Guide:
With the increasingly hot self-heating food market, especially under the temptation of market dividends, many capitals have joined the crazy "hunting" war of self-heating food, in the future cycle, in the face of the self-heating industry's big wave of sand-like adjustment, who can win from this fierce competition, become the "standard-bearer" leading the innovation and development of the self-heating industry, and will become the focus of attention inside and outside the industry.
On the train, the sound of bubbling up the air attracted everyone's attention, and Lao Liu stopped the bubble noodles in his hand and watched the young man on the other side open the lid, and a hot smell of rice came. From the mouth of the young man, Lao Liu met a new product---- self-heating rice.
The above picture, immersive scene, is only one of the many self-heating food consumption scenes, which is a vivid economic phenomenon, as a new segment, self-heating food is becoming more and more popular, has long been recognized.
In recent years, driven by the lazy economy and the home economy, self-heating food has developed rapidly and the market scale has been expanding. Under the attraction of market dividends, more and more capital in the field of self-heating has also been entered, well-known catering brands, leisure snack brands, convenience food brands, and emerging self-heating food brands, and even some capitals outside the industry, all of which are closely focused on the emerging field of self-heating food and have launched a fierce "hunt".
Debut, short-lived
In fact, as early as around 2013, self-heating rice was on fire for a while, and the main consumption force was young people who dared to taste early. They bring self-heating rice into the scenes of travel, attractions, offices, etc. The hard work of the manufacturer, coupled with the momentum of the media, has made self-heating rice a phenomenon-level product for a time. The capital market also smelled business opportunities, and once some investment institutions shouted out the slogan of a new blue ocean of 100 billion yuan.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long, and the blue ocean became a "Dead Sea" without a glimpse. Along with the rapid decline in the reputation of the goods, consumers gave evaluations such as "rice is particularly hard" and "dishes are difficult to eat". The evaluation of the taste can be disagreed, but the price is the same as the consumer's groove.
For convenience food, the unit price is one of the important factors that can be generally accepted by consumers. At that time, the average price of self-heating rice was 25 yuan, and a rice bowl in a restaurant was about 10 yuan, which was unacceptable to consumers with high price sensitivity to fast food.
There are many constraints on taste and price. Production processes, distribution processes, production costs and warehousing logistics all have an impact. The debut of self-heating food came to an end, and the long dormant development began.
Home culture, lazy economy and epidemic
I don't know when it began, and the otaku culture spread among young people. Young people are happy to label themselves or others as "home", and Starlink Jun is no exception. For the food industry, this spontaneous label is a precise customer group, so around the home culture, a variety of snacks and convenience foods have also been labeled as essential for home.
According to public information, the scale of the convenience food industry in mainland China reached 450 billion yuan in 2019; Affected by the epidemic in 2020, the scale of the convenience food industry exceeded 480 billion yuan. If calculated according to the average annual compound growth rate of 6%, it is expected that the market size of the mainland convenience food industry will reach 630 billion yuan in 2025.
The convenience food industry is to some extent a "pan-lazy economy", and industries such as takeaway and errands also have lazy economies.
According to the "Lazy Consumption Data" released by Taobao, in 2018, Chinese spent 16 billion yuan on laziness, an increase of 70% over 2017, of which the demand after 95 grew the fastest, up to 82%. Compared with quick-frozen food, instant noodles, etc., self-heating food will be "lazy" to the end.
If "home culture" is the self-entertainment label of young people, then the epidemic has really changed people's lifestyles and consumption habits. Frequent incidents such as home and sealing have turned fast food into daily reserve food, and consumers have included convenience foods in the list of home-based foods under the impact of a wave of epidemics, accompanied by self-heating products, prepared dishes, etc. are once again hot.
Self-heating hot pot out of the circle, leading the new trend of self-heating food
Self-heating hot pot out of the circle, on the one hand, benefits from the rapid growth of the convenience food industry, on the other hand, it is a hot pot culture that meets the tastes of the public. Unlike the self-heating rice, which is difficult to adjust, the taste of hot pot is not much different. In 2021, the revenue of China's catering market reached 4,689.5 billion yuan, of which the hot pot market size was 953.5 billion yuan, accounting for 20.3%. It can be seen that the huge consumer population of hot pot has laid the foundation for self-heating hot pot out of the circle.
In addition, the entry of hot pot giants has also played a role in fueling the self-heating hot pot out of the circle. In order to seek diversified product layout and respond to the impact of emerging products, haidilao, Dalongyi and other hot pot chain enterprises have launched their own brand self-heating hot pot products. The industry giant has high brand awareness and has natural advantages in the marketing end, which can keep the product topic at a high degree of heat, and also make the self-heating hot pot more accepted by consumers.
Self-heating hot pot is the only one in self-heating food, according to brokerage data, self-heating hot pot accounts for 70% of self-heating food, and the market size is expected to be about 4 billion yuan. According to data released by Taobao, there were nearly 200 convenient hot pots sold on the Tmall platform in 2017, which expanded to 430 in 2018, and in the two years after the epidemic, it was a spurt of growth.
Capital enters the game, the promoter or the spoiler
On October 28, 2020, Self-heating food brand Zi Hi Pot completed more than $50 million of Series C financing, with a valuation of $500 million. At this time, in the self-heating hot pot circle, Haidilao, Xiaolongkan and other restaurant chain bigwigs are still playing with sound and color, but soon, they feel the unprecedented sense of oppression of entrants under the blessing of capital.
The first thing that the self-hi pot brings is a new way of playing in marketing. Self-heating hot pot consumers have obvious characteristics, focusing on young consumer groups. So the marketing of the self-hi pot set its sights on the traffic star, so that it can get huge exposure in a short period of time. At the same time, the marketing team planned the marketing slogan of "half of the entertainment circle is eating the self-hi pot", and invited many stars to endorse it, which set off a boom in the self-hi pot for a time.
Not only celebrity endorsements, Zi Hi Pot also seeks cooperation between Internet celebrities and head anchors, and continues to create momentum on various media platforms. Variety show advertising implantation, Weibo WeChat Douyin Kuaishou topic creation, Bilibili evaluation short film, Xiaohongshu Internet celebrity recommendation and other methods to create lasting popularity. The advertisement of The Self-Hi Pot covers almost all marketing channels, whether it is an online platform or an offline life scene; In elevators, in theaters, in places where advertisements can be implanted in life, you can see the self-hi pot. This kind of brainwashing marketing burns hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but it also brings unprecedented brand awareness and consumer recognition.
On the channel side, in addition to the spread of the online platform, the self-hi pot offline channels have also been extensively laid out. Zi Hi Pot has entered hema, CR Vanguard, Wal-Mart, Lawson, Yonghui and other supermarkets and convenience stores, and has reached an agreement with stores in terms of product placement and other aspects to carry out advertising and marketing at the offline sales end.
If Haidilao uses the brand effect to make the self-heating hot pot enter the public vision, then the self-heating hot pot single-handedly makes the self-heating hot pot deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. In 2021, the total sales of the omni-channel channel of the self-hi pot exceeded 100 million yuan, ranking first for four consecutive years. Since the hi pot, rising stars such as Kai Xiao Stove and Mo Xiaoxian have also handed over bright answer sheets, pushing the heat of self-heating food to a new height.
Consumer group portrait: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are the main consumers
Judging from the big data analysis of public opinion, the top four regions in terms of self-heating food retrieval volume are Guangdong, Beijing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Judging from the sales data of the online platform, the ranking of some provinces and cities is basically consistent with the ranking of search popularity. Guangdong and Jiangsu self-heating food consumers account for 34% of the country's self-heating food consumers. In economically developed areas, the fast pace of life and the large proportion of young consumers are the root causes of regional differences. From the perspective of consumer portraits, the age of consumer groups of self-heating food is mainly concentrated in 18-29 years old, accounting for more than 64%.
Interestingly, even in the Sichuan-Chongqing region, which is full of hot pots, self-heating hot pot is still hot. In 2017, the sales volume in Chengdu alone reached 10 million copies, which made traditional hot pot stores feel a lot of pressure.
The momentum is strong and there are many problems
Although the intervention of capital has continuously heated up the self-heating food market, reflecting that this market has good development potential, there are indeed some problems in the development process of today's self-heating food, mainly because of the lack of standards and lead to this "disorderly" state.
2022 is the third year after the outbreak of the epidemic, and the epidemic in Shanghai in the first quarter has further deepened people's understanding of the normalization of epidemic prevention and control, and also deepened the awareness of convenience food hoarding. Superimposed on the growth attributes of the convenience food industry itself, the future development of convenience food is relatively clear.
Nevertheless, the self-heating food industry itself also has a certain bottleneck in development. Policy risks are mainly concentrated in the fever package, which is mainly based on the reaction of the heating agent to water and release a large amount of heat in a short period of time. Travel is an important use scenario for self-heating food, and the safety of heating packages is an important issue for the railway department.
There is no strict national standard for heating packages, resulting in uneven safety performance of heating packages in the market, and safety incidents often occur. In July this year, the railway department issued new regulations, which have clear requirements for the "heating package" of self-heating food. Because the "heating package" contains: metal potassium, sodium, lithium, magnesium and aluminum powder and other wet and flammable items, it is forbidden to check in and carry around. Therefore, how to ensure efficient heating while ensuring more safe and reliable heating has become an important issue faced by many self-heating food companies.
Secondly, the taste is also one of the reasons why self-heating food has been criticized. Whether it is self-heating rice or self-heating hot pot, there are its own limitations, how to let consumers experience the ultimate convenience without discounting the taste, is also a problem faced by self-heating food companies. In the food market, taste is often a magic weapon for long-term success. Whether it is developing new material packages or optimizing the logistics chain to ensure the consumption cycle, or using new processes and new technologies, we can firmly control the taste buds of consumers to ensure that the products sell well.
Starlink Jun combed the development process of self-heating food, and the most amazing thing is a series of successful marketing of self-heating pot. Self-heating food has an innate advantage in the process of penetrating traditional fast food categories such as instant noodles, which is that it has an aura of health and fashion from birth. At the production end, manufacturers should use new processes and new methods to lock the taste of self-heating food firmly, and make great improvements in the safety and stability of self-heating packages. The channel and sales end open the market through their own characteristics and selling points, use modern digital precision marketing methods to make consumers accept, and penetrate into other fast food market space. In this way, the scale of the self-heating food market will be further expanded, and it will gradually grow into a market with strong competitiveness in the fast food market.
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