What thoughts does the controversy bring to the industry?
Title image: Figureworm Creative
Author: Liang Wen, Editor: Fang Yuan
Pre-made dishes are still on the cusp of public opinion.
The "pre-made dishes on campus" incident continues to ferment, and some brands are also involved in controversy due to the frozen products involved in the ingredients.
Recently, some netizens posted questions about the use of pre-made dishes in the dumpling skin and meat filling of Yuan Jiyun dumplings, and then Yuan Jiyun Dumplings responded that it adopts a central kitchen distribution system, and the process and channel of transporting meat filling are consistent with supermarket cold fresh meat, and the filling that is uniformly blended after the pork is thawed will be distributed to various stores, which also triggered a discussion on the classification of prepared dishes.
From online evaluations, it can be seen that many people's cognition of pre-made dishes is very vague, and some consumers have misunderstandings about pre-made dishes, equating them with ready-to-eat finished dishes. Such comments are not uncommon in posts related to the incident: "Shouldn't pre-made dishes be the kind of stir-fried food that is poured on a plate and eaten?" "Isn't it the kind of braised pork poured out of the bag or something called a pre-made dish?" "I know that the pre-made dishes in it only need to be eaten hot"...
The incident has also aroused the concerns of many catering people. Under the influence of public opinion, the impact of this turmoil is becoming more and more widespread, in addition to prefabricated vegetable manufacturers, but also many frozen product manufacturers and semi-finished food suppliers at the raw material end have been impacted.
Through this turmoil, we can also get a glimpse of the attitude and awareness level of the consumer market towards prepared dishes. Prepared Dishes Insights found that food safety is the most concerned and controversial point, and consumer attitudes are different when it comes to different types of prepared dishes.
Consumers are mired in "shelf life anxiety",
Fresh prepared dishes and homemade prepared dishes walked to the front of the stage
Among the many questions consumers have about prepared dishes, shelf life may be the biggest resistance to prepared dishes entering household consumption. Many people believe that the shelf life of pre-made dishes is as long as 12 months or more, and "technology and hard work" are indispensable behind it.
Under these concerns, some consumers either buy chilled short-term pre-made dishes or make their own pre-made dishes.
Pre-made dish insight noticed that on social platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douban, many people shared posts about homemade pre-made dishes. It is common to prepare meals for a week at once, freeze them in divided packages, and "get tired easily for seven days at a time". From the perspective of dishes, they are mainly hard dishes that take time and involve many processes, such as grilled pork ribs, braised beef, stewed beef brisket, and chicken curry.
△Image source: Xiaohongshu screenshot
There are also practical reasons behind this phenomenon. After all, prepared dishes are an industry that is "more in demand and more painful". On the one hand, homemade prepared dishes can control the use of various seasonings, and there is no need to add additives for preservation; On the other hand, it can meet the needs of quick meals at work.
Of course, considering that some ingredients may change their taste and deteriorate due to changes in temperature and time, homemade prepared dishes also have certain risks, but this also brings new thinking to prepared vegetable enterprises - how to carefully and rationally use additives, promote the cleanliness of raw materials, upgrade storage and preservation technology, and do a good job in food safety protection, is the next question that must be answered.
At present, many enterprises such as Aunt Qian, Hema Food, Dingdong Grocery Shopping, and Meituan Grocery have begun to explore refrigerated short-term fresh food pre-made dishes. Taking Dingtone as an example, it launches fresh prepared vegetable products for seasonal ingredients, such as pickled tuk fresh, shredded snow cabbage shoots, dried marantou, broad beans with green onion oil, etc. in the previous Dingtone ace dish series.
The acceptance of semi-finished dishes is higher than that of finished dishes
Prepared dishes are not cooking kits, nor are they all cooked products, but also include raw semi-finished products, which are very wide.
According to the different processing degree, it can be divided into ready-to-cook, ready-to-cook, ready-to-heat, and ready-to-eat. That is, side dishes refer to vegetables and meat clean dishes after rough processing, such as fish fillets, shrimp slippery and other ingredients; Ready-to-cook dishes need to be cooked before they can be eaten, such as semi-finished small crispy meat, home-cooked dishes that need to be processed in a pot; Instant dishes that can be eaten after simple heating are instant dishes, such as frozen pastries; Ready-to-eat dishes are products such as eight-treasure porridge and canned food that can be eaten after opening the package.
"The first stock of pre-made dishes" Weizhixiang said at the performance briefing on September 12 that the concept of pre-made dishes is too large and broad, and many people think that pre-made dishes are cooking packages, and cooking packages are not the scope of the company's production, the company mainly produces semi-finished dishes, which are basically raw food.
Due to the different processing degree and processing method, the seasoning degree, additive use, and cooking method of different types of prepared dishes are also different. From the perspective of the C-end consumer market, the acceptance of finished dishes with a deeper degree of processing is not as good as that of semi-finished products with a lower degree of processing.
Image source: Ele.me: China Prepared Dishes Digital Consumption Report 2023
According to data released by Ali Local Life, in 2022, among different categories of pre-made dishes, the growth rate of frozen hot pot ingredients ranks first, followed by convenient fast food. In addition, the top categories are convenience food, frozen hot pot ingredients, frozen noodles, etc., and the top 3 items in these categories are mostly semi-finished products, and there are not many finished dishes.
Among them, in the category of frozen hot pot ingredients, the hot-selling items are meat rolls, hot pot balls, hot pot dumplings, and intestines; In the convenient fast food category, the hot-selling products include ham sausage, instant sausage, sauce lai, rice lai, marinated egg, happy egg; In the category of semi-finished products and barbecue ingredients, the hot-selling products are seasoned poultry meat, seasoned aquatic products, crayfish, seasoned beef and sheep meat.
△Image source: Douban APP screenshot
From the perspective of consumption, most people do not reject prefabricated ingredients. For example, the Douban group "Semi-finished Food Exchange Center", where many people are keen to share their experience in purchasing prepared dishes, has more than 80,000 members.
Netizens have the highest discussion about pre-made ingredients suitable for steaming and frying, and staple food products such as instant flour and noodles also have a certain degree of attention, but there are not many discussions about dish products.
Why are semi-finished products relatively more acceptable?
On the one hand, before the emergence of the concept of pre-made dishes, many consumers themselves had the habit of consuming semi-finished products such as pastries and frozen products; On the other hand, in the public perception, finished dishes are equivalent to cooking bags, which are deeper processed and involve more links, which also aggravates consumers' concerns about the production and processing environment and the use of additives.
Pre-made dishes to grab consumers with takeaway?
The price is not delicious, which is another important factor in the "dislike" of pre-made dishes. Compared with takeaway, the price of pre-made dishes has no advantage, and the taste is not as good as dine-in freshly fried.
Pre-made dish insight noticed that the current pricing of the C-end head brand of pre-made dishes has not opened a significant gap with takeaway.
The Taobao platform shows that the main sauerkraut fish single item of dingding lazy dish, a single 450g of sauerkraut fish will be sold for about 26 yuan; Boiled beef is a hot-selling product of Mai Zima, with a price of nearly 40 yuan for 553g specifications; Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan's 350g frozen pork chops are priced at more than 34 yuan. On takeaway platforms, some dishes of the same specification can match or slightly higher than this price point, but there are also cooking and delivery services.
△Image source: Tuworm Creative
"If it can be cheap, delicious, pre-made dishes may also be the choice of most young people" "The problem with pre-made dishes is to sell them at low prices and high prices"...
In contrast, low-priced prepared dishes sell better. Previously, the "Interesting Report" conducted research on consumers' attitudes towards prepared dishes. When asked "what is the acceptable price if the restaurant uses pre-made dishes", consumers who chose less than 30 yuan were the most, accounting for 59.8%.
From the perspective of online sales data, taking Douyin as an example, the top 10 products in pre-made dish sales are mostly low-priced products or small-size early adopter products, including Grandma Chef's grandmother's dishes, Starman Chef's glutinous rice shoots, sauerkraut fish and grandmother's dishes of Ding Lazy Cuisine, Cong Chef's plum vegetables buckled meat, and Sanzhi's grandmother's dishes.
Sales of these products exceeded 1 million units. Among them, 5 bags of 258 grams of Cong Kitchen Grandma dishes are priced at around 22 yuan; A 248-gram Xingman Kitchen glutinous rice shoot costs around 12 yuan; 2 servings of 350g cong-sized plum chop buckle meat are priced at less than 50 yuan.
This means that pre-made dishes that have established a certain degree of brand may be able to compete with takeaways, otherwise they can only go through at low prices. For prepared vegetable enterprises, it is necessary to strengthen research and development while controlling production costs, balance price and taste as much as possible, and meet consumers' pursuit of cost performance.
Conclusion
As the "pre-made dishes into campus" incident continues to ferment, the operation of some enterprises has been affected.
According to the Great Wall Network, the sales performance of a prefabricated vegetable production enterprise in the east has been affected. The company told Great Wall that supermarkets are its main channel, and although the company has not done campus catering business, sales have also been affected recently, and there has been a decline. The company said, "Some self-media on the Internet used its previously released pre-made dish videos as background material to spread, which affected the company." ”
Liang Yuanqing, founder of Guangzhou Feast Catering Community, also expressed concern in an interview with Pre-made Dish Insight. Liang Yuanqing believes that consumers' panic has been amplified, or some institutional catering enterprises have fallen into operational difficulties or even closed down.
On social platforms, there are voices boycotting prepared dishes. Some netizens also said that what should be done now is not to boycott, but to establish industry standards and safety standards as soon as possible and strengthen supervision.
It is true that there are still problems and chaos in the prepared vegetable market, but it is not without demand. At the same time, pre-made dishes are a large category, which cannot be directly equivalent to cooked products that are heated and eaten, and the production environment is not all dirty and messy as netizens imagine. From this point of view, popular science education for prepared dishes needs to be continuously promoted. As a segment of the food industry, prepared dishes should not be overhyped and should not be demonized.
With more and more people entering the game, the threshold of the industry has begun to appear, new players need to enter the game cautiously, old players must do a good job in quality control, alleviate the anxiety of the consumer side, and consumers should also look at pre-made dishes rationally. Only when all parties work together can the industry usher in better development.
Source/RedFood.com