Before the Spring Festival this year, stocks related to prepared vegetables had risen sharply in the secondary market due to the double catalysis of the epidemic and the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year's Eve meals).
It was also around such a Spring Festival that Lu Dingyao, the former chairman of Ruixing, began his new "barbaric action". After coffee (Luckin) and pasta (fun noodles), he reached out to the "prepared dish" industry.
In January 2022, Lu Dingyao's new brand, Tongue Tip Workshop, which focuses on prefabricated food retail, was launched and has now been renamed "Tongue Tip Hero". The company's original plan was to land 3,000 stores in 5 months, and it took only 1 month, breaking the record of 3,000 Luckin for 20 months, and the "rapid trend" of offline expansion was more prosperous.
Tip of the tongue hero's Chinese New Year's Eve rice pre-made dish Weibo publicity
(Source: Tip of the Tongue Hero Official)
Before Ruixing, Shenzhou listed and delisted, and after the continuous failure of "interesting small noodles", can Lu Zhengyao's "business philosophy" play a miraculous role in "pre-made dishes"?
Lu Zhengyao's intentions
Only "fast" is not broken
According to relevant sources, the prefabricated dish project "Tongue Tip Hero" has received a total of 1.6 billion yuan in financing. The reason why it has attracted the attention of capital is due to the fact that there is a "brave team" behind it - the Shenzhou department and the Luckin team behind Lu Zhengyao.
For such a team, there are many articles to analyze their patterns and routines, but in fact, they can be summarized into one sentence: "Only fast is not broken", which is also a gene that many teams do not have.
For them, "fast" is more important than anything. Lu Zhengyao's team is usually able to quickly perceive the market outlet of popular industries, expand rapidly through "subsidies", and quickly occupy the head position, and then quickly IPO money.
For example, Luckin was just in time for the beginning of the "coffee" outlet. During its expansion period, free coffee coupons were sent everywhere, and Luckin users knew how much of a discount it was, the first cup was as low as free, in addition to countless 50% off or even 10% discounts. In less than two years, nearly 5,000 stores were opened, and then the iron was launched while it was hot. Today, Luckin's stores have surpassed Starbucks, and some explosive products sold have been liked by more and more Chinese consumers.
The tip of the tongue hero is also a similar idea. Although the concept of prefabricated dishes is hot in the capital market, the actual market of the To C end of pre-made dishes has just opened, and it has not yet formed a giant in the true sense.
Compared with Luckin's direct operation means and subsidized users, The Tip of the Tongue Hero accelerates its expansion through franchisees, and at the same time, it provides an incentive mechanism through "subsidizing franchise stores". According to relevant interviews, franchisees develop a new customer offline and purchase more than 15 yuan, and the headquarters will provide them with different subsidies between 7-15 yuan. For example, the subsidy in first-tier cities is 15 yuan, if the franchisee finds 2,000 new customers within two months, he can get 30,000 yuan of subsidies.
Of course, such a "fast" team doing pre-made dishes has an obvious genetic defect.
Although Lu Zhengyao's team has done coffee and fun noodles before, unlike the coffee physical store operation, the overall retail chain of prepared dishes is long and complex, which is not a lightweight business. And compared to coffee, the pre-made dish itself has the difficulty of "keeping fresh". Although the speed of franchise store setup is fast, it is more necessary to ensure that a single store does a good job in cold chain and freshness preservation system. Moreover, from the upstream point of view, due to the asset-light operation model adopted by the tip of the tongue hero, raw materials are purchased from outside, and cold chain transportation also relies on outsourcing. If you want to complete the pre-made dishes need to be deeply processed, raw materials in the flow process through production, processing, warehousing logistics, distribution of multiple links, must achieve fine operation.
Not only that, but there are also many raw materials involved. At present, there are about a hundred dishes of the tip of the tongue hero, and are divided into frozen, refrigerated and room temperature varieties according to the type, which shows that the raw materials must come from many different factories, and the supply chain behind it must be huge and complex, which increases the difficulty of completing the closed loop from the origin - platform - franchisee - C-end.
Of course, if everything is ready, all the dust will settle, which is naturally not Lu Dingyao's style, otherwise, a brand like Luckin would not have been born.
Pre-made food stores
Solve the channel pain points of the industry
At present, from the perspective of the main players of the pre-made dish, it is divided into two categories.
A category of dishes responsible for providing prepared dishes, including "prepared dishes" supply as the main business of Weizhixiang, as well as prepared dishes are the extension of its main business of traditional catering enterprises such as Xibei, Guangzhou Restaurant, Tongqinglou or food enterprises such as Babi Food, Longda Cuisine, Jing'an Food and so on.
There is also a category responsible for selling these pre-made dishes, that is, channels, including new retail platforms such as Hema Fresh, Daily Fresh, Dingdong Grocery Shopping and other new retail platforms or fresh e-commerce.
Although it seems that there are many alternative channels for "prepared dishes", in fact, the pre-made dishes have not been rolled out for a long time, precisely because of some restrictions on the channels. For example, hema, which is most deeply involved in this field, relies on the hema workshop to provide a large number of SKUs, which puts forward high requirements for the ability to control losses, not only that, offline stores with heavy assets like hema have weak expansion efficiency, and it is very difficult to achieve rapid laying.
Although the convenience store with the highest density can achieve instant buying and walking, due to the huge investment and importance of this format on fresh food products such as bento, the status of prefabricated dishes in it is slightly embarrassing.
In addition, there are online grocery shopping platforms, and fresh e-commerce companies such as Daily Fresh and Dingdong Grocery Shopping are still in a high loss stage, and resources are not well invested in pre-made dishes.
Because of this, Lu Dingyao chose to cut in from the subdivision track of "pre-made dishes stores" and integrate upstream and downstream, not only to make pre-made dishes, but also to make terminals for pre-made dishes. This is not only because of the benefits of stores for brand exposure and channel convenience, but also to solve the pain points on industry channels.
At present, pre-made food stores that provide 100+ SKUs like Tongue Hero may only be left with the model of "unmanned convenience cabinet". In contrast, the unmanned convenience cabinet can provide the ultimate streamlined refrigerated pre-made dish SKU, and the unmanned convenience cabinet located at the entrance of the community or inside the downstairs, to meet the consumption needs of different users in different scenarios during the 24-hour period, and it is faster and lower than the expansion speed of the store, and there are also certain advantages in the future, the future depends on whose speed of drawing the knife is fast.
从To B到To C
Or return to consumer demand
People who have a preliminary understanding of the prefabricated vegetable industry should know that the To b end is currently the majority of prefabricated dishes. Behind the rise of pre-made dishes is the ultimate demand for efficiency in the B-end catering industry.
According to NCBD, a big data research and evaluation agency for catering, the scale of China's prepared vegetable market will exceed 300 billion yuan in 2021, most of which will come from the B-end market. The C-end market dominated by The Tip of the Tongue Hero accounts for less than 30% of the total scale of the prefabricated vegetable market, about 90 billion yuan.
At present, the overall trend is also shifting from the B-end to the C-end, and the tip of the tongue hero is doing the consumer market of the pre-made dish To C-end.
However, at present, there are still many people in the industry who have doubts about the ceiling of the prefabricated vegetable market at the To C end, and they pessimistically believe that prefabricated vegetables are a pseudo-demand, which is actually related to another industry pain point in the current prefabricated vegetable industry in addition to channels - positioning and scenarios.
The positioning of semi-finished products such as prefabricated dishes must be very embarrassing, because people who are convenient for the map will tend to directly choose takeaway (efficiency-oriented), but people who map quality (quality-oriented) or people who look at the cost performance (price-oriented) will choose the whole step of personally selecting materials and cooking. Because of the positioning of the prepared dish, it needs to meet multiple purchase factors of the user at the same time in order to further open the market. —— It is not only delicious, but also convenient (more comprehensive SKU), quality assurance (brand bottom, supply chain strength), and more importantly, to eliminate price barriers, that is, the price is more reasonable.
From this point of view, in addition to "fast", the tip of the tongue hero has not done enough.
For example, at present, there are more than 100 SKUs of the tip of the tongue hero, although the number of dishes is still limited, which cannot meet the daily dietary needs of a single urban family, and the supply chain and quality control are a major challenge for the tongue hero to "join".
From the price point of view, although compared to the unit price of most of the box horses more than 30 yuan, the tip of the tongue hero is generally 8-10 yuan lower, but for some users who are more sensitive to price, they will feel that the price is still expensive. For example, the garlic ribs (200g) on the Tongue Tip Hero APP are 25.4 yuan a piece, but the market price of 500g raw materials in Shanghai is about 25 yuan, which is twice as expensive.
The tip of the tongue hero still has a long way to go, but it is only just getting started.
End
Former Ruixing, with its own efforts to successfully cultivate the market, enhance consumers' awareness of coffee and purchasing power, the ceiling has been greatly raised. Although it was later delisted due to financial fraud, it can be seen from the recent performance of Luckin that the idea of first going to volume (rapid expansion + cost performance) and then going to quality (price increases and explosive products) may work. Moreover, in the future, coffee can be used as a gripper to do cross-selling of explosive products, such as light food, lunch, juice, etc., just like a shelf can continue to extend.
Later, there are "tongue-tip heroes", and in the future, they also hope to successfully cultivate the market, expand the entire industry plate, and promote competitive vitality through rapid expansion and subsidies to franchisees. From this point of view, it still has a certain positive significance for the industry. At present, we can also see that the tip of the tongue hero not only sells pre-made dishes, but also other categories such as hot pot ingredients. In the future, with pre-made dishes as the entry point, create explosive products, and continue to extend their own categories, continue to meet the diversified needs of consumers, and build a kingdom of "eating". In the future, the tip of the tongue hero can also benchmark "hot pot supermarket", "fresh e-commerce", "small vegetable market" and so on. The pre-made dish is the beginning, but not the end.
Of course, although the prepared dish and the coffee industry belong to the same catering, but there are still many differences, in addition to the previously mentioned, there are others, for example, the prepared dish does not have the social attribute of coffee, because its "fresh" attribute is more difficult to "standardize" than coffee, in addition, Luckin may also have a story of "Chinese coffee", but what kind of beautiful story can the prepared dish store have?
Therefore, for the hero of the tip of the tongue and the Lu Zhengyao behind him, I don't know if this time I will make a dowry for the latecomers? But for them, there is no high risk, where is the high return? We'll see.
*Dear friends, are you interested in going to The Tip of the Tongue hero to buy pre-made dishes?