Liang Changyu reports that China is the hometown of food and a big consumer of chicken. Large plate chicken, dry pot chicken, white chopped chicken, spicy chicken... Hey, how come there's no fried chicken?
The modern food "fried chicken" that many people are reluctant to give up does not seem to be in the traditional menu of Chinese cuisine. In my memory, the person who brought the fried family to the table Chinese seems to be a KFC founded by Harlan Sandoz, with chicken wings, chicken legs, chicken fillets, chicken nuggets, chicken rice flowers and fried chicken steak that have been popular in China for more than 30 years, and the McCann system seems to be the ceiling of the gourmet "fried chicken".
"The Americans bring fried chicken to the table of the Chinese, and we will sell the Chinese-style fried chicken back to the United States and sell it all over the world." With the addition of a new generation of catering people with more Internet genes, cross-border thinking and personalized creation, a new type of fried chicken brand that integrates social, Internet celebrity, subculture, trend and other attributes has begun to rise. The "Call a Fried Chicken" brand founder Mei Sheng and investment partners created the Internet red fried chicken brand, the first fried chicken category and track, sold tens of millions of whole chickens a year, and became the first fried chicken brand to go to sea.
"Ordered a Fried Chicken" innovative "Meteorite Fried Chicken"
Fried Chicken: A Blue Ocean Track for Entrepreneurs
Decades ago, Harlan Sandoz may not have imagined that many years later, the fried chicken "wave" he left behind has become a blue ocean track for many entrepreneurs, and Miss Song, who was born in Tuquan County, Xing'an League, Inner Mongolia, is a representative of catering entrepreneurship who has successfully come out of it.
Once, like other hundreds of millions of entrepreneurs in China, she had a dream of starting a business, but she had no way, no clue, and no direction. What is more special is that Tuquan County, where Miss Song is located, was a poor county in Inner Mongolia before 2020, which means that Miss Song's entrepreneurial projects not only need a low threshold, but more importantly, match the local level of economic and social development. Just when she was at a loss, she saw the brand promotion of "calling a fried chicken" on the Douyin platform.
"Called a fried chicken" on the social platform is quite hot, social attention is very high, is the "red fried chicken" level of internet red catering brand, according to Miss Song recalled to reporters, it is called a fried chicken of this Internet celebrity attributes, let her come up with the idea of joining the entrepreneurial, in the case of limited start-up funds, strong to girlfriend Amway, and finally the two partners to invest, the two sides successfully bonded.
From the actual operating effect, the consumption affinity and penetration of fried chicken is indeed strong, according to Miss Song, the consumption capacity of ethnic minority counties is very good, a day can do nearly 100 takeaways, monthly net profit reached more than 30,000. She herself has become an excellent partner representative of fried chicken because of her outstanding performance.
According to the reporter, fried chicken snacks have always been a hot field and breakthrough in entrepreneurship. From a consumption point of view, the breadth of chicken is quite high, second only to pork in China, and at the world level, chicken is the largest meat consumption. As far as the chicken industry is concerned, chicken bones are small, easy to standardize production and processing, while the upstream supply chain has been tempered by the McCann system for more than thirty years, and has long evolved a set of high-standard, high-level breeding and supply systems, sufficient and stable, so the development and expansion of chicken catering brands has natural backstage advantages, unlike seafood catering brands, the supply chain can choke its pulse.
In addition, the influence of KFC pearls in the past can not be ignored. KFC has set a world-class industry benchmark for fried chicken, which has raised the ceiling of the entire industry while also releasing a very broad space for industrial expansion and product innovation.
Internet ideas to create a "net red" brand
What really makes Mei Sheng and "call a fried chicken" come to everyone, I have to mention Cao Rui, who plays a pillar role behind the scenes, and the Yum Group he has worked for for a long time, and deeply understands the success of the McCann department. After becoming the general manager of Shanghai Hongcai Investment Management Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Taixiang Catering Management Co., Ltd., this catering veteran, together with the new generation of entrepreneur Mei Sheng, has integrated into the team of New Chinese Catering People, and has taken over the baton of catching up with Western-style catering giants from traditional catering people.
New catering people, with strong characteristics of the Internet era. Together, they laid the brand image of "internet celebrity", "new style" and "trendy school" for calling a fried chicken, and it is these labels that have attracted countless entrepreneurs, partners, partners and other groups such as "Miss Song".
According to Mei Shengxiang, at that time, the emerging takeaway industry profoundly affected the dining and eating habits of Chinese people, especially young people, and the fast "buy-eat" way made it more convenient for snacks to enter the public's daily casual dining scene, Mei Sheng immediately established a brand name with takeaway, Internet and social attributes for this newborn fried chicken product, so that calling a fried chicken was deeply related to calling takeaway, and thus became a hit. This strategy really helps to make unfamiliar consumers quickly remember their newborn selves in the era of "fast catering" where replacements are very frequent.
And those who take over the baton and ignite the war more vigorously are big items and big explosives. Looking at the rise path of new catering consumer brands in recent years, single products and explosive product strategies have almost become their trump tactics, and one trick is eaten all over the world. The biggest category that Mei Sheng established for calling a fried chicken is the first whole fried chicken.
"Whole fried chicken" seems to be just a small change in eating methods, but it has evolved into a fairly large market. The whole fried chicken, aimed at the daily casual fast food scene of young consumers, Cao Rui further introduced in the exchange, this mode satisfies their hidden hand-torn whole chicken psychology when eating fried chicken, and thus derives the sense of pleasure, ceremony and atmosphere shared at the dinner. Consumers are eating fried chicken, but they are also eating novel experiences.
After the single product and the explosive product, Cao Rui and Mei Sheng expanded the scene with "calling a fried chicken" and turned the category into a brand. In the case of relatively stable product categories, the change of taste and flavor has become a good weapon for new products and new experiences, and the various vine pepper winds and coconut tides that have blown in the casual catering industry are all confirming that consumers' taste buds are getting more and more stubborn, and grasping a person's stomach has moved up to grasp a person's taste buds.
According to the two partners, consumers are often willing to try new flavors when buying fried chicken, so they called a fried chicken in taste innovation, cooperated with Unilever, New Hope and other enterprises, through research and development, combination, collocation, a total of more than 30 flavors. Taste innovation, retain consumers, improve repurchase, so as to enhance the stickiness of the brand and consumers, but also let a fried chicken in the consumer to form a strong consumption memory point.
It can be seen that in accordance with the ideas of the Internet and e-commerce, it is the core of the brand to create star products and explosive models, and to carry out the circle of Internet celebrities and occupy the minds of consumers.
The digital supply chain is driving accelerated store expansion
The vigorous scene of the consumer market has given a fried chicken a greater imagination space for future market expansion, after all, in Cao Rui's view, whether it is the achievement of the current thousands of stores covering 100 million consumers and 5 million orders per month, or the planning of "three years and eight thousand, five thousand stores", it has not yet reached the ceiling of the industry development.
Cao Rui believes that with reference to the similar McCann system, as well as the later Wallace, Dicos and Zhengxin chicken steaks, the scale of 10,000 stores belongs to the normal average of the industry, and there is a long distance from the scale of 20,000 and 30,000 stores. They further revealed to reporters that the next three or five years belong to a very critical "attack on the city" expansion period of fried chicken, the long-term goal is locked at tens of thousands, the brand sword refers to the revenue target of tens of billions of yuan of franchise stores, and the development potential of enterprises is still very abundant.
The development prospects of catering enterprises rely heavily on the development of offline markets and store openings. Zhou Jian, the first think tank expert of the Brand Committee of The Zhejiang Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, believes that "calling a fried chicken" relies on the catering franchise system, which greatly expands the breadth and depth of the brand's market popularity and geographical distribution. Especially with internet digitalization as the internal driving force, the structure of the catering industry is accelerated to optimize and upgrade, and chain restaurant enterprises will win more dividends under the blessing of Internet technology and big data advantages, and combined with the brand and store "cracking down on fakes and establishing truth" action, seize more opportunities in the fierce market competition, and also provide more opportunities for catering mass entrepreneurship.
At the same time, the above-industry profitability of stores has boosted market share and store attractiveness. After combining the annual net profit of first- and second-tier cities and third- and fourth-tier cities, the profitability of stores can reach 83%. Behind the industry's high standards of data, there is a set of mechanisms called "small front desk, big back office" running. Among them, the front desk "makes small" the front kitchen with standardized management of the front hall + standardized operation, and the backstage is strongly "bigger" through the huge and complex digital system.
Under the operating mechanism of "small front desk and big background", the advantages of cost reduction and efficiency improvement driven by supply chain upgrading can be quickly transmitted to the front end of the store, thereby driving the efficiency and profit margin of the single store, and the expansion of the store in the single drive area and even the region, such as snowballing, the volume is huge, and the goal of franchise stores of 10 billion is naturally completed.
"Called a fried chicken" easy to copy, fast expansion, mature supply chain system and other characteristics, to the already hot new catering investment tide and really added a handful of firewood, some market investment institutions preliminarily estimated that the valuation of "called a fried chicken" is not less than 1 billion.
Zhou Jian further pointed out that if you look at the entire new catering track, the trend of industrialization and modernization of restaurant chains is more serious, the investment boom in the catering industry will only increase day by day, and as long as your ideas are of sufficient quality and the business model created is high-quality enough, the valuation of billions of yuan and tens of billions of yuan will be realized faster.
"Ordered a fried chicken" At the Osaka store in Japan
"Whole Fried Chicken Made in China": The Global Expansion of Chinese Fried Chicken
While exploring the industry ceiling of new catering and new fried chicken, the new generation of catering people are also exploring the overseas tension of new brands to enrich the geographical breadth of catering and diversify business risks. The reporter learned that local catering brands have been going abroad and going to the international market for a long time, such as Quanjude, Meizhou Dongpo, Haidilao, Xicha, etc. According to incomplete statistics, the number of overseas Chinese catering brands has increased to more than 600,000 in the past 40 years.
Public information shows that "ordered a fried chicken" is the first fried chicken brand in this "sea tide". According to the data provided by the official xiang, the fried chicken has gone to the overseas market since 2019, and has been laid out in 14 countries or regions so far, with stores in Japan, Singapore, Canada, the Philippines, Australia and other overseas countries.
At present, the overseas revenue of fried chicken is called about 10%, which is already in the middle and upper reaches from the perspective of the entire industry. At the same time, the reporter noticed from the interview that because the per capita consumption power of many overseas markets is significantly higher than that of the domestic and local markets, it has pushed up the unit price of store customers and ensured the profit margin, which means that once the overseas market is rolled out in large quantities, the profit potential cannot be underestimated, and it is not difficult to achieve the goal of an average annual growth rate of 20% of the main financial data.
In this process, a fried chicken was successfully rooted and rooted in the North American market, which is the local Western-style fast food brand "learning to succeed", stationed in the Western-style fast food base camp, staged a "blue out of the blue and better than blue", fried whole chicken, Made in China, the brand's international impression is established.
The pair of partners Cao Rui and Mei Sheng sighed and said that they wanted KFC to be stationed in China for more than thirty years, and how many rich and varied long-term or short-term chicken products it continued to launch, and the flavor patterns of old Beijing flavor, spicy chicken, cumin, Sichuan spicy and other flavors with the essence of Chinese northern and southern catering have greatly exceeded the original menu limitations of the Original American KFC. And this time, "it is also the turn to order a fried chicken, on a small whole chicken, sprinkled with the traditional taste of Thousands of Mountains and Rivers of China, east of Fusang, west of the onion ridge, across the ocean, let the world remember the taste of China." (Courtesy of respondents)