Business is a constant idea, and the pre-made vegetable business is certainly no exception.
TikTok stirs up pre-made dishes
Spring has arrived, everything is revived, the air is filled with the smell of hormones, and it is the season when all kinds of fresh food are on the market.
A few days ago, Douyin e-commerce opened the "Spring New Season" activity. According to the official public account of Douyin e-commerce, the event is mainly aimed at the prefabricated vegetable industry that has exploded this year.
It is reported that in this event, Douyin e-commerce will link up with the prefabricated dish industry, brands and content creators to promote new pre-made dishes for semi-finished dishes.
The key point of the activity is the killer of Douyin, "high-quality short video content". Douyin E-commerce plans to raise consumer awareness of high-quality prepared dishes through short videos, and launch a short video challenge with the topic of the #Five Minute Lazy Food Challenge.
In general, it is to stimulate the potential consumer demand of users with the help of video delivery of celebrities and merchants. At the same time, in the Douyin mall, synchronously build a downstream supply chain and undertake upstream traffic with brand merchants.
In addition to increasing the sales of prefabricated dishes, it is more important to cultivate consumer minds, further penetrate the market, and make the delicious cake of prefabricated dishes bigger and bigger.
It looks complicated, but in simple terms, Douyin joins the pre-made dish war! And the clever Douyin e-commerce directly starts from the perspective that they are best at, and is a traffic discoverer and a transaction connector.
Coincidentally, Tongue Technology has also recently reached a strategic cooperation with ByteDance's digital marketing service platform Huge Engine, which is expected to invest hundreds of millions of resources.
Tip of the Tongue Technology intends to use Douyin to speed out of the prefabricated dish track, and the two sides will carry out in-depth cooperation in the direction of traffic import, IP cultivation and digital marketing, and bring consumers a new pre-made food shopping experience through interest in e-commerce and live streaming.
And the founding team behind this tip of the tongue technology is actually everyone's old acquaintance, Lu Zhengyao. In January this year, the new brand Of Tongue Workshop, which focuses on the retail of pre-made dishes, was launched (now renamed "Tongue Tip Hero"), and plans to land 3,000 stores within five months.
According to Li Yingbo, rotating CEO of Tongue Technology, as of the end of January this year, the number of intentions to sign signed by Tongue Hero to join stores has reached 2500-3000.
Such a rapid development speed has attracted many giant players to enter the game, and the new spring activity of Douyin e-commerce has opened the prelude to the douyin pre-made dish war.
Giants poured in, each showing off their skills
In addition to the tip of the tongue technology, since the second half of last year, the entire prefabricated vegetable market has been hot, whether in the investment circle or the consumer market, it is crowded with people.
According to Tianyancha data, there are currently more than 69,000 prefabricated vegetable-related enterprises in the mainland. Among them, in 2021 alone, nearly 4,000 prefabricated vegetable-related enterprises have been newly registered.
In the capital market, prefabricated dishes are popular A shares. The data shows that at the beginning of January this year, 8 of the 21 companies involved in the concept stocks of prefabricated vegetables on the Shanghai and Shenzhen boards directly rose and fell.
During the Spring Festival that just passed, pre-made dishes ushered in a small climax of consumption. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, during the 2022 National Online New Year Festival, the sales of prepared dishes increased by 45.9% year-on-year.
Among them, Dingdong buys vegetables prefabricated dishes increased by 400% year-on-year, and the sales of Hema pre-made dishes increased by 345% year-on-year. On traditional e-commerce platforms, jd.com and Taobao's prefabricated dish sales also increased by 100% year-on-year.
Behind the hot is the vast market prospects, Ai Media Consulting data show that the size of China's prepared vegetable market is expected to be 345.9 billion yuan in 2021, and will reach 515.6 billion yuan in 2023.
The spring activity of Douyin e-commerce is to pour a pot of hot oil on the heat of the prefabricated vegetable market. In the fierce competition, the giants also show their skills.
If you want to classify the above 68,000 enterprises, there are four categories: professional pre-made vegetable enterprises, quick-frozen food enterprises, traditional restaurant enterprises and e-commerce platforms. Within the e-commerce platform, it can be subdivided into three categories: fresh e-commerce, traditional e-commerce and live e-commerce led by Douyin.
Among them, the performance of Dingdong Buy Vegetables and Hema Fresh is the most eye-catching, because they not only do the channel providers for the sale of prefabricated dishes, but also further dig deep into the supply chain, lay out their own product development centers, and occupy almost the entire industrial chain of research and development, transportation and sales.
This model has also further improved the profit model of fresh e-commerce, taking Dingdong to buy vegetables as an example, in the fourth quarter of 2021, part of the profitability of Shanghai has been achieved, of which the "fast food" promoted by Dingdong has helped a lot.
At present, Douyin e-commerce has not yet entered the upstream industrial chain, and it is more of a channel for the sale of prefabricated dishes to enter the market stage, but the advantages of Douyin are unique.
As mentioned earlier, the advantage of Douyin lies in short video content, and this advantage just adapts to the pain points of the industry of prefabricated dishes.
The current status quo of the prefabricated vegetable retail market is that the development prospects are broad, but the penetration rate is low, and consumers do not have the habit of consuming prefabricated dishes.
In addition, problems such as the silly distinction between prepared dishes and cooking packages, additives and food health problems in prepared dishes are further plaguing consumers. Even in the eyes of some users, prepared dishes are classified as the same as the cooking package and instant noodles. Unhealthy and unhygienic become labels that cannot be torn off in pre-made dishes.
In particular, the sauerkraut incident exposed at the 315 evening party this year directly affected the laotan sauerkraut instant noodles, which has an annual sales of nearly 10 billion explosive single products and is extinct. And this event also has a certain impact on related pre-made dishes, such as the most common sauerkraut fish single product in the prepared dish.
How to tear off product labels, how to expand market penetration, and how to cultivate user consumption demand are the most urgent problems for prefabricated dishes to solve.
The advantage of Douyin e-commerce is that through high-quality short video content, it subtly affects the user's mind and decision-making, compared with the small red book of graphic grass, Douyin video content planting grass is more direct.
And in the field of live broadcasting, food live broadcasting has always occupied a hot position, and the monetization conversion rate of food live broadcasting is also obvious to all.
For example, the pre-made dish brand, Dingding Lazy Man Dish, has achieved the goal of 30 million yuan in monthly sales on Douyin by covering food masters, 10,000 video distribution and other models.
It can be said that the pre-made dish activities of Douyin e-commerce are more beneficial than harmful to the entire pre-made vegetable industry, expanding user minds, enhancing user purchase demand, and improving market penetration.
Short videos connect everything
In addition to the above-mentioned advantages of video planting, the user needs cultivated by Douyin can be directly digested within the Douyin e-commerce to achieve "self-sufficiency" in the new era of traffic.
However, at present, douyin's prefabricated dish business is still dominated by channel providers and has not entered the upstream industrial chain. The current short video promotion plan should be only the first step, to do a good job in pre-made dishes and fresh categories, Douyin also needs to enter the upstream supply chain to achieve more links of revenue.
At the time of the recent clamor for food safety issues, Douyin e-commerce still needs to do more, quality supervision, and even self-production, and indeed grasp the compliance and legality of products.
It can be said that the current Douyin e-commerce has gradually become an e-commerce platform for short videos connecting everything.
Counting the current e-commerce closed loop created by Douyin, from live e-commerce, content planting to local life, food exploration, and then to independent e-commerce APP and second-hand e-commerce channels launched some time ago, the categories of Douyin Mall are more and more complete.
Just like meituan plays its delivery advantages and runs from "delivering takeaways" to "sending all things", Douyin is also constantly tapping the potential of short video content, gradually from interest in e-commerce to connecting everything.
According to the previous 36Kr report, the wide-caliber GMV of Douyin e-commerce in 2021 has reached nearly one trillion yuan, which is close to the annual GMV of Pinduoduo in 2019, and pinduoduo has been regarded as a prince of e-commerce at that time.
The potential of Douyin is obviously more than this, and the launch of the new activity on pre-made dishes can be described as blowing the horn of Douyin e-commerce in 2022.