Wen 丨 Professional Catering Network Wang Chunling
If you ask: Which restaurant format has developed the most rapidly in the past two years?
The answer is definitely snacks.
In the catering market of 3,579.9 billion yuan, snacks harvest nearly 1/3 of the revenue of the catering industry, and they grow savagely like weeds.
The first big chicken steak, royal chicken steak almost survives in the streets of your city;
The emergence of the West Young Master's meat sandwich steamed bun and the Wei family's cool skin has made Shaanxi-style snacks famous, and in the past year, the stores with meat sandwich steamed buns and cool skins as a single product have surged in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen;
The Small Noodles of Chongqing and The Hot-dry Noodles of Wuhan are shining brightly across the country, and they can be seen in the north and south of the river.
These seem to tell us that the spring of special snacks is coming.
No, there is a young man in Beijing who is 89 years old, who has become a Beijing Internet celebrity pancake through a small pancake.
Through category segmentation, product innovation, product shape change, packaging bag fun, he vividly put a most traditional, the most common pancake to the extreme, but also loved by young people, three years in Beijing opened 18 stall stores, the area is about 5-10 square meters, a stall can sell up to 4,000 yuan a day, and the gross profit can reach 70% to 85% high.
Recently, the reporter of the professional catering network conducted an exclusive interview with Wang Chen, the founder of Zou, in Beijing.
Inspired by Huang Taiji to make pancakes
In 2009, Wang Chen came to Beijing from his hometown in Hebei, to the golf school to learn coach management, at first he felt that through golf can get to know high-end contacts, beneficial to his future development, but after working he found that society is realistic, when he is not enough to know who is in vain, others want to help you do not know where your hand is, so this also inspired Wang Chen to start a business, to have a business of their own.
(Right is Wang Chen, founder of Zou)
For almost two years, he worked while looking at projects, and in 2012, he made Huang Taiji famous with a small pancake and Internet thinking, which brought great stimulation and inspiration to Wang Chen, which changed his perception that single-category snacks cannot be made into brands and scale.
In the actual inspection of Wang Chen also found that the same is selling pancakes, there is a big aunt cart near the worker's body to sell, only sold at night, a top pancake to eat down for 20 yuan, a night can sell three or four thousand yuan, and the gross profit of pancakes is extremely high, which strengthens his determination to make pancakes.
Compared with other catering categories, pancakes have the following advantages:
1
High frequency, rigid demand
Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360, said that measuring a good product is six words :"high frequency, pain points, and just need".
In Wang Chen's view, pancakes in Beijing just belong to high-frequency and rigid demand products, when he did the survey found that the number of pancakes in the country is 5 to 100,000, there are more than 10,000 pancake shops in Beijing alone, and there are 1129 pancake shops that can be found in Beijing Dianping, so this also shows that the market is large enough, whether it is breakfast, Chinese food, dinner can eat it, but also has the attributes of dine-in + takeaway, you can take the catering retail route, which is also more in line with the trend of future catering.
2
Naturally high gross profit properties
The properties of the pancake product itself are very good, wrapped, the extensibility is very good, can roll everything, which is also the reason why the Americans are popular in the past two years, because of the different combinations of ingredients in the inside, the cost structure is completely in their own hands, but also created the pancake is a natural high gross profit attribute of the product, and now Wang Chen's pancake gross profit can reach 70% to 85% high.
3
Strong ornamental and experiential
The batter is placed on a tweezer, then pushed left and right with a tool, and then eggs, green onions, chives, thin and crispy, basically every adult has in mind the picture of a child spreading pancakes.
Compared with other foods, the picture sense of the pancake making process is too strong, the product itself has a sense of experience, and in the future, when making a big store, it is possible to enlarge the part of the experience scene.
4
There are no competitors in the industry to benchmark
In a category, as long as there are no top three, as long as there are no three brands that customers can say, it means that there is a lot of market space, which is Wang Chen's cognition, and he believes that even the smallest category will appear in the future.
So Wang Chen began to make pancakes, and he did not choose to be a hand-throwing treasurer when he was in the first store like some restaurant owners, but he personally experienced it himself, that is, the cashier and the product manager, touched the doorway of the catering, which is why a lot of imitations of Huang Taiji, but only Zou classmates have been left until now, in Wang Chen's view, the catering eyes can look up at the starry sky, but the feet must be firmly on the ground.
A small pancake with four big selling points
Through three years of hard work, Wang Chen opened 18 stall stores, and the profitability is also very good, but sweet sometimes seems to be the best partner with bitterness, because most of them are illegal and have no business license, and the policy of food and medicine forced Wang Chen to close many stores, and because of the discord in the concept of partners, he finally had no choice but to break up.
In March 2017, Wang Chen started a business again, founded Zou Classmate, the first one opened smoothly in Nanluoguxiang, opened 5 stores in 3 months, and there were pure takeaway stores, mainly positioned after 80, 90 and 00.
This time Wang Chen only wanted to be himself, and through product combing and innovation, he made the little pancake have the following four selling points:
Category segmentation: make the fourth type of pancakes that do not dry and do not stick to the teeth
Before Zou did not appear, the pancake faction was roughly divided into three categories:
The first category: it is a well-known Shandong multigrain pancake-based large pancake, the disadvantage is because it is a multigrain noodle, the taste is too dry, no eggs, and the sauce taste is also local.
The second category: it is a dish pancake based on Shandong Tengzhou cuisine pancakes, the disadvantage is that the side dishes are more prepared, the production process is more complicated, the time is long, the cost is high, and the audience group is small.
The third category: small pancakes based on Tianjin mung bean noodles, characterized by pure mung bean noodles with dry taste, high cost, mostly fritters, recognized by locals, but it is difficult to be accepted by people outside Tianjin.
These three types of pancakes also have a common feature: they are more popular with older people.
For young people, in fact, there is no pancake is suitable for them to eat, so Wang Chen combined the advantages of the above three types of pancakes, and finally developed a small crisp pancake based on mung bean noodles + white noodles + mixed grains, such pancakes are characterized by neither dry taste nor sticky teeth, simple production process, and low cost.
At the same time, Wang Chen innovated the thin crisp and sauce respectively, thin crisp is crisp and not oily, and the sauce is a salty sauce based on the old four samples in Beijing.
Product original: make elbow pancakes, pancakes with fish, gross profit 85%
In the past, when we mentioned pancakes, it seemed that what came to mind was the kind of multigrain noodles, sweet noodle sauce, eggs, thin crunch, green onions... Composed of pancakes, but there are 7 SKUs in Wang Chen's Zou classmates. 10 yuan of traditional original pancakes, 16 yuan of sauce elbow pancakes, 16 yuan of crispy fish pancakes of 20 yuan of smoked duck pancakes... Don't say you haven't seen it, some haven't even heard of it.
Why make elbow pancakes, pancakes with fish?
Wang Chen said: "If you want to make pancakes for young people, you must first arouse their curiosity, what products can arouse their curiosity and attention?" That must be a product that no one has, and secondly, from the perspective of pricing, how much money the traditional pancakes are already in everyone's mind, you sell more than 10 yuan, maybe people don't even pay attention to you, but the original products are different, customers are willing to pay for scarcity. ”
Now it is precisely because of this combination that some products can reach 85% gross profit, and original products account for 50% of sales.
(Pancakes with fish)
Benchmark sandwich: Make a pancake in the shape of a triangle
Ask ten young people the question "Why don't you love pancakes", and I'm afraid eight people will give the same answer: that is LOW.
It is true that for a long time in the past, because pancakes were born in the city, they were a food against hunger, and they were often sold by carts, so this perception was indeed deeply rooted in people's hearts, but if you want young people to eat them, you must de-LOW.
In this regard, Wang Chen did not spend less effort, and finally he found that many people like to eat sandwiches not only because it is nutritious, rich and convenient, but also because the combination of different foods creates its higher appearance, so Zou students should not target traditional pancakes, but sandwiches.
(Sandwich Pancakes)
So Wang Chen is the first person to make pancakes into a triangular shape, from the form of products to completely change everyone's perception of roadside pancakes, since making a triangle shape, not only the ingredients inside are clearly visible, the high value attracts many young people to buy, because it is a triangular shape and then eat people look more Sven.
Packaging innovation: Make bags with memes
All along, the traditional pancakes have no packaging bags to speak of, many of them are a plastic bag to carry away, but Wang Chen feels that the purpose of the packaging is not only to look good, but also to be the best communication tool in the case of customers and you are not familiar.
You see the current Young Master Xi, they are now very much like a media, the packaging can print and distribute the information on the sale of houses, you can help other customers with needs to publicize, because the largest traffic is the catering people.
Therefore, based on this, Wang Chen has been looking for a special package for Zou, which is both practical and beautiful.
Finally, the launch of the Leshi emoji potato chips suddenly made Wang Chen find inspiration, since adding this idea, the sales of Leshi potato chips have risen sharply, and it has also become a weapon for the circle of friends to show off and share, so in the design of Zou's packaging, Wang Chen boldly used the idea of facial expressions.
In the past, eating a pancake will be full of faces, so many girls are embarrassed to let people see indecent eating, after understanding this pain point, Wang Chen made Zou's packaging into a funnel shape, that is, there is a piece of packaging to cover the position of the mouth, so that beautiful women will not have such concerns, more importantly, everyone is more willing to share and spread, the current era is the era of sharing.
brief summary:
"The more you enter an industry or category with low barriers, the greater the difficulty coefficient behind it", which is Wang Chen's long-standing cognition. Therefore, even the most common and common pancakes he has made micro-innovations in places he can think of, and it is this little bit of micro-innovation that has distanced Zou and other pancake brands.
Through Wang Chen's case, we can also tell all the catering people, before entering can look up at the stars, after entering must be down-to-earth, the first store to do it themselves, even if it is a perfect product, there are N kinds of rising possibilities, ordinary products become not ordinary, is the best competitive barrier in this era.