Why does the small pot tea model have a demonstration effect?

On September 10, 2021, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the State Administration of Market Supervision and Administration, and the Three Ministries and Commissions of the All-China Supply and Marketing Cooperative jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Healthy Development of the Tea Industry (hereinafter referred to as the Opinions). Macroscopically, this guidance document has made good expectations for the development of China's tea industry and for the first time given a lot of meticulous and constructive guidance, but in China's raw tea production and total consumption is high, disorderly development in some areas, tea industry concentration is low, the level of deep processing is not high, lack of market influence and other objective background, the first to understand the enterprise may be one step ahead of the industry, but the long-term scientific implementation of the enterprise will go further.

Under the macro background of Guosheng Tea Boom and the modernization of the "14th Five-Year Plan", the upgrading of the tea industry is necessary and urgent. And the representative enterprises at the industrial chain level as the implementers of the policy, the industry, the industry practitioners, the manufacturers of tea products, the connectors of the consumer terminal, will help us to understand this document, this article will take the modern Chinese tea enterprises --- small pots of tea as a clue, peel back the cocoon analysis of the problems and breakthroughs facing the tea industry.

Analysis of the objectives and current situation of the Opinions

The "Opinions" proposes to strengthen the construction of four major aspects, that is, to build the whole industrial chain of the tea industry, provide support for advanced elements in many aspects, promote the integration and development of the tea industry, and increase guidance and supervision services.

Interpreting the "Opinions", it is best to first focus on the "purpose", the "overall goal" of the document points out: "By 2025, the tea garden area will be stable at the current level, the contribution rate of tea industry science and technology will reach 65%; the total output value of dried tea will reach 350 billion yuan, the tea export volume will reach 2.5 billion US dollars, and several large-scale modern tea industry enterprise groups with annual sales of more than 2 billion yuan will be cultivated; the level of tea technology will be greatly improved, the tea culture will be vigorously promoted, the first, second and third industries will be deeply integrated, and the high-quality development pattern of the tea industry will be basically formed." ”

In summary, it is not difficult to find out why in the huge industrial scale of 350 billion yuan, the large modern tea industry enterprise group of 2 billion yuan still needs to be cultivated? Compared with the industrial scale of 580 billion yuan in the liquor industry in 2020, the same cultural attributes are prominent, China's business card, liquor has 100 billion Maotai, Mao Wuyang is well known, but tea leaders are little known or even vacant.

Its essence stems from the fact that 70,000 tea enterprises are fighting their own battles, still dominated by a small-scale peasant economy.

But Chinese tea does not lack high quality and rich variety, the lack of a world-famous brand, compared to coffee, standardization and scale is the best path, that is to say, small pot tea to use standardized logic to do Traditional Chinese Kung Fu Tea. Although Chinese tea is popular at home and abroad, there is still no Chinese tea brand that is well known to the outside world, and throughout the world, there is no Chinese tea brand that has done transnational industrialization.

Therefore, the integration of the industrial chain, collectivization is an important means and direction for modern tea companies to gain the lead, just like Coca-Cola to most parts of the world can quickly obtain consumer awareness, compared with the degree of industrialization of coffee and cola, Chinese tea needs to be further improved in both standards and scale.

In the "Opinions" initiative to strengthen the construction of the four major aspects, the construction of the whole industrial chain of the tea industry has also been placed in the first place. Different from before, the industrial chain layout of small pot tea is bottom-up, and its biggest advantage is that it is easy to get rid of the traditional shackles and easier to connect with the real needs of consumers.

From the perspective of the time of establishment, the small pot of tea from 2012 to the mountain to find tea so far only 10 years, but it has brought a lot of ideas and innovations to the tea industry in 9 years, compared with the rapid turnover of 2 billion yuan, few people have noticed that the small pot of tea to deeply cultivate the tea industry, optimize the determination of the tea industry, but its complete industrial chain layout of the tea industry has been nearly completed.

In the downstream of the industrial chain, small pot tea has anchored the general direction of Chinese tea with the consumer goods thinking of attaching importance to lifestyle communication, and now small can tea has gradually formed a multi-brand multi-product line pattern.

In the middle reaches, the Huangshan Super Factory, which is expected to be officially put into operation in 2022, is expected to reach a total production capacity of 10 billion yuan as the world's largest and most technologically advanced smart factory in the tea industry.

In the upstream of the industrial chain, Fengqing Dianhong Factory is a benchmark factory for the industrial manufacturing of small pot tea upstream. Xiaocang Tea cooperated with Zhang Chengren, the representative inheritor of the black tea making technology (Yunnan black tea making technology), a representative project of the national intangible cultural heritage, to transform its tea making technology into a standardized and large-scale industrial production method.

In addition to the complete industrial chain layout, the strategy of small pot tea large research and development + whole industry chain, multi-brand multi-product line has been gradually improved, and the development of collectivization is worth looking forward to.

How advanced elements support the tea industry

The "Opinions" pointed out that it is necessary to provide support for advanced elements in many aspects, which can be summarized as four key words of science and technology, research and enterprise alliance, sound standards, and talent training.

In the level of science and technology, research and enterprise joint level, small pot tea Fengqing Dianhong factory and Huangshan super factory are successful cases, Fengqing factory and Hangzhou Tea Institute cooperation, through the "production, study and research" scientific and technological cooperation and innovation, in the Dianhong Gongfu tea quality online detection technology research has made an important breakthrough - near-infrared tea quality inspection system and machine vision intelligent perception system in the small can of Dian black tea production line for integrated application and verification, the test shows that the absolute error of tea fresh leaves, withered leaves moisture detection is ±0.5%, The correct rate of moderate judgment on the fermentation quality of black tea is 100%, which demonstrates the reliability of the technology.

At the beginning of the birth of small pot tea, there was the pursuit of tea industrialization and standardization, in addition, Fengqing factory has also made industry-leading technologies including near-infrared light sensing, imitation daylight withering, digital kneading machine, etc., clarified the influence of process and parameters on the formation of Dianhong flavor quality, and formed a complete set of standardized processes for the spring production of Dianhong Gongfu tea.

As an integrated intelligent factory established by Industry 4.0 standards, Xiaocang Tea Huangshan Super Factory has cooperated with IBM, Siemens, Baidu AI and other top international enterprises to explore solutions and paths such as tea customization and intelligent production in terms of digital operation capacity building, production management top-level design, and digital talent training. After the official production, the small pot of tea will realize the intelligent upgrading of scientific research and development, testing and inspection, production mode and storage mode of traditional Chinese tea here.

Based on scientific tea thinking, Small Pot Tea has specially established the "Tea Industry Equipment Center" and "Tea Research and Development Center", the former focuses on the topic of tea industrialization, provides customized solutions for tea industrialization and intelligence, and is committed to developing intelligent processing equipment for the initial and refined integration, such as tea picking robots, intelligent impurity removal equipment, etc., using modern industrialization thinking to introduce high technology and comprehensively promote the revolution of tea industry industrialization.

The latter is mainly through innovation, research and development of highly recognizable products, from different production areas, different seasons, different varieties, different processes four dimensions, Chinese tea to carry out a big connection, a big mix, a big innovation, so that tea this "unexpected discovery" in human history into "active design". At present, the two major R&D centers have gathered more than 100 tea graduates and more than 20 external experts.

These are an industrial exploration for small pots of tea, but they are also one of the paths that other tea companies committed to modernization can refer to.

Branding and integration development

In summary, it is not difficult to find that the small pot of tea has actually foreseen the basic pace of the "Opinions" at the beginning of its establishment in 2012, but the small pot of tea does not have the ability to predict the prophet, consumer goods and industrial thinking are the primary conditions for it to become the representative of modern Chinese tea, and the development of the times often gives the industry a law that can be explored.

In essence, tea is an agricultural product and a magical leaf. In the course of thousands of years of history, tea has changed the world's drinking habits, but also affected the national fortunes of the two major empires of China and Britain at the end of the Qing Dynasty, tea trade has always been reasonable to change the world pattern, but the pattern of Chinese tea still exported as bulk tea should be changed.

Before the release of the "Opinions", the "14th Five-Year Development Plan Proposal for China's Tea Industry (2021-2025)" also pointed out that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, a new round of global industrial division of labor and trade pattern were reshaped, and China's tea industry turned to a stage of high-quality development, entering an important window period for comprehensively improving quality, efficiency and competitiveness. ”

How to empower tea is the primary problem, this empowerment can be standardized, industrialized and intelligent, but the most important thing is branding, with Nestlé as a reference, which has been the prerequisite for China's original leaf tea to once again become popular in the world.

However, because the reality of the tea industry is basically agriculture, the small-scale peasant economy, alpine tea gardens, and business entities are scattered. The uneven demand of production areas and sales areas is a natural contradiction, in the process of industrial development, it is very necessary to cultivate operating entities that can adapt to modern market competition, and branding is the way to break the situation.

Therefore, in promoting the integration and development of the tea industry, the "Opinions" also highlighted the need to promote the integration of the whole chain and improve the connection mechanism between the upper, middle and lower reaches of the industrial chain, because this is the pre-existing condition for the birth of 2 billion and 5 billion enterprises. According to past data, in 2018, the domestic sales of China's tea reached 266.1 billion yuan, the total market share of the top 100 brand enterprises did not exceed 5%, and the number of companies with revenue of more than 100 million yuan in the industry did not exceed 20, and many long-established enterprises with a long history of tea making were also difficult to form a scale due to the limitations of the industry.

In 2022, the small can tea Huangshan super factory is about to be put into production, its large R & D + the whole industry chain, multi-brand multi-product line layout has completed the most important step, for small can tea this is a heavy asset of enterprise grouping, for the industry, this is a practice of liberating productivity.

This 10 billion annual production capacity, the world's first tea industry Industry 4.0 base may not be the end of China's tea, but in today's context, it is one of the most mature solutions to promote the tea industry to prosper again.

Today, Xiaocang Tea is committed to becoming the most valuable tea consumer goods group in China, but the industrialization of Chinese tea requires the industrial industry to work together. In 2025, the tea industry science and technology contribution rate of 65%; the total output value of dried tea reached 350 billion yuan, tea exports reached 2.5 billion US dollars, the development of China's tea industry will still be the main domestic sales, output as a supplement to the basic disk, "with a leaf to warm the world" should not only be a small pot of tea its own corporate mission, but also should be China's tea, Chinese tea culture to adapt to the times to adapt to the world's common vision and mission.