Sauerkraut let Master Unification Kang flip the car behind, but the white elephant who fell behind took the opportunity to go out of the circle?

Written by Wang Yuting, author of the weekly magazine "Finance and Economics" |

Edit | Dong Yuqing

"In a word, no cooperation, rest assured to eat, the body is not afraid of the shadow oblique." Immediately after the 315 party exposed the sauerkraut incident, White Elephant Food responded to the matter in the Comments section of Weibo. Subsequently, he issued a statement on weibo that he had never cooperated with the flag-planting vegetable industry and had been consistent for 25 years.

On March 16, the white elephant was on Weibo's hot search, and as of press time, the topic of "white elephant said that it did not cooperate with the flagging vegetable industry" had been read by more than 270 million. Netizens have left messages in support of the white elephant, "Your blessing is still behind", "Buy a hot search, your noodles are super delicious" "After that, I will be the flour of the elephant".

In recent years, under the attack of Master Kong, Unity, Jinmalang and other enterprises, the survival situation of white elephants is not optimistic, and the market share of white elephants in 2020 is only 7%, less than one-sixth of Master Kong's sales, and even disappeared from the shelves of many large supermarkets at one time.

But the reversal of the plot occurred after the opening of the 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympic Games, because a large number of disabled employees were provided with jobs, and the always tepid white elephant instant noodles suddenly returned to the public eye. Many netizens therefore "passionately placed orders", and the sales of White Elephant's products soared in a short period of time, and the official flagship store had to come forward to call on consumers to rationally shop "how much to eat and how much to buy".

01 The white elephant who fell behind, because the public welfare is out of the circle

Caijing Tianxia Weekly found in the White Elephant Taobao flagship store that unlike other food stores, consumers in the comment area discussed the recent white elephant disability behavior in addition to discussing the taste and price of the product itself. It was previously reported that the number of disabled employees in Baixiang Food Company in Jining, Shandong Province, ranked first in the city with 237 employees, and disabled employees accounted for one-third of the total number of employees.

Similar to the situation faced by Hongxing Erke before, netizens began to search for public welfare events about white elephants from the Internet. For example, when the Wenchuan earthquake occurred in 2008, the total amount of donations and materials donated by the white elephant was 1.5 million yuan; after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, the white elephant donated 3 million yuan for epidemic prevention and control; in 2021, Henan suffered a rare exceptionally heavy rainstorm, and as a local enterprise in Henan, the white elephant took out 5 million yuan and a large number of materials for flood relief, and set up a rest area in the Zhengzhou World Trade Center Building to provide hot water and noodles for the citizens.

Not only that, white elephant instant noodles are real domestic goods at the capital level.

Instant noodles originated in Japan, making it eyeing the Chinese market, which accounts for 40% of the world's instant noodle consumption. As one of the four leading enterprises, Baixiang made a completely different decision from the three enterprises of Master Kong, Unity and Immai Lang, that is, to refuse Japanese intervention. However, it was also forced to get involved in the price war in the following years, and because it was inferior to the other three, it once led to a large backlog of inventory and gradually fell behind.

02 The enthusiasm of "wild consumption" is difficult to continue

"Finance and Economics" weekly found in Taobao search that the sales of white elephant old hen soup noodles, turkey noodles and other commodities exceeded 100,000 this month, and the monthly sales of instant brine eggs also exceeded 30,000 pieces. Faced with a sudden influx of orders, the pressure on white elephants was palpable. Factories across the country, emergency start-up plan to do their best to produce and ship.

Nowadays, the scene of the whole people placing an order for white elephant instant noodles makes people can't help but think of the incident of the whole network madly robbing Hongxing Erke. In the summer of 2021, Hongxing Erke, who was "reluctant to" recharge members for the official micro, took out 50 million yuan for Henan emergency rescue and disaster relief, won the traffic and reputation of the whole network in a short period of time, and transformed into real money and silver consumption enthusiasm, and Hongxing Erke's entire line of sports products was in short supply.

In fact, the public's consumer enthusiasm came and went quickly, and in the months after the disaster, the number of fans of Hongxing Erke Weibo fell rapidly. In November 2021, when the media came to a Hongxing Erke physical store in Changping District again, the store also returned to the state before the "out of the circle", although it was off hours, but there were no other customers in the store except for two salesmen.

The white elephant that is out of the circle this time is also facing the risk of user loss. How to transform the customers who "consume for love" into long-term loyal users of the brand is an urgent problem that White Elephant needs to solve. At present, in the domestic convenience food market where white elephants are located, the competition can be described as very fierce.

According to the 2021 financial report of The Unification Group, the unified revenue in 2021 reached 25.2306 billion yuan, an increase of 10.8% over the same period last year, and the revenue reached a record high; In the case of Master Kong, although the instant noodle business in the first half of 2021 fell by 14.67% year-on-year, there was still a revenue of 12.777 billion yuan. In contrast, in 2018, the group had proposed to reach the development target of 30 billion yuan in 5 years, but the current market share was only about 7%, and it was concentrated in third- and fourth-tier cities, and the pricing of bagged instant noodles was about 2.5 yuan, and it was difficult to achieve product upgrading and high-end transformation.

In the front, there are old rivals such as Unification and Master Kang, and then there are new forces such as snail powder, self-hi pot, and prefabricated dishes. In the face of consumers' increasingly picky tastes and the disappearance of traditional instant noodle consumption scenes, white elephants have also made efforts. In 2017, the company set up a "bone broth research center" to refine the soup base stewing process; in 2018, it also created emerging products such as chutney powder and turkey noodles to meet the market demand of consumption upgrading.

To a certain extent, the successful white elephant of "out of the circle" still needs to further return to the product itself. When Master Kong and Unified Instant Noodles are mired in the quagmire of the "Old Altar Sauerkraut" health incident, White Elephant should carry forward the advantages of its own soup, create differentiated market competitiveness, keep the bottom line of food safety, and transform the short-term traffic dividend into a long-term growth point of the enterprise as much as possible, and strive to achieve a headwind reversal.

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