(Observer Network News Wen/Lu Siye Editor/Zhuang Yi) 2022 has just begun, and the first capital outlet seems to have appeared.
After the end of the New Year's Day holiday, prefabricated dishes have become the hottest concept of A shares, and many stocks in the plate have risen and stopped, and on January 20, the prefabricated dishes sector continued to rise, and Delis, Xiantan shares, and Huijia times rose and stopped intraday.
As of the close of trading on January 20, Delix has closed 7 consecutive up-and-down boards, and Guolian Aquatic Products has won 4 20% up-and-down boards in 10 trading days, with the market value doubling from 4.1 billion yuan to about 8.1 billion yuan, and the two stock price changes have even received a letter of concern from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
Delis has closed 7 stop-and-go boards in a row, mainly engaged in frozen meat, ham and other pork products
This wave of stock market explosion came suddenly, and the influx of industry players turned the prefabricated market into a blue ocean. Recently, the hot pot catering leader Sipping and Feeding revealed to the Observer Network that the Sipping Group is also laying out the field of prefabricated dishes, and related prefabricated vegetable products such as flower glue chicken and pork belly chicken will soon be launched on the offline supermarket and online platform. New retail enterprises such as Hema and Dingdong have also launched a number of new products of pre-made dishes and new meals when the Spring Festival falls.
Why did the pre-made dish suddenly catch fire, is it a real consumption fever or a capital carnival?
Brokerage prediction: the next trillion-level market
In fact, pre-made dishes are nothing new. Pre-made dishes, which can also be called semi-finished dishes, are products that are prepared after washing, cutting, and mixing, using frozen or vacuum packaging to preserve, and then only need to be simply cooked to make a dish. In a broad sense, clean vegetables, meat products, quick-frozen foods, fast food packages, etc. can all be collectively referred to as pre-made dishes.
As early as around 2000, pre-made dishes began to be used in B-end scenes such as restaurants and hotels in China. According to the data of the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, more than 74% of the chain catering enterprises in China have built their own central kitchens and distributed prefabricated dishes to stores, of which the proportion of prefabricated dishes used by the head chain catering enterprises has been higher, and the proportion of pre-made dishes eaten by Enterprises such as Zhen Kung Fu, Yoshinoya, Xibei and Xiaonanguo has accounted for more than 80%.
Zheng Zheng, founder of the Michelin chain restaurant pre-made dish retail company Hard Candy Technology, told the Observer Network that the pre-made dish solves the problem of standardization and cost, and is still dominated by the B-end market, mainly supplied to mass catering stores.
According to the research report of Guohai Securities, the ratio of B-end to C-end in China's prefabricated vegetable market is about 8:2, and restaurants and other businesses account for the majority of prefabricated dishes.
This year's pre-made dish concept fire is more because of the rise of the C-end consumer market. Since the epidemic in 2020, home-based consumption has exploded, and the market demand for prepared dishes has soared. The upgrading of preservation technology and cold chain logistics has also promoted more abundant prepared vegetable products to approach consumers, such as braised pork, crayfish, flower glue chicken, Buddha jumping wall and other dishes appearing in the pre-made vegetable consumer market.
Pre-made dishes can be seen as another young man's "eating out" outlet. According to the survey data of Ai Media Consulting, among the consumers of pre-made dishes, consumers aged 22-40 account for 81.3%, and consumers aged 31-40 account for 46.4%.
The results of the New Year Vegetable Market Research recently released by Hema show that 35-year-old young people are taking over the dominance of Chinese New Year's Eve meals, and these young consumers who are not willing to spend time and effort and have poor cooking skills are very willing to try prepared dishes. Data from Hema Fresh shows that the proportion of post-95 consumers buying semi-finished dishes has doubled after 65.
Since last year, pre-made dishes have been popular across all sales channels. According to the data of Dingdong, in 2021, the sales volume of dingdong's prefabricated dishes will increase by 300% compared with 2020, and the penetration rate of orders including prefabricated dishes in the overall order has exceeded 40%.
Prefabricated dishes have become a new trend on the dinner table, superimposed on many places to advocate the local New Year, capital smells the space of market demand, and pre-made dishes have become the first hot outlet at the end of the year.
Guolian Aquatic Products, whose stock price soared last week, is riding on the east wind of prefabricated vegetables. On the evening of January 11, Guolian Aquatic Products issued an announcement that it would cooperate with Hema to deeply develop pre-made dishes for aquatic products such as shrimp, tilapia, crayfish, etc., and increase the research and development and release of pre-made vegetable products. The next day, the share price of Guolian Aquatic Products began to rise all the way, and it gained 20% of the limit board for 3 consecutive trading days.
Even Zhangzidao also took off due to the outlet of pre-made dishes, after announcing that "the company's pre-made vegetable products with the characteristics of instant food, instant cooking, instant heat, ready to match have successively listed a series of products such as garlic vermicelli scallops, wrapped powder fish steaks, fresh + scallops, black pepper salmon, dragon rib Buddha jumping wall", on January 14, Zhangzidao opened with a word up and down.
In the venture capital circle, the new Chinese prefabricated dish brand "Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan" recently obtained the B+ round of financing led by Baidu Venture Capital, with a cumulative financing amount of more than 100 million yuan; Lu Zhengyao, founder of Luckin Coffee, was also exposed to step into the prefabricated cuisine track and launch the "Tip of the Tongue Workshop" project.
Brokerage institutions have moved one after another, unanimously optimistic about the prospects of prefabricated dishes. Guohai Securities said that prefabricated vegetables is one of the fastest growing sub-industries in the food processing industry in the past five years, and it is expected that the compound annual growth rate of the industry will reach 15% in the next five years, with a scale of more than 400 billion yuan by 2026, and the scale of the prefabricated vegetable market is expected to exceed 3 trillion yuan in the long term.
Shanxi Securities expects that the space scale of mainland prepared vegetables is expected to reach 340 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 18% year-on-year, and the mainland prepared vegetable industry is expected to become the next trillion catering market in the next 3-5 years.
Capital is reveling, but consumers have concerns
At present, enterprises that lay out prefabricated dishes can be divided into four major genres: professional prefabricated vegetable producers (including quick-frozen food manufacturers), catering enterprises, upstream agricultural enterprises and retail enterprises.
Zheng Zheng told the observer network that the high-end Michelin restaurant has a large single store area, a small number of stores, and limited offline service coverage, while prefabricated dishes have opened the bottleneck of offline restaurants, "equivalent to opening many Michelin cloud restaurants, and the brand effect has been released." ”
"Flower glue chicken and pork belly chicken are the bottom of the net red pot of hot pot, and we have re-developed it through nearly a year to let consumers eat our best products at home." The relevant person in charge of sipping food told the observer network that the nursing group plans to launch a hit with great market core competitiveness in terms of pre-made dishes.
Previously, Haidilao has also launched the "Open Rice" series of products, Xibei has launched the prefabricated dish brand "Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine", and Guangzhou Restaurant and Tongqinglou are also focusing on investing in the pre-made cuisine business.
However, on the other side of the prefabricated capital market, the enthusiasm of the consumer side is not so obvious. Overall, consumers' recognition and acceptance of prepared dishes is not high.
Hema's survey report shows that among consumers' concerns about prefabricated New Year dishes, 55% of respondents' biggest concern about prefabricated New Year dishes is that "the ingredients are not fresh, and there are too many additives and preservatives."
Another 25% of the respondents believe that there are not many localized products and lack of local specialties for prefabricated Chinese New Year dishes; some respondents are worried that the prefabricated Chinese New Year dishes are "not in line with the picture and text", and the gap between seller shows and buyer shows is too large.
In this regard, Zhu Danpeng, a senior researcher at the China Brand Research Institute, believes that this reflects that China's prepared dishes have not really entered the node of "production and marketing". That is to say, the capital side is very enthusiastic, the industrial side is very passionate, but the consumer side does not have much desire.
The industrial side that has entered the melee has begun to homogenize.
In terms of products, Buddha jumping wall, flower glue chicken, large pot vegetables, etc. have become the priority dishes launched by many companies, and the same dishes and similar eating scenes have made the originally small prefabricated vegetable consumer market more saturated.
At the same time, the Observer Network found that the price of these prepared dishes is not cheap. Hema's pre-made New Year dish "Family Portrait" is priced at 99 yuan; Dingdong Buy's newly launched "Chinese New Year's Eve Rice from All Over the World" series of packages ranges from 58 yuan to 888 yuan, and the large pot menu cooked by abalone, sea cucumber, flower glue, black tiger shrimp, mushrooms and other seafood ingredients is as high as 198 yuan a piece.
Tmall pre-made dish sales TOP1 Heyuan restaurant, the hot sale of the first flower gum chicken price of 499 yuan a piece, more abundant Ingredients Buddha jumping wall unit price in the thousands of yuan.
Heyuan Restaurant top four sellers of prepared dishes
Is it acceptable for consumers to spend a high price on a semi-finished dish that cannot be eaten immediately?
"We just need to refine the quality and keep innovating, and the user's tongue is aware of the goods." Zheng Zheng told the Observer Network that most of the customers have a high acceptance, and a small number of consumers will question "whether the frozen product can restore the quality of dine-in" and "whether the shelf life will affect the quality", but these concerns will be dispelled after trying. Zheng Zheng believes that homogeneous competition is the result of the influx of participants in the early stage of the industry, but there is competition to expand the industry.
Zhang Qian, purchasing director of Hema 3R Commodity Procurement and Marketing Center, also said that from the experience of Hema making pre-made dishes, the current consumer demand for high-quality and price-to-price ratios of pre-made dishes is much higher than the pursuit of low prices, and pre-made New Year dishes are even more so.
Observer Network found that as a platform close to C-end consumers, on the one hand, new retail platforms such as Hema and Dingdong Buy Vegetables have always played with the Internet, sensing changes on the demand side rapidly, pushing new products at a very fast pace, and their own teams have stepped up dish research and development;
On the other hand, there are also platforms that actively introduce tripartite cooperative enterprises. At the end of last year, meituan bought vegetables "elephant chef" X "must eat list" special area on the new, joint public comment "must eat list" launched Guangzhou restaurant, Tao Taoju, that is not a pot and other pre-made dishes.
For now, the enthusiasm of practitioners is shaping the industry.
According to the research report released by Anxin Securities, nearly 70% of the prefabricated vegetable processing enterprises are still in a small, weak and scattered state, and many of them are individual industrial and commercial households and workshop-style production and processing models, and have not formed a relatively complete commercial business model. Therefore, the overall concentration of the industry is low, and it is still in the blue ocean competition.
As a pre-made dish with the rise of the epidemic and the lazy economy, the Spring Festival is hot, but major festivals do not reflect the real needs of the market. Some practitioners told the observer network that prefabricated dishes have been on a large scale in the B-end market before, the consumer market is still in the early stage of barbaric growth, and there is a certain speculation phenomenon in the recent overheating of the concept of pre-made dishes.
Whether it is a true wind outlet or a false concept depends more on the consumption enthusiasm in ordinary days. For the pre-made wet market, it takes longer to observe.
This article is an exclusive manuscript of the Observer Network and may not be reproduced without authorization.