon seed business that was popular in his hometown of Anhui, and through a new process of boiling spices and herbs, Qiaqia melon seeds were born. Cloaked in a red kraft paper packaging, Qiaqia stands out from its bulk-based peers.
Founded in 1989, Fujian Dali was looking forward to a turnaround opportunity in the early 21st century, when Dali launched the Dali Garden egg yolk pie, which was priced less than 1/3 of Haoliyou, which hit the Korean food company's sales monopoly in China for four consecutive years. Subsequently, Dalí concocted two explosive products, Kobik and Delicious Point, making the business line spread throughout the country.
It was a fascinating "big" era—
The model of "large single product + large production + large channel + large retail" has spawned these "snack kings" in the 1.0 era, who focus on the development of a small number of SKU goods for public demand and market characteristics, and then through large-scale mass production, and then with the help of thousands of dealers, the goods will finally reach consumers across the country.
They are also the earliest, largest and best companies to do marketing. Contemporary popular ghost animal advertising, celebrity endorsements, IP co-branding, and customized packaging are all nothing more than the concept renovation of that year.
As the fundamentalism of China's snack market, the huge profits and experience deposits have trapped them in the illusion of glory for 20 years. When I came back to god, I found that the opponents who had been different had erected an insurmountable wall around them.
02, snack 2.0 era: brand chain
After 2000, the "snack kings" who have accumulated for more than ten years have dug the first bucket of gold in the field.
The turnover of the great white rabbit milk candy reached 600 million yuan, the Qiaqia melon seeds started a rapid growth of sales of more than 1.5 billion, and Dali directly entered the 10 billion club and ranked among the "Top 500 Private Enterprises in China" in one fell swoop...
Even if these veteran companies have entered the top ranks in terms of financial performance, they are far from enough to fill China's wide and deep snack market, and some latecomers are gradually emerging.
In 2002, I think you are no longer limited to jujube products, and use red jujube vinegar drink, peculiar jujube, red jujube ginseng tea, etc. to complete the subdivision of "jujube snacks"; in 2005, Yanjin Shop, which grew up from a small food workshop, officially embarked on a long and arduous road of self-research food.
In 2004, Xiangpiaopiao, who had just debuted, had almost no opponent in the instant cup milk tea market, and made great progress towards the sales target of "two circles around the earth"; and Youyou Food, which was founded in 2007, also quickly established its position in the vertical category with a pickled pepper claw.
It turns out that although these snack companies still generally follow the old path of their predecessors, these followers who focus on making products have later been recognized by the capital market. And almost at the same time, a new model of the snack industry is quietly emerging.
In 2001, the snack food chain brand Laifen was officially born, in fact, two years ago, it already had its first small shop in Shanghai.
The original Laiyifen was mainly engaged in the speculative business that was not yet prosperous at that time, and the sales of the single product "honey walnut" were particularly top-notch. Perhaps in gratitude for this "walnut family history" with strong chronological colors, when Laifen was listed, he directly led a cow carrying walnuts to the door of the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Later, with the continuous expansion of the business, the category of fried goods in Laiyifen continued to increase, until it covered all categories of snacks such as meat products, soy products, dried fruits and vegetables, sugar jelly, cakes, and imported foods.
From the perspective of the development idea of the initial stage, Laiyifen can be said to have intentionally or unintentionally inspired many of today's snack upstarts. The one that has the most similar learning is the good shop founded by Yang Hongchun.
In 2006, Yang Hongchun, who had just resigned from Kelong Electric Appliances, pulled up several old acquaintances and borrowed more than 600,000 yuan from relatives and friends and embarked on the road of entrepreneurship. The fledgling good shops are not only the business model of chain stores, but even the idea of relying on dried fruits and fried goods in the same industry is the same as that of Laiyifen.
However, unlike Laiyifen's hindsight in terms of categories, as soon as the good shop was founded, it moved the idea of "bringing together delicious snacks from all over the world in one store"; in terms of expansion, the tolerance of the good shop to the franchise store is also different from the persistence of the direct store in Laiyifen.
Therefore, following the opening of the first store in Wuhan in 2006, a set of "first erect a model, and then recruit to join" play has promoted the rapid expansion of good shops. From 28 stores in 2007, 88 stores in 2008, and then to nearly 1,000 stores in 2012, the list of good shops is not lost in the first 7 years from the perspective of store size.
Such conspicuous results have naturally attracted the attention of capital. In December 2010, Today Capital invested 51 million yuan in shares, obtaining a total of nearly 30% of the shares of Liangpin Shop.
Overall, compared with the traditional snack enterprises from production to sales, the leisure snack chain stores represented by Yifen and Liangpin Shop have opened up a kind of "asset-light operation" idea.
In terms of production, their products are oemized by many foundries, and they are not obsessed with developing a few products, but strive to carry as complete a range of snack SKUs as possible; in terms of sales, these companies rely on self-built channels, and most of them are small and medium-sized street shops.
Whether it is the production end or the sales end, it determines the competitive barriers of chain brands, and it is shifting from product research and development capabilities to the company's ability to manage suppliers. So it's not so much that they're marketing brands, but rather that they're powerful retailers.
It is worth mentioning that the development and growth of the good shop and Laiyifen is also moving forward, making it easy to forget the herb flavor sandwiched between the two at that time.
Born in 2003 in Hangzhou, next door to Laiyifen, he learned the appearance of a good shop and worked hard to expand the taste of hundred grasses, which did not become the third model sample of the 2.0 era. In 2009, It barely opened 100 stores, that is, it had to stop in the chain era because it fell into the bottleneck of expansion.
Fortunately, the achievement of The Herb Flavor is not here.
03, snack 3.0 era: the national online
2012 was another watershed year for the snack industry.
This year, the traditional food giants represented by Want Want and Unity have approached the highest point of market value, but they do not know that this upcoming peak is their last glory.
Because in this year, the second half of the snack industry's competitive form began to emerge, and the first successful tester was the unattainable herb flavor in the era of chain brands.
At the end of 2010, Baicaowei, which encountered a bottleneck of expansion, set foot online at the invitation of Alibaba, and seemed to see the unlimited potential of the Internet, and founder Cai Hongliang chose to completely abandon offline and concentrate on online.
Therefore, in 2012, when the three squirrels and the good shop first started online, Baicaowei had already won 140 million yuan in online sales.
Good shops are almost the fastest responding in snack chain retail stores. In 2012, Yang Hongchun, who promised to open 5,000 stores across the country, touched the net with a good shop and successively landed on dozens of online e-commerce channels such as Tmall, JD.com, and Yihaodian.
Facts have proved that to this day, there are still only more than 2,000 offline stores in the good shop, but it does not prevent the online business from contributing billions of yuan in revenue to the company every year.
Of course, the most eye-catching snack brand of that year was the three squirrels known as the "first online snack", after all, its origin carried the unique story of that time - model subversion and capital mania.
Founder Zhang Liaoyuan is the kind of business genius who is popular in entrepreneurial articles, he took the lead in smelling the opportunity of e-commerce B2C as early as early 2010, and launched a project to sell pecans online, this online store called "Shell Fruit" achieved sales of 20 million yuan in only 1 year.
After Zhang Liaoyuan's sales target of "two hundred million yuan in three years" was ridiculed by all the "conservatives", he decided to set up his own portal.
In 2012, the three squirrels of the online brand "pure online + high-end nuts + cute pet IP" were favored by the capital obsessed with catching the outlet as soon as it was launched. Li Feng, who was also working for IDG at the time, and Xu Xin, who had already invested in a good shop, approached Zhang Liaoyuan and offered a total of more than $21 million in financing.
Capital darling Three Squirrels also lived up to expectations, and won sales of 7.66 million yuan in singles' first day of the year, and this figure directly exceeded 500 million yuan in 2016.
At this point, the snack industry has entered the third era dominated by the Internet. The online boom has given the post-80s and post-90s who have just grown into the main force of market consumption more choices, and also allowed brand owners to have more ability to digest surplus production capacity and get closer to consumers.
In this stage of online dominance and product marketing, the core competitiveness of enterprises has become adaptable to the Internet.
Therefore, the three squirrels and herbs that grew up in Si at the beginning, as well as the good shops that seek deep access to online channels as soon as possible, can stand out in this era and form a full momentum. In contrast, the prosperous people who still rely on the old offline road inevitably begin to pay for missing an era.
In 2014, the market value of Wang Wang, Unity and Master Kong reached the top collectively, and although the accumulation of industry ensured their financial decency, it also mercilessly sounded the clarion call from prosperity to decline.
According to the financial report, Master Kong and the unified beverage and instant noodle business entered a period of stagnation in 2014; the revenue growth rate of Qiaqia Food and Dali Group slowed down, and Wang Wang fell into negative growth for four consecutive years from 2014 to 2017, and the market value fell by nearly half.
It wasn't until 2017 that the reverence for "omnichannel" became apparent at the level of the organizational structure of these companies. Only at that time, Three Squirrels, BaicaoWei and Liangpin Shop were already in the top three in the market share of the snack industry, among which Baicaowei was listed with the help of the acquisition of Good Thoughts.
In the 1.0 era, in addition to their exhausted performance, they also suffered the fate of being forgotten by the "children" who achieved them that year.
04, snacks 4.0 era: health is king
While you're struggling to buy three squirrels, herbs or good shops, the young Generation Z has begun to abandon them.
Data show that the market share of three squirrels, good shops and herbs has declined, from 35% in Q1 of 2020 to 23% of Q1 in 2021. The recent third quarter financial report shows that the BAT performance of these three snack classes has declined, and negative marketing has frequently emerged.
When snacking enters the "healthy" 4.0 era, what are young people eating?
Yuanqi Forest led the food and beverage industry to collectively enter the era of 0 sugar and 0 fat and low calorie; ffit8, a protein bar sold 100 million a year; Wang Satie, Ozark and other cereals and wonderlab opened a scientific meal replacement; hyaluronic acid gummies, buffX is to open the door to functional food...
"The food industry in the past had a lack of demand for today's young people, and there are major opportunities in the overall lifestyle upgrade." Zhang Guangming, founder of ffit8, said to Guanchao New Consumption (ID: TideSight), "All kinds of snacks, beverages, etc. in life, these categories can be re-done with the logic of health." The younger packaging, visual and communication language is back to marketing. ”
In many conversations, Zhang Guangming said that what ffit8 wants to do is to make future young people eat healthier, rather than simple ffit8 products. As a result, after the protein bar, probiotic protein powder, protein meal replacement shake, protein cookies, etc., "protein" has more possibilities.
Functional food, healthy food, healthy snacks are the market where consumers actively seek products with demand, which also brings rapid dividends to the industry.
Specifically, taking the "health component" as an example, higher-order health can be summarized by three additions and three subtractions:
The first kind of addition is that the modern pain point makes the classic food supplement raw material become fashionable again, and the modern pain point plus the classic mental ingredient becomes a new regimen, such as Quaker five rye;
The second addition is ingredient innovation, and food is the "new health" choice for young people. Functionalize snacks, or functional snacks;
The third kind of addition directly hits the pain points of the subdivision population, and the addition of ingredients allows mature categories to gain new opportunities. For different groups of people, find entry points, such as children's growth needs, beauty and beauty for young adults, and so on.
The first subtraction is the reduction of sugar wind. Minimalist formula, green sugar substitute, scientific sugar substitute outlet;
The second subtraction is precise salt control. Naturally salty and fresh, or known as the next outlet for health management;
The third subtraction is scientific meal replacement and nutritional management. Meal replacement is not equal to weight loss, and there are many other effects and scenarios, such as energy supplements for sports people, nutritional supplements for office workers, etc.
Under the national tide, new domestic products emerge in an endless stream, and the old brands are upgraded and renewed, which represents a new trend, new quality and new value, which is more dimensions of emotion, more diversified senses, and higher health.
A careful study of the current Internet celebrity products will find that their blending is not over-curiosity, but a new soul under the harmonious collision of old elements; the new taste of Internet celebrities and trend categories meet the inspiration of new explosive products.
"The most surprising difference between the new brand is that this generation of new brands has shifted from the previous generation's focus on sales to more on brand building. They usually have a deep understanding of marketing, product development and design, are proficient in the use of digital marketing tools, and master the skills and methods of communicating with consumers. Lu Zhibin, director of the New Consumption Research Center of Ali Research Institute, once said.
Consumer tastes and preferences are no longer a single dimension of preferences, and now to satisfy consumers, they must start from the five senses.
Of course, it is important for fresh food to be delicious, but it is also necessary to pay more attention to consumers' sense of smell, taste, hearing, vision, and even tactile perception. At present, the interaction and experience of consumers with products is all-round and multi-dimensional.
05, the same destination
In the 30 years since the 1990s, the snack industry has roughly experienced three rounds of model innovation and opened the fourth round of change. Today, while the pattern in the industry is basically taking shape, new challenges have also struck.
The snack kings of the 1.0 era have experienced about three years of adjustment and reflection, and have made efforts to lay out online.
In 2014, Yanjin Shop followed the Trend of the Internet to set up an e-commerce company; in 2016, I want you to include the upstart baicao flavor of online snacks; in 2017, Want Want shifted its focus to the in-depth layout of omni-channel.
In addition, in the 3.0 era when the national tide is popular and marketing is dominant, the original giants who have always been good at publicity have opened up a new marketing path with emotional themes without exception.
As a result, Wang Wang knitted sweaters, The Great White Rabbit sold ice cream and perfume, and Xu Fuji and the Summer Palace jointly launched a cake gift box to try to pry open the long-sealed memories and wallets of contemporary consumers.
At present, the diversification strategy has made the financial data of the above companies slightly improved, but the "ship is difficult to turn around", in the snack field, the mountains are numerous, the traffic differentiation today, to return to the peak of the market value of the year will be difficult.
In the 2.0 era, Laiyifen, which did not have a timely transformation, took a two-pronged approach, making up for the online operations owed on the one hand, and improving the shopping experience of offline stores on the other.
In 2018, with an increase of 7.01% over the same period of the previous year and a total operating income of 3.891 billion yuan, Laiyifen followed The Good Shop to become the fourth brand in the snack industry market share.
However, only 10.2655 million yuan, a sharp decline of 89.87% year-on-year net profit, still makes this latecomer seem inadequate.
The "Big Three" of the 3.0 era also encountered the stagnation of online penetration and the price struggle in the open and dark during the period of rapid development, and the gradual homogenization of models and products once blurred its brand recognition. The fierce race on the track has forced them to embark on the road of collective transformation without exception.
For the three squirrels and Baicaowei on the pure line, switching to the offline is the most practical way to obtain traffic increments.
At the end of 2018, Three Squirrels announced that it would open 150 stores offline in 2019; Baicaowei, which specializes in online, regained its offline advantages to pick up the physical store business after 8 years.
The good shops, which originally walked on two legs online and offline, continued to accelerate their offline layout when they already had more than 2,000 stores.
It can be seen that although each company has different strategies and paths, omni-channel, diversification and differentiation have become the survival consensus of all snack companies. At a time when the industrial links are getting closer and closer and smoother, traditional enterprises are putting down their bodies, online enterprises are returning to the entity, and the core of all participants is returning to the essential needs of consumers.
As far as industry opportunities are concerned, the market depression in the 1.0 era will no longer exist, and the underlying rotation of the 3.0 era may not appear in the short term, and the snack field has entered a relatively stable industrial period.
As far as the enterprise pattern is concerned, the good shop, the taste of grass, and the three squirrels are large and complete, with many categories and no characteristic memory points. The products of new brands that have risen in various segments are more catered to the tastes of today's young people, and continue to encroach on market share.
But even so, the heads of all the capital markets add up to only the level of tens of billions. This means that for the players who are still in it, whether they can do it and how big they can do it all depends on the ability of the company.
After all, China's snack market is like a child's snack pocket, always with a place for better latecomers.