It sells only one type of bento every day
Its 600 people sell 130,000 bento boxes a day
It is the only takeaway company that recycles lunch boxes
It never finances, doesn't advertise, doesn't sell
It is Japan's food delivery king, and it earns 9 billion yen a year
01 Tamagoya: Japan Gaijō Daioh
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Founded in 1965, Tamagoya is a bento delivery company dedicated to meeting the lunch needs of business white-collar workers, with 600 employees (including part-time) with a unique business model, breaking through in many catering companies and becoming Japan's takeaway king, selling 130,000 takeaway bento boxes every day, and annual sales reaching 9 billion yen (about 540 million yuan).
Tamagoya's corporate customers include Mitsubishi Corporation, Sumitomo Corporation, NEC Co., Ltd., IBM Japan, Tokyo Electric Power Company, NTT Docomo, Japan Airlines, JR East, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Sony, Panasonic, and various government departments. Customers are mainly divided into eight geographical regions: Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ebisu; Gotanda; Omori and Shinagawa; Shibaura and Ginza; Ota and Kawasaki; waterfront factory area; Imperial Palace East Imperial Garden; Nishikasai and Odaiba.
Founder Yuichiro Sugawara was born in 1939 after his father ran a chicken farm, and after moving to Tokyo, he ran an ingredient shop selling eggs and vegetables.
Before founding Tamagoya, Sugawara worked at Fuji Bank (now Mizuho Bank) in Japan. With his father's experience and a deep understanding of the pain points of not eating white-collar lunches, Sugawara Yuichiro came up with the idea of making a special white-collar lunch delivery company that produces and sells "delicious and cheap" bento.
02 One item a day: unchanged for 60 years
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NO.1 | Menus are announced two weeks in advance
Inform customers of the next 2 weeks' menu in advance through the Internet (including the official website) to facilitate reservations.
NO.2 | Menu pricing
Mainstream lunch box: 450 yen (equivalent to 28 yuan);
Meeting lunch box: 1,080 yen, 1,620 yen, 2,160 yen;
The overall price is about 30 yen cheaper than the outside
NO.3 | Scope of delivery
• Tokyo City (23 wards including Ota Ward, Koto Ward, Shinagawa Ward, and Shibuya Ward)
• Kawasaki City (Nakahara Ward, Saiwai Ward, etc. 3 Wards)
• Yokohama City (7 wards including Tsurumi-ku, Nishi-ku, and Naka-ku)
03 Refined distribution system
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There are about 200 delivery people in Tamagoya, and each of them rides in 160 delivery vans. In addition, delivery men are divided into three areas with a total of 9 groups, and usually move in groups. The key issue for Tamagoya is how to deliver an indefinite amount of bento boxes to so many customers scattered across the heavily trafficked Tokyo metropolitan area in a short delivery time.
Dual response production: first, bento boxes are made according to the minimum demand forecast; Then, as the actual order is placed, according to the latest estimates, make more bento boxes (if needed). Tamagoya has five major suppliers that are agile and flexible. Tamagoya usually confirms the minimum predicted amount of ingredients the day before, and if necessary, you can make a request on the morning of the day of preparation.
Pre-deploy bento inventory by time period: Tamagoya divides the entire market into two zones by distance. Before the order cut-off time, the first delivery vehicles are dispatched to the farthest areas, and each delivery truck loads the bento box according to the estimated quantity. (This practice is often referred to as "inventory on wheels.") After the order cut-off time ends, dispatching the last delivery trucks with the exact amount of orders to the nearest region can transfer inventory between delivery vehicles, bridging the gap between supply and demand within and between regions. Spare delivery vehicles can also be used to adjust the remaining gaps.
17:00–18:00: Estimate the total number of orders for the next day, and the team leader estimates the number of bento orders for each customer in their respective region.
4:00: Tamagoya receives ingredients from thirty or forty authorized suppliers, and the kitchen staff begins to cook the menu food.
6:30: Factory workers begin assembling food into bentos.
8:30: The first delivery trucks load the estimated number of bento boxes for the farthest customers and drive to the designated route.
9:00: Tamagoya's operators begin accepting same-day orders by fax, phone, and Internet.
10:00-10:30: The first delivery vehicles arrive at the first customer distribution point. The driver parked the vehicle in front of the customer's office building and waited for a call from headquarters. When the headquarters receives an additional order from a customer, it immediately calls the driver of the relevant route to inform him/her about the new order. Finally, the headquarters gives an "action" signal, and the driver delivers the bento to the designated office. Some customers receive their bento within minutes of placing an order.
10:25: The second batch of delivery vehicles leaves the factory near 10:30 to deliver bento boxes to customers who are medium distances. At this time, Tamagoya had almost processed all the actual orders for the day.
(1) They load the specified number of bento boxes (more than 90% of the total number of bento) for customers who have placed orders according to the actual order quantity; (2) Load bento boxes (no more than 10% of the total number of bento) for customers who have not yet placed orders according to the estimated order quantity. Since the final order quantity is still constantly adjusting, bento production is also going on at the same time. After 10:30 a.m. (e.g. 10:32), Tamagoya stops accepting orders for the day.
11:00: The third delivery truck loads the last batch of bento boxes according to the actual order quantity and drives to the nearest customer. If there is a surplus of bento boxes loaded in the first or second batch of delivery vehicles, the third batch of delivery vehicles will load less bento boxes according to the difference. If the previous two trucks loaded with insufficient bento, the third delivery truck will load more bento according to the difference.
11:00-12:00: If there is a discrepancy between the actual order and the estimated quantity, the dispatch center will instruct the delivery driver via mobile phone to transfer the bento from one delivery truck to another, so that the delivery vehicle has enough bento inventory and travels along the optimal route. Anywhere, this dynamic inventory transfer can be carried out as long as the delivery vehicles can be parked together (such as a public parking lot). Location and inventory transfers are determined by delivery drivers and regional managers. They base their decisions primarily on their own experience and intuition; No information technology is required.
11:20: Tamagoya also has 30 delivery trucks called "regulators". In rare cases, Tamagoya may not be able to fill the difference between the predicted order and the actual order. In addition, unexpected situations can occur. When the delivery truck already on the road cannot adjust the number of bento boxes on its own, the "regulator" delivery vehicle will be dispatched at the last moment.
04 Automated production
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Automated encapsulation of boxed rice
Centralized noodle processing
Automatic cleaning of vegetables
Automated frying
Bento encapsulation
Box lunches into boxes
Customers use Tamagoya box lunches
05 Ultimate cost control
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In the entire cost structure, 50% is ingredients, 25% is labor, other expenses are 25%, and the last remaining 5% is Tamagoya's profit. It is precisely this 5% profit that can support the sustainable and stable development of Yuzi House.
This is inseparable from the highly standardized, process-oriented system and high-efficiency management system behind it. The abandonment rate of Okashiya reached a staggering 0.1%, well below the industry average of 2%.
So how does Tamagoya do it?
NO.1 | High human efficiency
"Do three times as much work as other companies in the industry and earn twice as much"
Sugawara is known for hiring and nurturing diverse talent, and there are few college graduates in the company, because Tamagoya has always hired young people with no academic qualifications, even unruly teenagers, which makes Tamagoya a company with super fighting power. Yuichiro Sugawara said, "The vast majority of our workforce is 'smelly boys.'" But once the flame in their hearts is ignited, the explosive power is simply unimaginable. ”
Yuichiro Sugawara made a wonderful analogy between "raising fish" and "wild fish". "Raising fish" is fed, and if you look at the crowd, it is the kind of "good children and good students" who follow the route set by parents and teachers and are proud of their recognition and support. However, this kind of conformist person has a weak "energy" in his body. And "wild fish" need to fight hard to survive all the time, they know exactly what they want. From the crowd, it's the kind of person who insists on being himself no matter what others think. They look deviant, but they have huge energy stored in their bodies.
This energy gap, in his view at work, "wild fish" can first be flexible. Tamagoya's bento delivery needs to be adapted to the time and local conditions, and sometimes according to the situation, the route changes more than a dozen times a day, and the corresponding customers are also varied, and the situation is strange, but the "wild fish" often take pleasure in this and can do such a job well.
At the same time, we can make full use of hourly and temporary workers to reduce costs.
NO.2 | Lunch boxes are reused
Instead of disposable bento boxes ($0.25 each), Tamagoya uses bento boxes that can be reused for up to a year ($4 each).
First of all, reusable bento boxes are more environmentally friendly, both from the point of view of saving wood (wooden bento boxes) and avoiding waste (plastic bento boxes).
Reusable bento boxes provide delivery drivers with more opportunities to talk to customers, as they need to collect them after lunch to get valuable customer feedback after the meal.
In addition, the relationship of trust established by the delivery staff contacting the company's food ordering staff 10 times a week effectively promotes sales.
NO.3 | Industrial production
In addition to some handmade productions, we are actively introducing advanced equipment, such as a fully automatic rice cooking system that can cook 15,000 portions of rice in one hour, and a fully automatic cleaning system that cleans and recycles lunch boxes to reduce costs.
NO.4 | Competitive supplier system
Some of the production process of Tamagoya is outsourced. For example, part of the fish cutting and deboning process is outsourced to China.
There is more than one supplier of every type of ingredient in Tamagoya. For example, Tamagoya has always had two rice suppliers. It orders 80 per cent of its rice from one supplier and the other 20 per cent from another, pitting the two suppliers against each other. In addition to these two suppliers, there are more than 20 other suppliers on the approved supplier list of Tamagoya.
NO.4 | Ultra-low scrap rate
The order estimation ability and flexible bento delivery method accumulated over the years have reduced the abandonment rate of Yuziya to a staggering 0.1%, greatly reducing costs.
Why is there no imitator of Yuziya's takeaway model in China?
Reference Articles:
36kr "Japan's Largest Food Delivery Brand: How to Maximize Economies of Scale and Experience Economy"
Zhihu "grapefruit gatekeeper" "How does Japanese Tamagoya sell 70,000 bento boxes a day?" 》
Liu Run "Without advertising, more than 60,000 takeaways are sold every day, the total number has exceeded 300 million"
Stanford University: "Japan's Tamagoya: A Work Bento for You"