Source: Overseas Network
The back kitchen of a hot pot restaurant in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, prepares takeaway hot pot orders from consumers online. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Hu Xu
Employees of a catering company in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, are packing takeaway orders. Photo by Hua Xuegen (People's Photo)
How hard is it to cook a table by yourself? The answer may be as simple as ordering takeout. In the "semi-finished product zone" in the fresh e-commerce APP, there are all kinds of pre-processed refrigerated dishes such as washing, cutting, and preparation of accessories - from home-cooked dishes such as shredded potatoes with sharp peppers and celery shrimp, to "hard dishes" such as Buddha jumping off the wall and flower glue chicken, to exotic dishes such as suki pot and tom yin gong soup. "Pre-made dishes" have become a new opportunity for the "home economy", which has quietly become popular online, attracting netizens to place frequent orders.
From "one-person food" to "family dinner"
Zhang Fan, who lives in Beijing, told this reporter that pre-made dishes can allow novice "Xiaobai" to experience the joy of being a chef. "I've tried to learn how to cook and bake with short videos before, but it's easy to 'roll over.'" Zhang Fan admitted that he wasted a lot of ingredients in the process of learning to cook, and later "planted grass" pre-made dishes. "Steak, pork belly chicken and other dishes that are difficult to master the heat, as long as it is simply heated, it can be made, which is very suitable for my kind of 'lazy person'."
Zhang Fan's roommate Yiqing works for an Internet company. Although the company can provide three meals for free on weekdays, for her, pre-made dishes are related to "self-reward". "Usually I am busy at work, and I basically don't have time to buy vegetables and cook. Catching up with the weekend and being able to make myself a delicious meal, I felt that this week had not been in vain. Yiqing told reporters that she generally buys clean vegetables after washing, cutting and packing, and can be eaten under the pan and fried. This time-saving and effortless approach to cooking helps her strike a balance between busy work and her ideal life.
According to the portrait of consumers released by online platforms, consumers aged 22-31 account for more than 43%, consumers in first- and second-tier cities account for more than 80%, and the core evaluation of prepared dishes by consumers is "time-saving" and "delicious". It can be seen that in the urban life of fast-paced work and the pursuit of eating well, solving the kitchen problem of "not doing, not eating, and not having time" is an important reason why pre-made dishes have won the favor of netizens.
The high acceptance of prepared dishes by young consumers has also quietly triggered new changes on the Chinese New Year's Eve table. For example, the overall sales of Jingdong Fresh's prepared dishes in January this year exceeded 10 million yuan, an increase of 94% year-on-year, and Xinya Chef Chinese New Year's Eve Rice Gift Pack and Xibei Eight-course Gift Box were hot sellers.
According to a survey by Ai Media Consulting, the scale of China's prepared vegetable market will be 345.9 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 19.8% year-on-year, and the scale of China's prepared vegetable market will exceed 800 billion yuan by 2025. Industry insiders pointed out that pre-made dishes need to use good ingredients and processes to attract consumers, the public's habits and needs for pre-made dishes are still being cultivated, and improving quality is conducive to allowing more consumers to see the advantages of pre-made dishes.
"Smallholder Farmers" Connecting to "Big Markets"
The hot sales of prefabricated dishes have opened up a new market space for agricultural products and promoted agriculture to catch the express train of industrialization development.
In Luoding, Guangdong Province, the epidemic once made it difficult to sell live chickens. According to local farmers, when the live chickens come out of the pen, feed, water and electricity, farm rent, and labor costs are increasing every day, and one more day is a loss.
Zhang Jianguo, general manager of Fudi Tempeh Chicken Industrial Park, believes that only by selling live chickens as deep-processed products can we increase farmers' incomes and recover losses. Under the liaison of local village cadres, farmers tried to hand over more than 1,000 live chickens to Zhang Jianguo to make vacuum-packed pre-products of three yellow chickens, which were sold out within a few days.
"The average selling price of a live chicken is about 120 yuan, and after making a prefabricated dish, the output value of each chicken can reach about 300 yuan." Zhang Jianguo's trial production of the three yellow chicken prefabricated dishes was a great success, which not only broadened the sales channels of local poultry products, but also further expanded the company's original production line.
As a new form of deep processing of agricultural products, prepared vegetables have attracted the attention of many enterprises. At the Guolian Aquatic Products Headquarters, one of the daily tasks of R&D manager Huang Yong is to collect opinions on the ingredients, tastes and cooking processes of prefabricated dishes through product tasting meetings, and launch pre-made dishes that meet the tastes of the public. Huang Yong believes that industrial cooking equipment is completely different from chefs' on-site cooking, and the difficulty in the development of pre-made dishes lies in the use of industrialized equipment to make the products as close as possible to the taste of the chef and restore the chef's flavor.
The grilled fish with green peppercorns developed by Guolian Aquatic Products has achieved large-scale mass production. After a tilapia has been slaughtered, pickled, preheated, seasoned and quick-frozen, it can enter the supermarket container and become a grilled fish pre-made dish that is heated and eaten. According to the relevant person in charge of Guolian Aquatic Products, grilled fish with green peppercorns was welcomed by the market as soon as it was listed, and has now been exported to Canada, India and other places. The success of this prepared vegetable product not only benefits the enterprise, but also drives the cultivation of tilapia upstream in the industrial chain.
Prefabricated vegetables have built a bridge for "small farmers" to connect with "big markets", allowing consumers to eat fast and well, and can also accelerate the standardization and scale of agricultural product processing and increase farmers' income.
From "small and scattered" to "standardized"
Prepared dishes are not a new concept. The explosive growth of the takeaway market has led to an expansion in demand for cooking bags and prepared dishes. During the epidemic prevention period, there are more and more "home consumption", and agricultural product processing enterprises, fresh e-commerce, and offline catering brands have entered the prefabricated vegetable industry.
At the same time, the "heating up" of prepared dishes is also accompanied by controversy. Some netizens commented that pre-made dishes can only make standardized single products, compared to Chinese food with diverse cuisines and different tastes, pre-made dishes cannot solve the problem of difficult to adjust.
The reporter learned that although more than 74% of the chain catering enterprises in China have built their own central kitchens and distributed prefabricated dishes to stores for production, and the proportion of head enterprises such as Xibei, Zhen Kung Fu, Xiaonanguo, etc. using prefabricated dishes exceeds 80%, nearly 70% of China's prefabricated dishes processing is still in a small, weak and scattered state, and product safety and quality lack unified standards.
Therefore, although the prepared vegetable industry contains unlimited business opportunities, it is still necessary to form a synergy on the supply side to move towards high-quality development. Fresh e-commerce has a stable user group and mature cold chain logistics and distribution advantages, joint high-quality enterprises, research and development of self-operated products is the secret of the launch of "explosive" prefabricated dishes.
For the offline catering industry, it is necessary to recognize that prepared dishes have both food and catering attributes. The food industry sells products, the catering industry sells services, if offline stores blindly pursue efficiency and try to reduce labor costs with prepared dishes, consumers will inevitably find it difficult to buy. Under the condition of ensuring taste and dining experience, improving the standardization of dish production can make the pre-made dish business do better.
Reporter Zhu Jinyi
People's Daily Overseas Edition ( 2022-03-04 Edition 10)