You can grasp everything big and small in the venture capital circle
Tencent Venture | ID：qqchuangye
"Prefabricated dishes have long been a hot track."
Author/Mu Jiujiu
1
Lu Zhengyao stared at the prepared dish
After three transformations in 4 months, Lu Zhengyao set his sights on pre-made dishes.
Recently, the Tongue Tip Technology Group, founded by Lu Zhengyao, is incubating a new prefabricated dish project called "Tip of the Tongue Workshop", which mainly sells two types of products: prefabricated ingredients and quick cooking.
The project is a new project, but the gameplay is still the same.
Just like quxiaomian threatened to open stores a few months ago, Lu Zhengyao hopes that the tip of the tongue workshop will continue to replicate the Luckin model and achieve 3,000 stores this year.
Prefabricated dishes have long been a hot track.
According to the "2021-2022 China Prepared Vegetable Industry Development Report", in 2021, the scale of China's prepared vegetable market will exceed 300 billion yuan, and it is expected to exceed 830 billion yuan by 2025.
Some institutions even predict that China's prepared vegetable industry is expected to achieve a scale of more than 3 trillion yuan in the next 6-7 years, becoming the "next trillion-level catering market".
Graph source network
The first place for the outside world to pay attention to the opportunities in the prefabricated vegetable industry should be the listing of Suzhou Weizhixiang in April last year, becoming the "first stock of prefabricated cuisine". According to the data, Weizhixiang was established in 2008, mainly focusing on the research and development, production and sales of semi-finished dishes, including meat and poultry, aquatic products and other categories, covering hundreds of dishes.
Within one month of listing, Weizhixiang's stock price rose nearly 4 times, and the price-earnings ratio exceeded 100 times.
Since then, the prefabricated vegetable industry has shown a "capital fever". In June 2021, Sanfeng Youyi received tens of millions of yuan in round A+ financing; in July, Taste Lion received tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing; and Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan twice received tens of millions of yuan in financing in less than a year.
Under the chase of capital, the prefabricated vegetable industry is noisy.
2
The central kitchen model has spawned a new category
The sudden rise of prepared dishes is more of a carnival in the C-end consumer market.
In the 1990s, with the arrival of chain catering giants such as McDonald's and KFC, China entered the stage of restaurant chaining.
Under the chain mode, the problems of inefficient and difficult to standardize catering dishes, as well as high employment costs, have become prominent, and a large number of catering enterprises have begun to build their own central kitchens, equipped with pre-made dishes, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
By 2016, there were 912 chain catering enterprises above designated size in China, while the penetration rate of central kitchens was as high as 70%.
The rapid development of the central kitchen has made it the industry consensus that prefabricated dishes cover the catering kitchen on a large scale. From 2011 to 2020, the number of registrations of enterprises related to prepared dishes showed an upward trend. In 2015, it exceeded 4,000 for the first time, and in 2018, it exceeded 8,000 for the first time, especially in 2020, 12,500 were newly registered, an increase of 9% year-on-year.
Among them, in addition to the self-built central kitchen system of large catering enterprises such as Haidilao, Xibei and Grandma's Home, there is no shortage of third-party central kitchens and food factories serving B-end catering enterprises.
In fact, as early as 2015, there were statistics that the capacity utilization rate of central kitchens above the quota was less than 50%. A large number of catering enterprises are faced with excessive investment in central kitchen assets, and the coverage radius is limited, and the utilization rate cannot reach a certain proportion, which has dragged down the problem of enterprise operating capacity.
To this end, a number of third-party central kitchens that integrate the needs of catering enterprises to produce prepared dishes have emerged, which is different from the previous one-to-one, and they have a one-to-many business model.
Taking Jiayuan Central Kitchen, which was established in 2018 as an example, it achieved sales of 80 million yuan in only 6 months after its establishment, becoming the first third-party central kitchen in China to achieve profitability.
Third-party central kitchens have become a new choice for small and medium-sized restaurant enterprises, but what has not changed is that pre-made dishes are still favored by the catering industry. According to Ai Media Consulting data, the size of China's prefabricated vegetable market in 2019 was about 244.5 billion yuan. It is worth noting that among them, the B-end market accounted for 195.6 billion yuan, and the C-end market accounted for 48.9 billion yuan.
Even today, the proportion of revenue of domestic prefabricated vegetable companies on the B-side and C-end is still 8:2, and the B-end is still the main channel of the prefabricated vegetable track.
This is related to the fact that in the past, pre-made dishes mainly served B-end catering enterprises. On the one hand, the initial production of pre-made dishes is associated with the standardization and efficiency of catering enterprises, on the other hand, the B-end demand is more single, and often a few SKUs can meet a large number of catering enterprises.
However, under the influence of the epidemic, the home economy has promoted the prefabricated vegetable industry to usher in a demand outbreak in the C-end market, and a number of cutting-edge brands have achieved a breakthrough with the help of the C-end.
3
A sample of miso incense that breaks through to the C-end
The listing of Weizhixiang is to verify the market potential of the C-end of prefabricated dishes.
According to the prospectus, from 2018 to 2020, the revenue of Weizhixiang was 466 million yuan, 542 million yuan and 622 million yuan, respectively, with a year-on-year growth rate of 29.9%, 16.4% and 14.8% respectively.
It is worth noting that in this type of revenue, the vast majority comes from the C-side.
In 2020, the sales of Weizhixiang franchisee channels, distributor channels and wholesale channels accounted for 51.4%, 17% and 30% respectively. Among them, franchisees and distributors are mainly for C-end customers (individual customers), wholesale channels are for the B-end market, and the proportion of C-end and B-end is 7:3.
Behind the C-end as a breakthrough, it is not unreasonable. On the one hand, the epidemic has generally increased the acceptance of C-end users for prepared dishes, and the C-end consumer market has shown great potential; on the other hand, because the higher gross profit margin of the C-end is attractive.
Su Wei, an investor in Qingsong Capital, once said, "The upstream and downstream of prefabricated dishes are extremely dispersed, the gross profit margin reaches more than 50%, the upstream and downstream price differences are very large, and there is enough space to do integration, so there is a great possibility that the intermediate channel will produce giants." ”
On the contrary, the gross profit margin of the B-end market is not high, and there are many competitors, and it has not run out of the head enterprise for many years.
To this end, a number of cutting-edge prefabricated vegetable brands such as Fresh Food Zhi, Rare Taste Xiaomeiyuan, Three Meals with Ingredients, and Taste Lion have focused on the To C market, while Internet players represented by Hema and Dingdong Have also begun to lay out the C-end market for prefabricated dishes.
Taking Dingdong buying vegetables as an example, it launched its own brand "Dingdong Damanguan" hot pot series to cater to consumer tastes. According to Ou Houxi, the person in charge of Dingdong Buy Vegetable Kuaishou Cuisine, the internal performance indicators of prefabricated dishes were exceeded and the results were remarkable.
In addition, a number of large enterprises such as Yasui and Sanquan have taken advantage of their original advantages to add prefabricated vegetable projects to seize market dividends.
Today, Lu Zhengyao hatches the tip of the tongue workshop, which is no exception.
Although the B-end product type is selected, like fun noodles, the tip of the tongue workshop is still facing C-end consumers. In order to capture this group of consumers, the tip workshop is divided into culinary skills dimensions to meet different consumer needs.
Among them, prefabricated ingredients are mainly aimed at consumers with cooking foundations, while quick cooking focuses on consumers with poor cooking skills or limited time.
It seems to have nothing to do with it, but this is the same reason as Dingdong Buy Food's launch of the "Dingdong Damanguan" hot pot series, which is committed to tapping consumer demand.
4
Does the brutal capital play work?
Although the shop is now less than half of the original target, it does not prevent the reproduction of Lu's capital's play in the pre-made cuisine industry. It is reported that the tip of the tongue workshop is trying to expand the determination of the store by joining.
However, there is a problem that To C services face more dispersed user positions, more diversified needs, and often have higher requirements for the price and quality of products. To grasp this group of diversified consumer groups, the difficulty is not less than that of the B-side.
Industry insiders pointed out that what ultimately needs to be tested is the efficiency of the supply chain.
At present, the tip of the tongue workshop does not have a production base and a central kitchen, and its model is more like integrating the advantages of B-end supply chain enterprises, selling them in their own stores, and relying on this franchise model to earn franchise fees.
The back-end supply chain is not perfect, all rely on joining to increase revenue, does this work?
First of all, the gross profit of the franchise business is not high.
Judging from the financial report of Weizhixiang, as of the end of 2020, it has a total of 1117 franchise stores, with a sales amount of 320 million yuan. Equivalent to the annual sales of a single store of 286,500 yuan, the average monthly output of a single store is 23,900 yuan, according to 40% gross profit calculation, the average monthly gross profit is only 9560 yuan.
Secondly, there are still many new and old brands besieging before and after the prefabricated vegetable track.
According to the data, there are currently about 70,000 related enterprises in China pouring into the prepared vegetable industry. Among them, there are many old brands such as Sanquan, Haidilao, and Xibei entering the game, and it is also difficult to stop a number of cutting-edge brands such as zhenwei xiaomeiyuan and three meals with materials, and there is no shortage of fights with hema in the channel.
It is not easy for the tip of the tongue workshop to break through. In Lu Zhengyao's journey of pre-made dishes, it may only evolve into a continuous expansion of stores by capital.
But the pre-made dish is not a small noodle, nor is it Luckin coffee, whether the capital game can work, everything is still unknown.
END
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