Image source@Visual China
文 | 惊蛰研究所，作者 | 白露
2023 is a year of true "full opening", and there is a fierce collision between the changes in consumer demand and the expectations of merchants.
Some tuyere tracks have torn off the conceptual fig leaf, and the head brand is no longer high. In order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, chain restaurant giants choose to try new businesses that they have not set foot in before. The increasingly fierce competition in the new consumption track has prompted players from all walks of life to continue to seize the sinking market in order to meet the endgame.
As for consumers, after experiencing the backstab of the "price assassin" and the awakening of consciousness from consumption upgrading to consumption grading, people have become more and more rational, and their demand preferences have begun to shift to cost-effective and experience-oriented.
In fact, a series of industry changes and new consumption phenomena that have occurred in the past year are the result of the redirection of the entire consumer market. The industry trends reflected in it also conceal the new logic of the consumer industry ushering in comprehensive growth in 2024.
Eat: Pre-made dishes challenge traditional dining
Since the beginning of this year, although the voice of "boycotting prefabricated dishes" on social media has never weakened, it has not affected the rapid development of the prefabricated food industry.
According to the "2023-2025 Analysis Report on the Operation and Investment Decisions of China's Prefabricated Vegetable Industry" released by iiMedia Consulting in July, the size of the mainland prefabricated food market in 2022 will be 419.6 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 510 billion yuan in 2023, and is expected to rise to one trillion yuan in 2026. Under the "call" of the trillion market scale, whether from the perspective of actual demand or product advantages, the prefabricated vegetable market is already a visible new gold mine.
The rapid rise of the prepared food industry is largely due to the major challenges encountered by the traditional catering industry in recent years. In the past three years, under the pressure of offline operations, Haidilao and other leading restaurant chain brands have successively closed stores to curb the continuous losses of enterprises.
However, blindly reducing the size of stores can only achieve the purpose of reducing operating costs. And although takeaway can be used as an alternative, it can only receive some orders. As a result, some companies with their own complete supply chains have begun to ponder the development of prefabricated food products, trying to solve the dilemma of hindering the revenue of offline physical catering formats with online retail operations. For example, Haidilao launched the "Open Rice" series, and Xibei launched Jia Guolong's kung fu dishes.
During this period, traditional catering companies can only be regarded as helpless to try to lay out prefabricated dishes. Judging from the actual situation, the prefabricated food business may not have brought much help to the leading catering giants to improve their revenue structure. A detail worth speculating on is that Haidilao's financial report does not describe this business too much. Among the relevant content spread on the Internet, there is only a clue that "in the first week of the listing of Haidilao crayfish prefabricated dishes, the daily sales reached 10,000 boxes".
In fact, as long as you recall a little, you will find that the hot sales of convenient fast foods such as snail noodles and hot and sour noodles in the same period far overshadowed the limelight of pre-made dishes. The real outbreak of prefabricated dishes is actually that with the gradual recovery of offline dine-in, more and more traditional catering stores have begun to pay attention to and adopt them. It is also from this period that prefabricated dishes are regarded as the Pandora's box of traditional catering and become the object of public opinion.
In the article "Who is hyping prefabricated dishes?", the Surprise Research Institute pointed out that according to the average salary standard of 6,000-8,000 yuan for chef positions in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, optimizing the personnel structure of catering stores with the help of prefabricated dishes can significantly reduce labor costs. In addition, by streamlining the on-site cooking process, the back kitchen area of the store can also be reduced, which further reduces the rental cost. Therefore, on the whole, prefabricated dishes are indeed a lifesaver for the physical catering industry to tide over the difficulties.
Based on the unique value of prefabricated dishes in terms of operational efficiency, it has become an inevitable trend for catering stores to adopt prefabricated dishes on a large scale. And so it is. According to the data, the largest demand for the prefabricated food industry in mainland China comes from the catering industry, with more than 85% of the prefabricated food products sold to the B-end. Compared with the "dine-in to eat food packages" that consumers are worried about, the industry phenomenon of large-scale use of pre-made food packages for takeaway has become a reality of "people are not dismantling" - according to Everbright Securities' estimates, the proportion of cooking bags used in takeaway can reach 70%-80%.
It should be noted that, according to the China Cuisine Association, prefabricated dishes can be divided into four categories: ready-to-eat prefabricated dishes represented by eight-treasure porridge and canned food, ready-to-heat prefabricated dishes represented by quick-frozen dumplings and self-heating hot pots, ready-to-cook prefabricated dishes that need to be heated and cooked, and ready-to-prepare prefabricated dishes that are also commonly known as clean dishes.
Among them, except for ready-to-cook pre-made dishes, the remaining three types of pre-made dishes have been completely popularized in daily life. The reason why consumers have prejudices about ready-to-cook pre-made dishes is that in addition to providing customers with meals, offline catering is also one of the contents of consumption. Eating a meal bag at a restaurant and buying a food bag to heat it yourself at home are obviously two different consumption scenarios.
Therefore, the real challenge of prefabricated dishes is not traditional catering, but how to break through the negative product perception and give consumers the value expectations they deserve from price to experience. F&B businesses that pursue cost reduction and efficiency increase, and consumers who consume rationally but also care more about experience, need a "reconciliation" that satisfies both parties.
Drink: Coffee chain PK new tea drink, competing for the "presence" of the market
As an offline consumption format that has fully matured in user education, the internal competition between the two major offline ready-to-drink tracks, new tea drinks and chain coffee brands, has become white-hot.
From the product innovation competition set off by popular ingredients such as yellow peel mandarin orange and raw coconut latte in previous years, to the price reduction war at the beginning of 2022, and then to the expansion competition around the sinking market throughout 2023, the offline ready-to-drink market has almost competed in all the dimensions that can be competed.
But whether it is Hey Tea, Nai Xue's tea, or Luckin and Cudi Coffee, the players in each subdivision of the track looked up at each other and found that everyone seemed to be taught by the same master. Therefore, in the case of product research and development, user operation and subsidy promotion, we can only choose to open up and join, trying to use external forces and time advantages to let ourselves try to accumulate grain, grass and soldiers before the industry war. As a result, staking in 2023 has become the common theme of chain coffee brands and new tea drinks.
As the first head player to open up to join, Heytea won the enclosure competition first after announcing the opening of franchise at the end of 2022. According to the data, as of the middle of this year, the number of Heytea stores has surged from 800 to 2,000 half a year after opening for franchise, of which the number of franchise stores alone exceeds 1,000.
Perhaps it was to see that Heytea had completed the scale through the franchise model, and in July this year, as the "first share of new tea drinks", Nai Xue announced the opening of the franchise after realizing it. According to the 2023 semi-annual report released by Naixue, the number of its stores has reached nearly 1,200. According to the data of Narrow Door Dining Eye, as of December this year, the total number of Nai Xue's tea stores was 1,492, while the total number of Hey Tea stores reached 3,027, twice as many as Nai Xue.
In the coffee chain track, the gap between Cudi and Luckin, who are "from the same school", is also obvious. According to the data released by Cudi Coffee on October 22, the number of stores in the world reached 6,061 on the first anniversary of Cudi Coffee's opening, ranking fourth in the world. At the same time, Luckin announced that the number of stores reached more than 13,000, more than double the number of Cudi stores, and Luckin announced that it plans to push this scale to 15,000 by the end of 2023.
It is worth mentioning that the fierce competition between new brands has also prompted old brands to join the expansion war. On November 2, Starbucks released its latest financial report, showing that as of the fourth quarter of 2023, the total number of Starbucks stores in China reached 6,806, a year-on-year increase of 13%. It is conceivable that as more and more chain coffee shops occupy the streets of cities and even penetrate into the county market, the ready-to-drink track will inevitably experience a close hand-to-hand fight.
However, before the final result of the enclosure competition, new tea drinks and chain coffee are also encountering new challenges. One of the biggest problems is that under the rapid expansion strategy, the limited customer flow has been over-diluted, and the long queues in front of the store have disappeared, and the "seller's market" has become a "buyer's market". Therefore, in addition to the competition for the stock of the store location, brands are also facing the problem of how to attract the attention of consumers.
At present, it can be seen that brands such as Luckin and Cudi continue to provide price subsidies to maintain user repurchase, while on the other hand, new tea brands such as Heytea and Naixue frequently use marketing methods such as co-branding to attract the attention of audiences with the help of well-known IPs. However, what also triggered the industry's reflection is that new brands such as Bawang Chaji are also quietly joining the battle at this time, although the scale is not as good as other head brands, but from the market feedback, the second echelon that is temporarily backward in scale is not without the opportunity to get the ticket to the decisive battle.
It can also be judged that in the future, while the brands of new tea drinks and chain coffee tracks continue to attract users to repurchase with price wars, they still need to continue to create a "sense of presence", on the one hand, to consolidate the market advantages brought by the scale of stores, and on the other hand, to resist the impact of new brands by strengthening user awareness and accumulating brand equity.
In 2024, it may no longer be the product itself, but the explosion and subsidy war will still be the two important battlefields of coffee and new tea.
Play: "Delicate picking" should also have a sense of experience
As the tourism market has fully entered the recovery stage, various industry phenomena in 2023 have surprised major attraction operators and even local cultural and tourism bureaus.
In October last year, in the article "The Rise of Reverse Tourism, Are Niche Attractions Ready?", the Surprise Research Institute revealed the industry trend of "young people beginning to choose niche attractions and non-tourist cities as travel destinations". Every holiday or even weekend, there are a group of young people who work and live in big cities, carrying backpacks and buying a ticket to the surrounding third- and fourth-tier cities. These lesser-known cities may not be as well-known as the Three Mountains and Five Mountains, but in just two days on the weekend, they are enough to experience a lifestyle that you have never experienced before.
What's more, in third- and fourth-tier cities, you can live in a five-star hotel for only 300 yuan, and you can taste local food with local characteristics for 50 yuan per person. Tourists can not only meet the freshness brought by tourism in the atmosphere full of fireworks in the small town, but also relax physically and mentally at a relatively low cost.
When public transport is fully liberalized at the beginning of 2023, the concept of travel to experience local life and experience a foreign lifestyle has also spread rapidly. From Zibo, Shandong Province in the first half of the year to Wuhan, Jingdezhen and Harbin in the second half of the year, college students and young white-collar workers in the city have not only left the mark of "Internet celebrity city", but also integrated the concept of entertainment that attaches importance to experience into various consumption scenarios.
So when the long holiday comes, some foreign tourists arrive at the airport and railway station, and they are not in a hurry to go to the hotel, but take their mobile phones to open the review software and grass planting platform, and go directly to the well-known food street by the locals according to the map, and there are long queues in front of the down-to-earth Internet celebrity shops and old restaurants. And after a full meal, they will start a journey of interpretation of this strange city with a freewheeling CityWalk or a freewheeling CityRide.
All in all, when it comes to fun, people are no longer just looking for a check-in experience, but are truly eager to feel the unique life atmosphere of the destination and find the essence of life in a variety of down-to-earth scenarios. Based on this simple and truth-seeking attitude of play, an online video or a hot event may become an "invitation letter" to attract tourists from all over the country on the grass planting platform. The "highlights" that are more direct than the content planting grass are offline performances such as concerts and music festivals.
According to the "2023 China "Performance + Tourism" Consumption Trend Report, concerts and music festivals are the two formats with the largest number of attendees, of which concerts account for 59.6%. In the summer of this year, the number of performances, box office revenue and the number of spectators increased by 235.34%, 496.20% and 717.85% respectively compared with the same period last year. In addition, according to the ticket booking data of the Tongcheng travel platform, the number of visitors to the park attracted by the performances held by key scenic spots in the summer peak season increased by about 60% year-on-year, which was significantly higher than the overall tourist flow of scenic spots across the country.
One example that has to be mentioned is that before and after the performance of the "TFBOYS Ten Year Concert" this summer, the number of online bookings for local accommodation in Xi'an has increased significantly compared to the same period in previous years. In particular, from August 6 to 7, when the concert was held, the total number of local travel orders increased by 738% year-on-year, and the ticket revenue was 35.76 million yuan, which directly brought 416 million yuan of tourism revenue to Xi'an.
If this continues, the continued recovery of the offline performance industry in 2024 will also become a long-term catalyst to activate local consumption. For local life businesses in the fields of accommodation and catering, any city may usher in an explosion of passenger flow, which requires businesses to have a keen sense of smell for Internet celebrity "check-in points" and be fully prepared to open up new battlefields.
Looking back at the changes in the fields of eating, drinking, and playing in 2023, it is not difficult to find that the entire consumer market is showing a trend of "going down". Consumers have begun to be more down-to-earth, pay more attention to cost performance, and pay more attention to effect and efficiency, and the sinking market has also become a new stage for the industry to seek new growth.
At the same time, even taking into account the general expectation of lower incomes, consumers in the process of grading their consumption still retain their desire for new experiences. "The province should spend money, ride a bicycle to the bar" is not just a joke, but in the face of various consumer needs, people began to plan their budgets in a targeted manner, in order to get more consumption experience on the basis of limited income.
Frankly speaking, consumer demand will never decrease, but the current market lacks products that can meet both user needs and wallet budgets. The new market background also tests the ability of merchants and consumers to make careful calculations.