Image source @ Visual China
Text | Outside the Five Rings, author | Tailfire, edit | Che Wei
If the net red food wants to compete for the coffee position, then the snail powder must be the C position without suspense.
This "love to die, hate to hate" Liuzhou snack firmly occupies the top of the list of fans in the convenience food industry. The video of "Luo Xiang Saying Criminal Law" eating snail powder at home on Station B has more than 10 million views, and there are 480,000 notes about snail powder on the Little Red Book. Such a degree of discussion, it is absolutely not an exaggeration to say that "the internet is top stream".
The explosion of snail powder has also made Liuzhou, a small city in Guangxi, suddenly become a "net red city".
For food lovers in the field, snail powder is the biggest comfort for the tongue of the home time during the epidemic, and it is also the reason for flying on weekends to go to Liuzhou to punch in. For liuzhou natives, snail powder obviously has a more important significance.
According to the data provided by the Liuzhou Municipal Bureau of Commerce, the sales revenue of the whole industry chain of Liuzhou snail powder has reached 50.16 billion yuan in 2021, of which the sales revenue of bagged Liuzhou snail powder is as high as 15.197 billion yuan.
In just a few years from snacks to large street snacks, they have become a "worth tens of billions" of Internet celebrity food, and have created more than 300,000 jobs.
Yes, there are 300,000 ordinary people in Liuzhou who are working for snail powder.
01 35 years old home, a bowl of snail powder brought new opportunities
At the age of 35, Wang Hui made up her mind to return to her hometown of Liuzhou from Hangzhou and become the director of raw material acceptance in the quality department of a snail powder factory.
For Wang Hui, who grew up in Liuzhou, the deepest memory of going to school is to sneak to the nearby vegetable market at night to have a bowl of snail powder for a supper. When asked which snail powder in Liuzhou is the best to eat, she smiled and said: "It's all delicious, you won't step on the thunder in Liuzhou." ”
After studying bioengineering for four years 13 years ago, Wang Hui, who entered the food industry by chance, did not think that she would have an indissoluble relationship with her hometown snacks after that.
Like many young people who went to big cities after graduation, Wang Hui came to Hangzhou full of vigor, and has been responsible for food safety control in a maternal and infant food brand, and has been in charge for many years. Although Hangzhou and Liuzhou are only one word apart, these two Internet celebrity cities are completely different. One is a fast-paced, the most popular paradise in the Internet industry, and the other is a heavy industrial city that is safe and self-reliant and lives in South China.
The most direct comparison is that a bowl of snail powder in Hangzhou costs 28 yuan, while a bowl of snail powder in Liuzhou costs 10 yuan.
The price of the local snail powder shop in Liuzhou
35 years old, seems to be a hurdle in the career. Faced with a balanced family and a career that encountered bottlenecks, Wang Hui found a way out in her hometown of Liuzhou - a job as the raw material acceptance supervisor of the quality department of the snail powder factory, which is not only close to home, but also the salary is not even weaker than her salary in Hangzhou.
"I'm also 35 years old this year, and my career is just not advancing or retreating. Snail powder I went from snack to big, and now that the snail powder in Liuzhou is on fire, I consider that this should be an opportunity to go back to my hometown. ”
The booming snail powder industry, with countless opportunities lurking, she met a company. This company not only carries out fine planning of the whole industrial chain of snail powder, invests in Liuzhou to build factories, introduces advanced technology, and also unites top universities in the industry and local quality inspection and technology departments to promote the comprehensive development of the snail powder industry through school-enterprise cooperation and the integration of production and education.
This has brought more room for Wang Hui, who was originally a mother and baby food, to develop snail powder food safety.
So Wang Hui did not drift and went home.
Coincidentally, her entry into the snail powder factory opened by Hangzhou Weinian in Liuzhou has created a wonderful link between her two most important cities.
Now, Wang Hui leads a team of more than 20 people, who are responsible for strictly controlling the quality management of snail powder raw materials throughout the factory. To this end, the company has specially invested in the construction of a professional snail powder laboratory, equipped with more than 100 testing instruments and equipment of 48 categories, including many cutting-edge imported equipment from the United States, Japan and other countries.
Wang Hui's team will strictly inspect all raw materials, auxiliary materials and packaging materials, and carry out strict monitoring of key and high-risk raw materials in addition to the requirements of national standards. For example, the spicy oil package in the snail powder, the company specially introduced the American quantitative detection of spiciness of the capsaicin tester, the production process of the oil bag spiciness quantitative monitoring to ensure the stability of the taste.
Wang Hui may just be a wave in the torrent of the times, but 300,000 ordinary people who are busy in the snail powder industry have gathered into a wave, surging to promote the development of the snail powder industry, and also moving forward with the city of Liuzhou.
"The memory of Liuzhou is always gray, sometimes it rains acid, it is all the smell of heavy industry. Now, there are many new types of entity enterprises like Weinian coming to Liuzhou to invest and develop, and the employment of our young people has more choices, which is good for the transformation of the entire city, and the environment in Liuzhou is much better. ”
The scenery of Liuzhou City is pleasant
The young people who return to their hometown reflect not only the choice of escaping from the north, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, but also the gradual improvement of the real economy in their hometown.
First-tier cities outline ideals for young people, while hometowns in third-tier cities can carry the lives of young people.
Now, Liuzhou has set itself a new small goal: strive to achieve a sales income of more than 100 billion yuan in the whole industrial chain of rice noodles, and also sell snail powder overseas.
Some people say that this is an industry that people who do rice and change a city. In fact, this is the industrial road that the Liuzhou government, enterprises and people have come out together.
02 Industrial internal strength other than popularity
Behind the popularity of snail powder is Liuzhou's long road to new e-commerce to get rich.
In the past, Liuzhou was a traditional heavy industry city of automobile manufacturing in Guangxi, with three automobile factories and more than 100 parts enterprises. Heavy industry is the pride of the city and the hidden pain of the city. The industrial system was rigid, the products were old and low-end, and at that time, Liuzhou lacked high-end jobs, there was no decent institution of higher learning, and most of the young people were in the market.
Heavy industry is the foundation of Liuzhou's city, but the primary and tertiary industry is an urgent lesson for Liuzhou. Liuzhou people are not unaware of this problem, during the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" period, the Liuzhou government promised to give a subsidy of 100,000 yuan to young people who went to first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to open snail powder shops, but limited by local food tastes, the initial promotion of snail powder was not a success, and it can almost be described as no one in the field.
The nationalization of a local snack must not rely solely on a simple push model, and the Internet is the blower that naturally creates demand.
In the first season of the 2012 national food documentary "China on the Tip of the Tongue", snail powder began to emerge. Two years later, the Internet celebrity economy and short video live broadcast exploded, and snail powder hitched a ride on this express train and began to frequently brush the screen in front of the public.
In July 2019, the first snail powder product operated by WeIan was born, and in just two months after the product was launched, it became the first brand in the online snail powder category with absolute advantages, and the monthly sales of Tmall flagship store reached 1.4 million copies. Snail powder is completely on fire throughout the country.
However, the popularity of the whole network is only the result of the explosion of snail powder, and the process of the birth of net red food reflects the industrial internal strength of Liuzhou City and Liuzhou enterprises and Liuzhou people.
The output value of Liuzhou snail powder began to take off in 2015
In 2014, Liuzhou City, Guangxi Province issued the first production license for bagged snail powder. However, the initial bagged snail powder was not an idealized industrial product. In 2016 alone, more than 80 snail powder brands emerged in Liuzhou, and immature small workshops flooded.
Losing word of mouth on the Internet is equivalent to lifelong bankruptcy, in order to sell snail powder on a large scale, the standardization of the industry is a necessary path. From 2016 to 2021, Liuzhou City issued more than a dozen policies related to the snail powder industry. All this guarantees the mass production quality of snail powder
If the government's policy dividend is the soil for the growth of snail powder, then liuzhou enterprises are the real main force on the road to building a snail powder industry.
We visited the Liuzhou Snail Powder Industrial Park in Yufeng District, and it can be said that almost all the well-known bagged snail powder brands come from here. In the first half of 2020, the snail powder enterprises in the park sold 556 million yuan.
Liuzhou snail powder industrial park
Successfully out of the "culture + consumption" model, to win the micro-idea of consumer minds, the first self-built snail powder factory in Liuzhou is in this industrial park, the production capacity of this factory is in the forefront of the industry, a day can produce 500,000 packs of snail powder. At present, Weinian is exploring the construction of snail powder automated intelligent factory and promoting the transformation and upgrading of snail powder intelligent manufacturing.
Many people will choose the products developed by Wei Nian for the first time, in 2020, the monthly sales of the brand have reached 1 million bags, but it is still difficult to meet the hot online purchase demand, "snail powder is not shipped" and other topics have repeatedly appeared on the hot search topic.
As Liuzhou snail powder is loved by more and more people, the snail powder industry has also expanded rapidly, and the emergence of differentiated snail powder products has satisfied the preferences of different groups of people for snail powder.
Wei Nian has a keen insight into the general trend of local food fast food, sees the huge potential market behind Liuzhou snail powder, and is also optimistic about the development environment of Liuzhou snail powder industry, so it has made the decision to invest in Liuzhou and build a factory on its own.
Industrial factory building is not difficult, from the former MCN company to today's new consumer brand company, just announced the news, micro-thinking is not without question, after all, from the sales traffic to directly do the real economy, there is a gap between.
Today, under the impact of the epidemic, light business models are popular, and the real heavy asset investment makes micro-ideas seem out of place. From processing and production, supply chain construction, warehousing and logistics to channel sales, a large amount of manpower and financial resources need to be invested in the formation of a professional team for layer by layer control, in the face of huge financial pressure at the same time, but also put forward higher requirements for the organization and management capabilities of enterprises.
But this out-of-place effort, the return is also eye-catching.
"Liuzhou Daily" once used "the first car, the first furnace of molten iron and the first bag of pre-packaged snail powder" to summarize Liuzhou's deep industrial heritage, the head of the enterprise down-to-earth, the development of industry, to make the entire Liuzhou snail powder industry towards standardization and upgrading and optimization of a step closer.
In today's Liuzhou, the head enterprises such as Wei Nian with their standardized and standardized management, radiation drives the overall development of the snail powder industry. With the concerted efforts of the head enterprise and the government, a complete screw powder industrial chain has been developed, from the upstream production of raw materials such as bamboo shoots and beans, to food processing, to the downstream supply chain, e-commerce, logistics, and even the development of the surrounding cultural tourism industry.
Liuzhou snail powder has also become a benchmark for the industrialization of local cuisine.
"In the past two years, more and more foreign customers have come to the store to eat powder, and some people are holding mobile phones to do live broadcasts." Chen Muhua, the owner of a local snail powder shop in Liuzhou, said, "Our shop is open from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m., selling an average of more than 3,000 bowls of flour every day. Now, her snail powder shop has opened 30 chain stores across the country.
A local snack that has been popular for only five years has broken through geographical restrictions and soared across the country, while feeding back the development of the city and helping the entire city's industrial chain.
And more Liuzhou people are also involved in the process of the two-way rush between the city and the industry, so that the development of the integration of the entire industry and the city is particularly worth looking forward to.
03 The company behind snail powder
The current Liuzhou snail powder industry already has two major elements of an excellent industry, consistency and difference.
Consistency is reflected in the standardization of the industrial chain brought about by head enterprises such as Hangzhou Weinian, while the difference is reflected in the upstream and downstream product fields driven by head enterprises, which brings a chain effect to every Liuzhou person.
In the process of investigating snail powder, we found that the supply chain of snail powder is longer than that of ordinary bagged fast food. This is also an important reason for the popularity of snail powder, as a convenience food, it is surprisingly rich in ingredients.
Various ingredients are involved in the procurement and production of agricultural products. For example, sour shoots should be purchased from farmers and then pickled, snail soup involves snail farming, and the processing process of rice flour is more complicated than that of ordinary powder.
These trivial and subtle efforts require head enterprises with enough ability to control the overall situation to carry out overall control in order to make a pack of snail powder out of the geographical restrictions.
At the end of 2020, Hangzhou Weinian began to contact with Universities and scientific research institutions such as Jiangnan University, and the scope of cooperation covers the determination of acid shoot flora and key indicators of maturity, the establishment of production process standardization schemes and the exploration of modern production lines, etc., to promote the nutrition and health of snail powder products through process innovation, and further meet the needs of contemporary consumers.
Liuzhou set up a snail powder standard committee to build a standard system for the whole industry chain, and Weinian has joined
Wang Hui, a young man who had been far away from his homeland, was impressed by the sincerity of Wei Nian's hard work in practicing internal skills, gave up the legitimate hangzhou, and returned to Liuzhou to become a quality inspection manager in the Wei Nian factory.
Like Wang Hui, there are now more than 300,000 Liuzhou people who are struggling for snail powder.
At present, there are more than 50 micro-nian cooperative supporting suppliers, the main ingredients of rice flour, sour shoots, capers, snails, fungus, rotten bamboo, etc., most of which are produced and processed locally in Liuzhou. At present, there are 12 raw material bases for identified snail powder in the city, and the scale of cultivation exceeds 500,000 mu.
Sour shoots are an essential ingredient for Liuzhou snail powder
Huang Jihua, a villager in Baile Village, Liuzhou, planted more than 100 acres of bamboo, and he produced bamboo to produce and process the most important raw material of snail powder, sour shoots, and his annual income reached more than 200,000 yuan;
In the snail breeding base of Wangdong Township, Rongshui County, the area of snail breeding reached 6,000 mu, and 2,160 Miao households increased their income and became rich in breeding;
The Baisha Acid Factory in Yufeng District, Liuzhou, has adopted the method of providing seeds and guaranteeing the purchase of the bottom, driving farmers in 12 villages in Liyong and Baisha towns to plant beans, and the net income per mu can reach 4,000 yuan.
Countless Liuzhou people have seized the opportunity of snail powder and changed their lives.
Represented by Wei Nian, the entire Liuzhou snail powder industry chain not only helped the city achieve three tens of billions in 2020: sales income of 11 billion yuan, derivative income of 13 billion yuan, and physical store income of 11.8 billion yuan; it also created more than 300,000 jobs and helped more than 10,000 farmers to complete poverty alleviation.
In the context of the epidemic and the employment situation is not optimistic today, this report card is particularly eye-catching.
A small package of snail powder, some people may see the god-making power of the Internet, and some people see the ability and resilience of China's local economic foundation.
Only industrial construction is the cornerstone of the economy, even in today's World, when the Internet has become an infrastructure construction, we still cannot ignore the cornerstone role of the real economy. The industrial construction of a city is a complex and systematic project that takes time to achieve.
For the construction of the new industry of snail powder in Liuzhou, Hangzhou Weinian is the main body of activities involved in this project. An enterprise brings not only factories and jobs, but also drives and leads the entire city to build a continuous upward trend.
04 End
Now, when we talk about new consumption, we are more talking about the industrial construction and entity support behind new consumption.
The story of Wei Nian started from Hangzhou and landed in Liuzhou.
As China's e-commerce city, Hangzhou is a blessed land and testing ground for countless new consumer brands, Hangzhou emphasizes "Internet + marketing sense", but Liuzhou provides another possibility, paying more attention to "physical investment + industrial chain building".
The Tale of Two Cities in Liuzhou, Hangzhou, represents the scenery and pragmatic sides of the urban economy. The first-tier cities that are in the limelight are the breeding places of Internet celebrities and the stage for everyone to aspire to fame, but the pragmatic third-tier cities are also the cultivation ground behind the fame.
The strength of a consumer product is inseparable from the initial brand manufacturing, but also because of Liuzhou's strong industrial guarantee can be more long-lasting.
China has cities like Hangzhou that accelerate transformation and innovation with the development of science and technology, providing the soil for young people to pursue innovation in the digital age.
But there is definitely more than one Liuzhou in China, which is enough to carry the human ideals of a considerable number of young people who aspire to live a good life.
Local cuisine has become a city business card, but also become a combustion agent for the urban economy, there are more third-tier cities, their real economy is pregnant with the power of industry.
And what we are looking forward to is definitely the next Liuzhou.