It was another year of crab eating season, but in Yang Wenyu's eyes, the crab's jianghu had changed.
Yang Wenyu is a hairy crab farming professional household on the shore of Hongze Lake in Huai'an, and in the past harvest season, he has seen many self-driving "foodies" and dealers who have flocked to the lake. But for the first time this year, there are Internet celebrities who come to the production area, set up a live broadcast room, and select good crabs for the fans in front of the camera.
Nowadays, hairy crab producing areas such as Hongze Lake and Gucheng Lake are ushering in a large influx of major e-commerce companies. The last time the same situation occurred a month and a half ago when the East China Sea pike crab was caught. The seasonal crab rivers and lakes that have been operating under the traditional distribution method for 20 or 30 years are being changed by the e-commerce wave.
It was time for the hairy crabs of Goseong Lake to be listed. (Photo by Anshun)
Crab second generation, online selling crabs
One of the changes is that the channel of selling crabs has become wider.
Chen Jianlu has been raising crabs for 30 years in the hairy crab production area of Gucheng Lake, Jiangsu Province, and his distress is that he will not sell them. Crabs are kept for hundreds of days, but success or failure is the 3-month sales period that begins in mid-September every year. Lao Chen's past sales channels were nothing more than traditional dealers or circles of friends, the former loved to reduce prices, and the latter was unstable. As a result, since 2017, his 18 acres of crab ponds have lost 80,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan per year.
In jiangsu hairy crab producing area, busy crab farmers are ready to welcome the arrival of the peak sales season. (Photo by Hao Man)
Chen Yun, the daughter of the "post-90s" who represented the German pot brand in the big city, could not see it anymore, and she insisted on returning to her hometown to form an e-commerce team to help her father sell crabs. In 2020, Chen Yun opened a shop on Pinduoduo to sell her own crabs under the "Crab Little Joe" brand. In the e-commerce platform, Chen Yun has a lot of space to play, releasing seedlings, planting water and grass, raising snails, and daily feeding, all of which are truthfully recorded and displayed. In order to reassure customers, Chen Yun invited a crab inspector to check the customs, from the male and female, weight to quality, standard details, each has its own price. Old Chen Wanwan did not expect that when his daughter opened an online store, she achieved 20 million yuan of sales.
Chen Yun, born in 1990, gave up her city life and returned to her hometown to help her father sell crabs, and last year sold 20 million yuan of hairy crabs through platforms such as Pinduoduo. (Photo by Ah Zhe)
Zhao Yayun in Zhao Yun's team is a "crab inspector" with 13 years of experience in crab inspection and tens of thousands of hairy crabs. (Photo by Ah Zhe)
Like Chen Yun in Goseong Lake, Anzhongda, who does wholesale in the Hongze Lake Aquatic Market, has also begun to transform into selling crabs on the e-commerce platform. He told reporters that the e-commerce platform is accelerating the penetration of hairy crab base camp. Since last year, Pinduoduo has been the first to start, opening the "Yangtze River Delta New Crab Farmer Training Class" in the Hongze E-commerce Industrial Park, among the trainees, in addition to traditional wholesalers like him, there are also white-collar workers who resigned from financial companies and returned home.
In fact, not only Goseong Lake, but also in the main hairy crab producing areas in the Yangtze River Delta such as Hongze Lake and Taihu Lake, Pinduoduo has laid out new crab farmer training. According to the platform plan, within 5 years, it will help the Hairy Crab Producing Areas of the Yangtze River Delta to cultivate 100 leading enterprises and 1,000 head e-commerce merchants.
Sell farther away, the crab is still alive
The second change is that the sales distance of crabs has become farther.
In Zhoushan, Xia Zhijun directly owns and shares more than 100 fishing boats, and is one of the bosses of local powerful boats. Despite this, confined to traditional distribution forms and extensive operations, his pike crabs "climb" out of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai.
On August 1, the 2021 Zhoushan "Open Fishing Festival" was launched, and more than 2,700 fishing boats rushed to the East China Sea to start this year's crab hunting season. (Photo by Zhang Zhen)
But this year, among the buyers who came to ask him for goods, there was a new e-commerce box horse, and the other party's order volume, price and account period made him feel quite secure. Most crucially, his products were sold on a large scale to Xi'an and Chengdu for the first time. Thanks to the escalating supply chain system of new retail, Xia Zhijun's pike crab has been able to enter the inland city "alive". After the fishermen in Zhoushan officially began fishing on the evening of August 1 this year, Hema used the "15-degree seawater constant temperature drifting cabin" to restore the native living environment of barracuda crabs with natural seawater exchange technology, and the first batch of pike crabs entered xi'an city warehouse in the early morning of August 5, and still maintained the vitality of the fishing.
This year, the pike crab entered the Box Mars Xi'an store. (Courtesy photo)
Together with Hema to compete for the resources of pike crabs from Zhoushan's origin, there are also Dingdong to buy vegetables and Pinduoduo. For example, Dingdong buys vegetables, using the whole cold chain, and the various indicators of the refrigerated truck reflect the embroidery kung fu, the temperature is controlled at 13 ° C to 15 ° C, and the salinity of seawater is controlled at 28 ‰ to 30 ‰. Behind the competition for seasonal crabs by major e-commerce companies is a secret battle about supply chain and preservation technology.
Online penetration is accelerating
At present, the East China Sea pike crab still has nearly half a month of fishing period, hairy crab is about to enter the peak of shipments, the fresh e-commerce platform is stepping up the formation of a hunting trend in these main seasonal crab production areas, through the base live traceability, tens of billions of subsidies, platform traffic support and other fresh play, as well as the crab industry practitioners transformation empowerment, joint research institutes jointly developed e-commerce crab standards, etc., multi-pronged, to work together to improve the online penetration rate of seasonal crabs as agricultural products.
On September 13, the Jiangsu Freshwater Fisheries Research Institute and Pinduoduo officially released the "River Crab Commodity Grading Standard" in the Yangtze River Delta. (Regent by Cao Zheng)
This is a grand scene that Anzhongda has not seen in many years of experience in the industry - at present, every evening, the express delivery outlets in Hongze District, Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, are wrapped in mountains, and large trucks are desperately trying to speed up the frequency of shipments. In the aquatic products wholesale market where Anzhongda is located, an old couple is specially responsible for bundling crabs for e-commerce pieces, according to the labor cost of 1 yuan for bunting a crab, the couple's daily crab bunting income is close to 30,000 yuan.
Jiangsu hairy crabs waiting to be packed after bundling. (Photo by Hao Man)
In Gaochun District, where Chen Yun is located, the number of newly registered e-commerce companies has increased to 1200 in the past three years. She revealed that an e-commerce platform plans to create an online incremental market of 20 billion yuan for hairy crabs in 5 years, which is 5 times the online sales of hairy crabs in Jiangsu Province in 2019 according to the Jiangsu Freshwater Fisheries Research Institute.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Li Ye Text Editor: Li Ye Title Image Source: A Zhe Photo
Source: Author: Li Ye