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A new blue ocean emerges?
Written by Meng Huiyuan
Editor/Li Wenjie
Recently, the fresh track has become lively again.
First, Hema clarified that it should take the "road of multi-format online and offline coordinated development"; then dingdong to buy vegetables in the business scope, adding shared bicycle services, corporate management consulting and leisure and sightseeing activities, etc.; subsequently, Daily Excellent Fresh also cooperated with the head short video to do live shopping speed.
The ebb and flow of 2021 is over, and the development of the fresh track that users complain, capital abandons, and suddenly falls down, forcing these platforms that survived the battle royale to wake up from the dream of "burning money to get the world". Just in 2022, they are ready to go and seem to have found a new way out...
A single business line cannot support the future of fresh e-commerce
Before the end of the year, there are fresh e-commerce companies that have reported the news of layoffs, which inevitably causes endless reverie inside and outside the industry.
Although it was later replied that "individual job changes are normal organizational resource adjustments", the poor development status of the fresh e-commerce market is still very worrying, after all, according to the relevant data of the "Diandianbao" e-commerce big database, from January 2018 to October 2021, there were Lengyi, Shangshu Yonghui, Yiguo Fresh, Fresh Fruit Home, My Kitchen Fresh, Wonderful Life, Fresh Laiduo, Mini Fresh, TableLife One Table Network, Melon Powder Network, Fruit Camp, Vegetable To La, Fields Futian Network , Anxian fruit, young vegetable jun, community hurry, fruit food help, ingredient master, rush to buy, three moments 321cooking and many other fresh e-commerce fell.
Data source: "Dianshubao" e-commerce big database
Immediately after, the same city life also declared bankruptcy, the carrot reorganization failed, the squirrel spelling capital chain was broken, Baoneng Fresh Multi-city closure, the Shihui group fell into the crisis of layoffs and closures, Aunt Qian lost beijing, and Meicai.com was also exposed to the news of layoffs and business scope contraction many times... Piles and pieces are challenging the bottom line of practitioners and investors.
It has to be admitted that as the number one choice in the entrepreneurial circle in the past two years, fresh e-commerce has entered a strange circle of development: although the players of the fresh track have created a variety of business models such as pre-warehouses, community stores, and group leader procurement, and have also obtained more than 100 billion yuan of daily bets from the hands of capital, but after a round of reshuffling and reshaping, the problem of profitability and low unit price faced by the fresh e-commerce market is still difficult to solve.
Perhaps, as Chen Hudong, a special research institute of the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economic Society, said, "Fresh is essentially a money-burning industry, coupled with the timeliness of fresh, the matching of the back-end supply chain, regional and many other requirements are very high, so although the industry as a whole is now fiercely competitive, it has basically not formed an efficient profit model, and there are many problems to be solved." ”
The natural high loss rate and non-standardization of fresh products have determined the development tone of high fulfillment costs and low gross profit margins of fresh e-commerce. Coupled with the cost of terminal distribution, consumer price sensitivity, customer unit price increase has traffic bottlenecks and other factors, it can be said that fresh e-commerce based on fresh goods, aiming at a business that is not easy to make money.
"If fresh e-commerce just burns money to do scale growth, it is not difficult at all, but it does not make any sense, in the knockout round of tens of billions to 100 billion, those players whose business cannot achieve profitable growth will become more and more difficult to operate." Therefore, just like the judgment of Xu Zheng, the founder of Daily Excellent Fresh, those players who "burn money for the market" have painstakingly pulled investment subsidies, and wanted to capture people's hearts with low prices, because they could not achieve self-hematopoiesis, and in the end it was often difficult to sustain, and when the money was burned out, they fell one by one.
The surviving fresh e-commerce companies finally understand that according to these business models that have been explored now, it is impossible to support themselves by operating a single fresh product business line, and using "burning money" to maintain the flow of water will only drag themselves down to the end.
Industry consensus on "diversified development, multi-legged walking"
Since the beginning of 2022, we can see some reflective fresh e-commerce companies making corresponding adjustments to their own business lines.
For example, Hou Yi, CEO of Hema, released an internal letter on the first working day of the beginning of 2022, pointing out that Hema has clarified the "road of multi-format online and offline coordinated development", with the goal of improving from the current single store profit to full profitability. Among the five strategies mentioned in the letter, it includes a two-wheel strategy from "online development as the mainstay, offline development as a supplement" to "online and offline common development".
At the same time, Hou Yi's three growth curves of Hema also began to exert force: Hema fresh focus on high-frequency home, store market, supermarket, vegetable market, catering store a variety of functions composite, within 3 kilometers of the store, 30 minutes to deliver to the door; Hema X member store targets the high-end paying member population, warehouse-type membership store can provide more own brand, more cost-effective, product depth and SKU stronger services; Hema neighborhood focuses on community retail, through the "order + self-operated" model, Infiltrate hema products into various communities to supplement the radiation of hema to users in different circles.
Daily Fresh is also trying to break the circle from another dimension. According to relevant media reports, at the end of January, daily excellent fresh and a head short video platform to test the water live with goods, its live shopping speed business selection of fresh ingredients, short-term food and beverages, consumers from the live broadcast room after placing an order, the daily excellent fresh pre-warehouse as soon as 30 minutes to achieve home delivery.
The reason why it can be so fast is because the shopping process is slightly different from the traditional live streaming room. Thanks to the daily excellent fresh front warehouse outlets, when consumers place an order in the live broadcast room, the front warehouse near the receiving address will receive the order, and complete the process of picking, packing and leaving the warehouse within a few minutes, and then send it to the consumer with the fastest timeliness. Therefore, this is also known as the first cooperation between live e-commerce and instant retail, and live shopping has directly entered the era of same-day delivery from next-day delivery and next-day delivery to the same-day speed delivery era.
Dingdong Grocery Is trying to break the confines of a single customer base and prepare to gain more upside from other areas. According to the data of Aiqicha, Shanghai Yibaimi Network Technology Co., Ltd., the main body of Dingdong's food purchase, has added shared bicycle services, corporate management consulting and leisure and sightseeing activities in its business scope, and the company's registered capital has also increased from 3.5 billion yuan to 8 billion yuan, an increase of 128.6% year-on-year.
Image source: Aiqicha
Of course, at present, these platforms have only taken the first step of change, whether these new directions can get the affirmation of users, how much change can be brought to the platform, it is not easy to say. However, as long as the new strategy of all-round penetration of the industry and diversified business layout is clarified, the fresh e-commerce companies that will only "burn money" but cannot "burn money" under factors such as stricter supervision and tight funds will undoubtedly see more possibilities.
Seeking differentiated development, but all focus on "pre-made dishes"
A rather interesting new news, in the new direction of the business line is basically different fresh e-commerce, Qi Qi stared at the "pre-made dish", all want to grab the C position of Chinese New Year's Eve rice.
Around the needs of Chinese New Year's Eve meals, various kinds of pre-made dish gift boxes are densely listed on the daily fresh food. Among them, the Xibei family banquet pre-made dish gift box of "Nine Famous Dishes Gathering" and the Dahongmen Jingwei Prefabricated Dish Gift Box of "Eight Cooked Food in One Box" have become the top 4 products in the gift box category.
Hema has also launched 18 sets of different sets of "eight bowls" Of New Year dishes in different regions of the country. For example, in Guangzhou, the "eight bowls" of pre-made New Year dishes include braised pork, raw fried ribs, fried fish cakes, brine goose paws, taro button meat, braised pork hands, osmanthus flowers, family portrait eight dishes, all of which only need to be heated to eat.
Hema fresh raw prepared dish
Dingdong's sales data shows that the food related to pre-made dishes in this year's New Year Festival increased by more than 400% year-on-year. In particular, some dishes related to Chinese New Year's Eve rice and good color, such as a "blossoming rich yellow croaker steamed meatloaf" sales increased by more than 980% compared with the previous week.
And the pre-made wet market is not Chinese New Year's Eve the "wave of heat" of rice. According to the report of the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, according to the compound growth rate of 20% per year, the scale of the mainland prefabricated vegetable market in the next 6-7 years may exceed one trillion yuan, and the scale of the mainland prefabricated vegetable industry is expected to reach 3 trillion yuan in the long run.
From the perspective of eye-catching sales data and trillion market prospects, fresh e-commerce companies that have always focused on agricultural and sideline products have targeted a blue ocean market that has not yet taken root in head enterprises and brands.
"A key reason why prefabricated dishes can rise in the market is the scale, standardization and industrialization of the entire catering industry, and most of the dishes in the restaurant can be 'prepared cuisine'." Wu Tingting, head of the daily excellent fresh meal group, said so in an interview.
Some relevant practitioners even believe that fresh e-commerce has multiple models such as front warehouses, community stores, and group leader procurement, and has been operating and developing in the consumer market for many years, and on the basis of precision marketing, it can also reduce the scrapping rate of dishes to the minimum, so as to seize multiple classes of consumer groups.
However, what is more critical is that the domestic food culture has the characteristics of many food factions, different tastes, and regional characteristics. And from the perspective of consumers' purchase of Chinese New Year's Eve rice ingredients, in recent years, consumers have become more and more not limited to local traditional dishes in the choice of dishes and tastes of Chinese New Year's Eve rice, and the tastes of the north and south have become more and more integrated.
This means that it is difficult for China's prefabricated vegetable market to form a monopoly situation, even if the fresh e-commerce platform has broken into the prefabricated vegetable market, from the perspective of taste, variety, practice and other aspects, to a large extent, it can avoid falling into the vortex of homogeneous competition. This is undoubtedly very friendly for platform enterprises that intensively utilize resources, and it is more in line with the key points of differentiated development.
After all, at this stage, a platform like Daily Excellent Fresh adopts a "foundry model" in the production and processing of prefabricated vegetables' own brands, and perhaps in the future, platforms will open their own factories, use the established supply chain and channel advantages, collect raw materials with more regional characteristics, and produce original flavors of prefabricated dishes.
All in all, whether it is a change in business methods or the adjustment of business scope, it is not difficult to see that fresh e-commerce is creating a "spring" that does not require capital catalysis. Fresh e-commerce companies that have set off again deserve the patience of the outside world to wait for the good news.
END
Meng Huiyuan
Introduction: You can talk about poetry and far away, you can also talk about tea and streamers
Areas of focus: Streaming media, Internet healthcare
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