Image source @ Visual China
Text | Sting Institute, author | Lu
With the Spring Festival approaching, pre-made dishes have once again entered the menu of the public's Chinese New Year's Eve from niche tables, and this year's prepared dishes are particularly hot.
In the A-share market, the concept stocks of prefabricated dishes such as Guolian Aquatic Products, Tongqinglou and Quanjude have all ushered in the rise and fall. At the same time, Lu Zhengyao was also rumored to be incubating the pre-made vegetable project "Tip of the Tongue Workshop" with great fanfare, and threatened to open 3,000 stores a year. Some institutions even predict that in the next 3-5 years, China's prepared vegetable industry is expected to become the next trillion catering market.
With the consciousness of "people taking food as the sky" and the curiosity about prepared dishes, the Sting Institute tried to figure out what pre-made dishes can bring to the catering industry at a time when the offline catering industry is frequently hit by the epidemic.
Pre-made dishes ignite the cold winter of dining
Pre-made dishes are nothing new, many Shanghai widows have always had the habit of hoarding pre-made dishes for the New Year, and the continuation of the epidemic has made people start to notice this new track with great potential. During the epidemic period, the offline catering format was seriously affected, and a number of catering enterprises began to launch pre-made vegetable products to try to save themselves. As consumers began to eat out less and many parts of the country encouraged local New Year policies, demand for pre-made markets has seen a big explosion in the past year.
Carrie Lam, head of the Ding Ding Lazy Dish brand, told the Sting Institute that because of the epidemic, everyone's demand for eating at home has increased, which is one of the external causes of the outbreak of demand for prepared dishes. From the perspective of the industry, the development of the industrial chain such as product supply and cold chain logistics in the upstream of the prefabricated vegetable industry has also developed to a certain level before, and the basic conditions of the entire industry have been met, and only an opportunity for demand to break out to open the market is missing.
Whether it is as a way for catering enterprises to help themselves, or a breakthrough in the current catering industry. The popularity of the prefabricated vegetable track has attracted a group of players of all kinds to pour in. Among them, Haidilao launched the "Open Rice" series, Xibei launched Jia Guolong's kung fu dishes, and retail channel players such as Hema Fresh, Daily Excellent Fresh, and Dingdong Buy Vegetables are also accelerating the layout of their own pre-made dish product fronts.
The capital market is also equally active, enterprise investigation data show that from 2020 to 2021, a total of 23 financing incidents have occurred in the prefabricated vegetable track, and the semi-finished product industry leader Weizhixiang also successfully landed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in April 2021 by riding the east wind of the market, and with the help of the market and capital, prefabricated dishes seem to have become a new outlet in the catering industry.
Jia Guolong, chairman of Xibei Noodle Village, said in an interview with the Economic Observer, "Catering people have always felt that they are craftsmen, but in fact, now catering has entered the era of technology from the era of craftsmanship, which must be the future trend of the catering industry." In the words, the optimism about the future of the pre-made vegetable market is undoubted.
Prepared dishes: a tool for reducing costs and increasing efficiency in catering
Jia Guolong's optimism is not unreasonable. The traditional catering industry after the kitchen as the core of the business model, long-term there is a low standardization, scale is difficult to solve the problem, in addition to the hot pot such as catering categories that do not require a chef, most of the catering stores are closely related to the skills of the chef in the back kitchen, and the pre-made dish has the ability to change this situation.
In the traditional catering business model, in the case of completing the cutting and matching of dishes in advance, it takes at least ten minutes from the customer's order to the meal to be served, while the pre-made dishes only need to be simply heated for a few minutes to be served. Therefore, in terms of speed of serving, pre-made dishes are far better than on-site stir-frying. And reducing the preparation time of dishes will also help to increase the turnover rate and increase the overall revenue of the store.
In addition, the use of pre-made dishes will also help restaurants to further reduce operating costs such as personnel salaries.
The Sting Institute checked the recruitment information related to chefs on the recruitment website and found that the salary of chef positions in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai is usually between 6,000-8,000 yuan, and the salary of experienced chefs exceeds 10,000 yuan. Because the prepared dish only needs to be reheated, the requirements for job skills and professional experience are not high, so no professional chef is required to complete the production of the meal. A more obvious benefit is that cutting the operating costs of the back kitchen can save a lot of money for catering companies.
In the catering business model with pre-made dishes as the core, the traditional catering format has a lower cost burden and a higher marketing rate. If you follow the brand style of "explosive products" of Internet celebrities, it is not impossible to quickly scale up the IPO in a short period of time.
In fact, there are indeed many chain catering enterprises that have begun to widely use prepared dishes for the purpose of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and thus spawned a number of upstream supply chain star enterprises in the B-end market.
In September 2021, Qianwei Central Kitchen, which provides supplies for many well-known catering brands such as Pizza Hut, KFC and Haidilao, landed on A shares, and received a 40% increase as the "first share in the catering supply chain" on the opening day. This has also become an important event to attract capital to continue to pay attention to the pre-made vegetable track.
Category barriers for C-end consumers
Although pre-made dishes have almost become a panacea to save the catering industry in the B-end market, in the C-end market, there are still many challenges for prepared dishes.
When the Sting Institute learned about the consumption of prepared dishes among young people, many respondents gave similar replies: "What kind of prepared dishes?" Are you talking about takeaway food bags? This may also reflect that while prefabricated dishes usher in the market explosion, in the minds of most C-end young people, there is still a lack of cognition or even "unclean, unhygienic" stereotypes.
Previously, there were media reports that 70% of takeaways came from 5 yuan of cooking bags. Catering merchants will buy low-cost food bags after simple processing, and then sell to diners at a price of 20-30 yuan per serving, which has aroused consumer resentment.
Compared with the cooking package, the ingredients and food safety standards used in the prepared dish are more stringent, but on the surface, the difference between the prepared dish and the cooking bag is not obvious. Therefore, how to make consumers accept the essentially "not too bad" prepared dishes while having a negative impression of "cooking bags" is a key problem to be solved by many entrants.
In addition, the most valuable taste standardization advantage of prepared dishes for B-end enterprises is the most unacceptable problem in the eyes of C-end diners.
In the field of Chinese food, in addition to paying attention to color, fragrance and shape, the general public has great respect for the concept of "pot gas". In the eyes of many people, the mass production of pre-made dishes through secondary heating obviously cannot restore the "pot gas" of freshly fried dishes, and it is difficult to identify with the taste and taste of pre-made dishes.
Moreover, China's food culture is vast and profound, and there are different taste preferences across the country, and the sweet and salty dispute alone can divide two different markets. In the market segment, which takes local tastes as the standard, mass-produced pre-made dishes also need more refined and diversified product development. From the current point of view, pre-made vegetable companies have not yet kept up with the requirements of the market.
The Sting Research Institute found in the search of e-commerce channels that the current common prepared dishes, mainly crayfish, sauerkraut fish, lion's head, pepper pork belly chicken, etc., can be compatible with dishes with different dietary tastes between the north and the south. Moreover, the taste requirements of these dishes are generally not high.
For example, the processing of fish dishes that emphasize the freshness of ingredients into sauerkraut fish is suspected of avoiding the freshness and taste of ingredients, and it is even more important to say that crayfish with a seasonal supply and heavier taste are also needless to say.
If prefabricated dishes want to completely dominate the consumer's table, I am afraid that it will need to achieve a new breakthrough in products.
What exactly are the pre-made dishes eating?
"Nothing can be done, and it is especially important to eat." In the "Suiyuan Food List", this sentence of the Qing Dynasty poet and gourmet Yuan Ming reflects the importance that Chinese attaches to food, and it is enough to cause people to think: When people consume prefabricated dishes, what are they eating?
Compared with the fresh stir-fry in the restaurant, the prepared dishes have less taste and more convenience. However, compared with takeaway and convenient fast food, pre-made dishes may not be convenient enough. A data released by a fresh retail platform shows that 54% of "post-95" consumers often buy their own ingredients to cook, and semi-finished prepared dishes have become their favorite.
This set of data seems to be used to tell a slightly tragic but commercially valuable story: "hit workers" who are busy with 996 during the day still can't let go of the demand for food after returning home. And what they "eat" is their desire for a happy life.
But behind the business story of prepared dishes, there is another possibility.
When all home-cooked dishes were replaced by mass-produced pre-made dishes, not only Lanzhou ramen and Shaxian snacks unified their tastes, but the civilian cuisine hidden in small street shops was also forced to disappear because of large-scale commercial competition, and people's tastes were also "monopolized" by batch-based pre-made dishes. What else can people eat then?
From a business point of view, the potential of pre-made dishes is something to look forward to. It is like a delicate intelligent algorithm that finds the greatest common divisor in all human tastes and then realizes huge commercial benefits with mechanized efficiency and precision.
But food may not just have commercial value. In the "pot gas" that people have in mind, there is also the value and meaning of life to people.