Edit | Yu Bin
Produced by | Chaoqi Network "Yu see column"
Although the United States is considered to be far less rich in its national cuisine than China, according to the "2021 World's 25 Most Valuable Restaurant Brands" list released by Brand Finance, a British brand evaluation agency, 20 of the 25 brands are American brands. What these American restaurant brands that "dominate" the world have in common is standardization.
As more and more Chinese catering brands seek to capitalize, the standardization of KFC McDonald's has also become the consistent pursuit of restaurant owners. However, judging from the performance of Chinese catering brands such as Quanjude and Haidilao that have landed on the capital market, the scale achieved by standardization can help the brand performance to continue to rise, but it may be a difficult proposition to achieve.
Chinese food brands need to be standardized
The most unsatisfactory catering track in the capital market has recently ushered in capital fever: Yang Guofu spicy hot, green tea restaurant, Hefu Noodles, Village Base, Laoxiang Chicken, Lao Niang Uncle, Lao Wang Hot Pot and other Chinese catering brands have reported the news of Hong Kong stock listing.
In 2021 alone, there were more than 220 financing incidents in the catering track, and the disclosed financing finance exceeded 50 billion yuan, and even Tencent Capital bet on the two major noodle chain brands of Ma Jiyong and Hefu Lao noodles.
In fact, despite the rising size of the Chinese food market, Chinese food brands are not capital darlings. There are only 10 Chinese catering companies listed on A-shares and Hong Kong stocks. There are more than 50 listed catering companies in the US stock market.
Compared with other industries, Chinese food is actually an industry with low threshold growth space and large cash flow. According to the statistics bureau, the size of the mainland catering market in 2019 was 4.67 trillion yuan, and although the catering industry suffered a major blow under the epidemic, the scale of industry revenue in 2020 was also maintained at about 4 trillion yuan.
However, such a large market is still in a state of extremely low concentration and low scale for a long time, and the data shows that the restaurant chain rate in the United States and Japan has reached 54% and 49%, respectively, while the chain rate of Chinese restaurants will only be 15% in 2020.
For American restaurant brands, Chinese food brands also hope to get more room for growth. American catering represents fast food chain brand McDonald's with more than 30,000 stores worldwide, with revenue of 23.223 billion US dollars (about 146.741 billion yuan) and a market value of 175.315 billion US dollars (about 1107.78 billion yuan) in 2021, compared with the local catering brother Haidilao, which had a market value of only 478.2 billion yuan when its market value was highest in February 2021, and the highest annual revenue was only 40 billion yuan.
The catering industry is a cash cow, and it is undoubtedly a very tempting thing to create a KFC McDonald's in the Chinese food industry. However, for capital, to pursue the scale of catering enterprises, it is necessary to create a set of catering standardization system. Without standardization, it is impossible to achieve risk control and cost control, and the enterprise must not do much, and there is no room for sustained growth in performance.
It seems imperative to standardize Chinese food that has been handed down for thousands of years.
Is there a standardization of Chinese food?
Many people believe that due to the diversity of tastes and the complexity of hot ingredients, Chinese food cannot achieve the same process standard quantification as Western-style catering such as hamburger roast chicken baking. But in fact, with the landing of new measurement tools and the refinement of recipes, in the field of Chinese fast food, Chinese food standardization has long been greatly implemented.
What is standardization? The national standard defines "standardization" as "the activity of formulating common use and reuse regulation of real or potential problems in order to obtain the best order within a certain range", that is, the ability to reuse a certain unified principle and obtain the best results.
According to this theory, standardization is not difficult to achieve.
For example, Shu Congxuan, the founder of the well-known Chinese fast food brand LaoXiang Chicken, once revealed that Lao Xiang Chicken has a strict standardized process for the heat, seasoning and processing time of each dish, so that each store can make the same delicious chicken soup.
The main Chongqing noodles meet small noodles, and the standardized emphasis is on the ratio of small noodle sauce to ensure that each bowl of small noodles can achieve a stable taste, and thus won the favor of capital.
However, studying every aspect of the preparation of the dish and compiling a detailed recipe cooking manual is still limited to the methods of the terminal chef, not to mention that there is no upper limit to the pursuit of passenger flow by capital, so the premise of increasing the meal rate during the peak period of the meal is actually not to hire more chefs, but to reduce the process of the terminal.
At present, there are two methods used by chain Chinese restaurants for the purpose of pursuing scale to improve the rate of meals, central kitchen and frozen pre-made dishes.
However, in fact, the function of the central kitchen and the frozen prefabricated dishes in large-scale chain restaurants is the same, that is, the dishes purchased in bulk are processed in advance into semi-finished products or finished products and then packaged, and then transported to each store by refrigerated truck for use.
The degree of automation of central kitchens in mainland China is still very low, and in general, chain catering brands establish their own central kitchens to ensure food safety and consistency of food taste. In addition to the self-built factories of catering, most of the suppliers of frozen prefabricated dishes are third parties, such as New Hope, Shengnong and other powerful agricultural enterprises rely on raw material advantages to layout production and processing, as well as professional prefabricated vegetable manufacturers such as quick-frozen food merchants, and even downstream catering terminal participants such as commercial supermarket fresh e-commerce. Therefore, compared with the central kitchen model, frozen pre-made dishes have more complex channels and more diverse supply customers.
At present, mainland catering brands are more inclined to build their own central kitchens and adopt a centralized distribution model. According to the "2021 China Catering Industry Annual Report" previously released by the China Hotel Association, at present, there are more than 10 chain catering brands in the mainland, and 68.3% of the brand enterprises use the central kitchen model, in addition to chain catering brands such as Haidilao, Grandma's House, Xibei, fast food brands such as Yonghe, Zhen Kung Fu, and Da Niang Dumplings also use the central kitchen model.
It is worth noting that in addition to taste consistency and controllable food safety, the use of self-built central kitchen system can also help catering brands save raw material procurement costs, reduce chef dependence, reduce back kitchen area and rent labor costs. For the pursuit of large-scale capital, the more stores that can be covered by self-built central kitchens, the more obvious the scale effect of the industrial chain.
Obviously, the standardization of Chinese food can be done, and even through standardization can bring about the scale of chaining, the Chinese food industry is also expected to appear through standardization of wandian brands.
Standardization does not bring a beautiful imagination space for continuous growth in performance
However, is the standardization of Chinese catering really that good?
In the hot pot industry that is most easily standardized and addictive to taste in Chinese catering, the performance of the capital market has broken people's imagination.
Recognized hot pot brother Haidilao, the total number of stores exceeded 1600, 2021 revenue as high as 40.497 billion, but due to too much pursuit of store scale and fell into a "mid-life crisis", 2021 from profit to loss, expected loss of 3.8 to 4.5 billion, the average number of daily turnovers from 5 times a day in 2018 to 3 times, the growth rate of the same store from 6.2% in 2018 to 1.6% in 2019, the market value compared with 470 billion a year ago, fell to less than 100 billion at present.
Although Haidilao has dismantled and standardized each business such as ingredients, clean vegetables, logistics, finance, and human resources, it is still impossible to establish a real moat, and the once proud user experience accompanied by large-scale rapid expansion is facing the reality that the management of service training personnel cannot keep up.
Moreover, the most fatal thing for the catering industry is that standardization is good, but delicious and cost-effective is the core competitiveness of the staying guest flow, while high-density catering stores make the brand lose its attractiveness, and the unified supply chain also makes the dishes lose their freshness.
The fine standards of cooking steps also do not make a perfect dish. The century-old Quanjude was once considered a tourist punch card in Beijing, and its "hanging oven roast duck technique" was even selected as a national intangible cultural heritage project. However, in order to keep up with the expansion of stores, Quanjude chose to use an intelligent microcomputer oven to make roast duck, which realized the standardization and automation of roast duck. However, instead of contributing to the rapid expansion of Quanjude's stores, the move also lost the cultural premium contained in the traditional handmade roast duck in the minds of customers.
The taste is general, the cost performance is not high, there is no empowerment of manual culture, and Quanjude, whose stores have been expanded, is facing the dilemma that customers no longer pay and whose performance has declined year after year. According to the financial report data, from 2017 to 2020, Quanjude's revenue was 1.861 billion, 1.777 billion, 1.566 billion and 783 million yuan, respectively, and the 2021 performance forecast was only 920 million to 970 million yuan.
In addition, the central kitchen and the preparation process of the prepared dish still have an impact on the taste of the dish. In the process of centralized processing in the central factory to the heating of the restaurant, the ingredients will often go through a series of processes such as refrigeration and freezing and then thawing and heating, and the original taste of the ingredients will inevitably be lost, and the best procedures can only be achieved so that the taste of the dish is not difficult to eat. For Chinese catering, which does not have a deep moat, most consumers do not have a unified pursuit of standardization, and once they feel that it is not delicious, customers will soon find the same dishes of similar restaurants at the same price. Consumer loyalty cannot be discussed, and the cost of transfer is even less.
What's more, the forest is too big to manage, and the brand is too big and the risk vulnerability is higher. In the era of mobile Internet, a store represents the reputation of hundreds of thousands of stores of a brand, and once a store under the brand has food safety problems or consumer experience problems, it is very easy to make a nationwide reputation through the news, which in turn affects the brand image and affects the customer's catering choices.
For example, Yang Guofu, who owns 5,607 franchised restaurants, is often punished by regulators for food safety issues, and his prospectus acknowledges that the company's business, operating performance and financial position may be dragged down by food safety-related issues in the industry.
Obviously, the Chinese catering standardization industry, the ideal is plump, the reality is cruel, standardized production to meet the needs of capital, but not the needs of consumers, catering still needs to return to the Chinese eating habits.