Image source @ Visual China
Text | New consumption of deep krypton, author | Jiaman Li, Editor, | Huang Xiaojun
In 2021, fresh e-commerce will once again undergo a major reshuffle.
Tongcheng life bankruptcy, ten hui group layoffs, Meicai network fell into the "layoffs, withdrawal of the city" storm, orange heart preferred large-scale contraction, hungry "youcai" stopped operating, once among the unicorn enterprises in this industry, the carrot, also announced the suspension of business.
Is the story of community fresh really untold? When everyone questioned, some media released 10 major events in the fresh retail field this year, of which the good news of Hema and Jingdong Qixian accounted for 2 seats respectively.
Can these two brands bring life to the overall cold fresh food industry? The whole industry will wait and see.
01 How to reconcile timeliness and cost?
The 2021 China Fresh E-commerce Industry Research Report predicts that the size of China's fresh retail market will increase from 5 trillion yuan in 2020 to 6.8 trillion yuan in 2025. Affected by the epidemic, the development of fresh e-commerce is accelerating, and it is expected that the scale of the fresh e-commerce industry will exceed one trillion yuan in 2023, and the pattern of coexistence of multiple models will continue.
It is enough to see that this is still a huge market with huge room for development. However, how should brand players seize the opportunity in such an increment, they still need to review the development of the fresh industry and see the business model exploration and verification of this industry.
First of all, the 1.0 version in the field of fresh retail is the fresh supermarket, that is, the city warehouse, which is represented by Tmall supermarket and so on.
Previously, fresh merchants in each city more or less a few warehouses, orders to come from the warehouse to ship and deliver, but the dilemma is that can not achieve a rapid delivery experience, perhaps the average person feels OK, the next day is also very fast.
But you have to make lunch at home, I order in the morning to buy a piece of pork belly the next day, this is to tease us to play, do you want to eat more every other day hungry, or I am making a schedule for tomorrow's dishes every day?
This is the 1.0 fresh e-commerce exploration stage in 2012-2013, the main direction is to use the ordinary e-commerce warehouse logistics to ship, basically only suitable for selling high-priced fruits and imported ingredients, such as Chu orange, Ben Life, Tuotuo Gong Society, Yiguo Fresh.
The first generation did not spell out one, so naturally, the second generation of 2.0 fresh supermarkets began to burn money non-stop, that is, the community small warehouse.
Entrepreneurs are also reviewing, some people think that replacing a small number of large warehouses with countless small warehouses will not solve the problem? Ensure that every 3 kilometers within at least one warehouse coverage, then any location to place an order, immediately by the nearest small warehouse shipment, so that will inevitably reach the hands of consumers at the fastest speed, to solve the fresh aging pain points.
This model is theoretically feasible, but the problem is cost. Building so many small warehouses is a huge cost test for the entire warehouse management and operation, rent, and allocation between warehouses.
The rapid rise of "Fresh 2.0" from 2016 to 2017, including Yonghui, is also walking on thin ice. Because the company does local distribution, the fresh supermarket in the city center is both a store and a warehouse, providing one-hour delivery service within a 3-kilometer radius of the store to ensure freshness.
However, under the test of cost, the unit price of fresh 2.0 has risen a lot, which makes the price of products compared with supermarkets and even vegetable markets more disparity, which is unacceptable to ordinary families.
Comprehensive version 1.0 and 2.0, in addition to the capital and retail giants that burn money, for the general fresh supermarket: customers have customer complaints, fresh supermarkets are also bitter.
A vendor said that he had opened a fresh supermarket for 4 years, the rent in the suburbs was low, and the small shop had a total of 7 staff, an administrative class, two cashiers, two tally, two fresh employees, plus loss, water and electricity, property, about 50,000 yuan a month.
If you follow the current 20% gross profit, a month to sell to 250,000 yuan to be flat, that is, a day to sell about 10,000 yuan to achieve flat.
Some insiders have also said that including the new retail that is now proposed, if there is no super management experience, no certain marketing means, and no gesture of being willing to devote himself to it is difficult to walk through. The players of 1.0 and 2.0 are known as capital and giants, but in fact, there are countless small traders who fold into sand, and most of the small traders look at fresh supermarkets with high investment, high risk, high intensity, low gross profit and low return.
For capital and giants, they have to reshuffle, 1.0 and 2.0 fresh is not satisfactory, although they are known to cut off the middleman link, but warehousing, logistics distribution, management costs add up, if there is no subsidy, will not be cheaper than supermarkets, vegetable markets, there is uneven quality, different batches, manufacturers taste and other experience differences are too much, and finally mentioned above fresh is temporary consumption, and now most of the e-commerce is the next day or longer to arrive, can not meet the impulse consumption.
The front warehouse mode such as daily excellent fresh and U treasurer can basically ensure delivery within 1 hour, and the welfare of foodies, but some fresh supermarkets still have no advantage in price if there is no activity.
02 How is the value of a small position maximized?
The Hema model, which is now sought after by Z Era, is essentially an upgraded version of Mode 2.0, which is to maximize the value of "small warehouses", that is, to produce maximum benefits per square meter of storefront.
Hema fresh shop in 4000 square meters, both fresh supermarket, but also catering area, the entire supermarket has about a third of the place is the warehouse, the ceiling hanging delivery conveyor belt, customers must pay on the Hema fresh App, only do nearby three kilometers of home delivery, but must be able to achieve 30 minutes delivery.
Hema internally summarizes the Hema fresh store as "one store, two warehouses, five centers", that is, a store, the front end is the consumption area, the back end is the warehousing and distribution area, and the five centers are the super city center, the catering center, the logistics center, the experience center and the fan operation center.
Simply to analyze the secret of hema breaking the circle, first of all, to enhance the attractiveness, hema innovatively increased the proportion of the seafood area, as soon as you enter the door, the huge and quiet "aquarium" can immediately attract the attention of customers, enhance the taste and grade of the entire supermarket.
There is also the innovative introduction of buy-and-make-to-make, can you imagine using the money to buy live fresh food to eat a seafood feast immediately? No need to wait, no need to do, just eat at the supermarket.
The second is the "warehouse-store combination". Hema created a ceiling suspension chain system, after the online order came, it was immediately salvaged, transported to the back warehouse within a few minutes of the suspension chain, packed, and immediately shipped out of the warehouse, the whole process was at the minute level. There is also the guidance of traffic to online transactions.
Forced Hema APP to pay, even Alipay is not OK, we all know that the current APP customer acquisition cost is not a little difficult, so Hema is unique, this is in order to divert offline traffic to the line, so that almost zero cost for the APP to obtain new users.
In addition, Hema relies on such a huge traffic gold mine as Ali Taobao and obtains huge traffic through the HandTao APP. This actually defines the main body of Hema Fresh is an online and offline integrated e-commerce, not just offline retail, its goal is to account for the majority of online revenue.
There is also a killer lanthan, which is Hema's own brand. This thing is not about much, it's about starting up. Once started, behind the need for fresh processing centers, refrigerated and frozen distribution centers, including the central kitchen and other linkages... The construction of these supply chain capabilities has supported an insurmountable moat for Hema.
Not only that, Hema also set a lot of KPIs for itself, and an article in China Entrepreneur magazine said that Ali CEO Daniel Zhang set four rigid standards for Hema Xiansheng before making Hema Fresh, namely:
First, online transactions are greater than offline;
Second, the number of orders per store online every day should exceed 5,000;
Third, the app does not need other traffic support and can survive independently;
Fourth, in the context of controllable cold chain logistics costs, 30 minutes of home delivery are realized, and these are always aimed at increasing revenue per square meter of area.
Now Hema does not completely rely on fresh money to make money, and began to try to do commercial real estate. Shenzhen opened the first "Box Mali", is a shopping mall of more than 40,000 square meters, clothing stores, restaurants, parent-child stores, with the most popular fresh to attract people, and then rely on the introduction of brands to earn high traffic rent.
Hema now plays the slogan of not selling overnight dishes, overnight meat, overnight eggs, and overnight milk, behind which is a strong supply chain support system and an accurate prediction model based on data, as Huang Mingduan, the boss of RT-Mart, said: "This thing is raising the threshold." ”
Like daily fresh milk, it comes directly from the place of origin. Hema Daily Fresh dishes are also from the place of origin, and they can be traced back to the source, knowing which dish was harvested in which place of origin and at what time.
To do fresh 3.0, we must first have Internet thinking, and behind the box horse is the big data support of the Ali system and the massive traffic of hand shopping.
Someone on the Internet commented on Hema like this: The biggest strategic value of Hema Fresh for Ali is not the benefits brought by its own development, Ali is not doing Hema to open a supermarket, but to make a model room, so that the traditional retail giants are completely desperate and have thrown themselves into Ali's embrace.
At the time when Hema fresh spring breeze was triumphant, the 3.0 version of T11 came to challenge, and the overall experience of T11 was more "advanced".
For example, in T11, the entire category of "fish, shrimp and crab shellfish" does not choose river fish, only high-quality marine protein, in addition to daily meals, in the wine and snack categories, T11 has explored enough depth. In the central square store, in the wine category, T11 claims to have 2500 SKUs. There are many subdivisions, including whiskey, Japanese and Korean liquor, a dedicated wine area, and even a high-end bar in the supermarket.
That is, you are expensive, I am more expensive and better than you, and 3.0 seems to be a game that is not bad for money.
Now the boutique fresh supermarket 3.0 sells high-quality high-grade products and services, focusing on consumer experience, and comes to meet yonghui green label store, China Resources ole, greenland G-super, city supermarket, citysuper, Jiuguang and so on.
03 Is OFC global empowerment reliable?
Many people think that the real can play the "box horse model" successfully, in addition to Ali, only Jingdong is left, anyway, Ali has, Jingdong must have, this game of chess is getting better and better.
Hema fresh, Guangzhou food is fresh belongs to the new retail format, online delivery, experience store within a certain radius of rapid delivery product quality, consumer experience is quite good, but the storefront and other related costs are also surprisingly high, so the price of goods in the high consumption area may also be suitable for development, ordinary residents said that they have nothing to do with themselves.
At present, the better model of fresh e-commerce is offline experience delivery + online ordering, which should be said to be a low-end version of the box horse.
At this time, Jingdong Seven Fresh came into being, but for Jingdong, they came too late. Hema was established in 2015 within Alibaba, opened a store in 2016, and iterated for nearly two years before it ran through.
The "7fresh" opened by Jingdong's high-imitation box horse was only the first one opened in early 2018. Compared with the late start, what makes JD crash may be that Hema already has the ability to quickly output the mode, and the entire system of Hema has not only run through so simple.
At a time when Jingdong Qixian is still iterating on trial and error in the distance, Hema can already empower and move towards self-operation + franchise, and two years earlier than opening a store, Hema's "rapid empowerment system based on big data" is a more desperate moat.
As of today, Jingdong's 7fresh has just opened two, the evaluation of public reviews is very high, and the unit price of customers is a little cheaper than that of Hema. But there is not much time left for JD.com, but JD.com still claims to cover the whole of Beijing (30) in 18 years and 1,000 in the country in 3 years.
The current strategic layout of Jingdong Qixian is:
The first is to take root in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, keep the base camp, and strive to become the most popular omni-channel supermarket for the citizens of Beijing;
The second is to exert efforts on the Greater Bay Area, with the Greater Bay Area as the southern center of gravity and radiating the southern provinces.
Qixian began to focus on the development model with Qixian supermarket as the main force and satellite store Qixian life as the supplement. At present, the entire seven fresh formats mainly include 47 seven fresh supermarkets, and 16 small formats of community stores seven fresh life.
Qixian clearly focuses on the two core key areas of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the Greater Bay Area, focusing on measures such as supply chain construction and efficiency improvement; in addition, there are products that focus on dozens of self-created mental products, service experience improvement and other strategic layouts, that is, one is the integration of store warehouses; the second is the store-in-store; and the third is cross-industry cooperation.
Next, the Seven Fresh Supermarket, which is dominated by large stores and covers an area of 2000-3000 square meters, is the main force in the development of the Seven Fresh Format at this stage. Zheng Feng admitted that the reason is that from the overall business growth and profit model, Qixian Supermarket is the closest to success.
Finally, for fresh supermarkets, Jingdong Qixian gave a new solution---OFC model, Qixian will be business model consultants, store and category planning, omni-channel accumulation system (IT system and digital stores, etc.), supply chain services, APP online operations, omni-channel marketing promotion, etc. to empower partners, to help them achieve omni-channel expansion, store upgrades, product optimization and operational service improvement.
The cooperation between Jingdong and Jiawanjia Supermarket is this model, and soon the first OFC model of Qixian Jiawanjia Gourmet Fresh Supermarket, Community Supermarket and other omni-channel retail stores will take the lead in Tangshan.
For another example, Tianfu Convenience Store and JD.com have cooperated to launch a community group purchase cooperation model, integrating online and offline omni-channel resources, and providing products and services for community residents with the help of more than 5,000 chain convenience stores in Tianfu. OFC not only gives full play to the geographical advantages of Tianfu's offline physical stores close to consumers, but also gives full play to the advantages of JD.com's supply chain, technology and operation, so that the two sides can achieve complementary advantages and let consumers become the ultimate beneficiaries.
JD 7FRESH calls this cooperation model "OFC", which is not a simple supply, but a complement between JD's omni-channel resources and practical capabilities and the geographical advantages of partners. Seven Fresh Supermarket empowers traditional retail enterprises through the OFC model, helping them optimize their business ideas, open up online channels, and seek new business growth points. We'll see.
At present, in addition to convenience stores, there are no cases of supermarket "joining", but in the third- and fourth-tier markets, supermarket "consulting and planning" companies have become the only survival mode of this model. "Retail Circle" believes that the OFC model of Qixian is actually a supermarket "consulting and planning" type model, which is a model that helps traditional retail to improve transformation and performance improvement.
The OFC model of Jingdong Qixian will not revolutionize the life of traditional supermarkets, nor will it open supermarkets by itself, but will replace and upgrade the functions of some "consulting and planning" companies. The advantages of this model are brand output, supply chain output, model output, and technology output, which is a model of asset-light operation, which may be seven fresh differentiated competition.
Now look, the end of the fresh is still the Internet. It is just the way to break the situation in the fresh industry, is it the box horse model, the T11 model, or the Jingdong OFC? This still needs to be explored and validated in the new year.