A new round of the era of 10,000 stores is coming, and this time, the main battlefield is in China. It also announced that Chinese catering has officially entered the era of 10,000 stores!
The scale of 10,000 stores is a milestone threshold for catering and offline retail brands, but due to issues such as the degree of market development, there are not many 10,000 store brands in China, and most of them exist in the catering industry. But even in the catering industry, there are only a handful of 10,000 store brands.
In fact, based on the huge population base, China has a fertile soil for breeding Wandian brands, especially for rigid demand such as food and drink.
In 2023, with the recovery of consumption, we see that Chinese catering is running into the era of 10,000 stores. In particular, fast food snacks and freshly made drinks are two tracks. Due to the standardization of these two tracks and the lightweight model, they have become one of the categories with the most thousand-store brands, and it is very likely that new Wandian brands will be launched in the future.
Since the beginning of this year, more and more catering brands, especially coffee and new tea brands, have set a target of 10,000 stores.
Luckin was the first to achieve this goal.
On June 5, 2023, Luckin Xiamen Zhongshan Road Store officially opened, marking the official entry of Luckin into the 10,000 stores club, and the birth of the first chain coffee brand in China with more than 10,000 stores. To reach 10,000 stores, Luckin took less than six years.
Some people have realized the dream of 10,000 stores, and some people are still on the way to realize their dreams. Why can brands such as Luckin, Mixue Bingcheng, and Zhengxin Chicken Chop break through 10,000 stores?
Many people understand the Wandian tide as a digital carnival, but this is not the case, behind the Wandian is the game of brand hard power. To be able to achieve 10,000 stores, there must be hidden elements behind it that support the advancement of scale. In order to find the secret of Wandian, I analyzed all Wandian brands in China and found some characteristics worthy of attention.
Catering O2O, like 1
1. Deepen the supply chain
If we study some world-renowned Wandian enterprises, such as Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven in the retail industry, or KFC and McDonald's in the catering industry, we can find that they have invested a lot of energy in the supply chain, and the supply chain must be one of the key elements for them to become great enterprises. The same is true for China's Wandian restaurant brand.
For example, Mixue Bingcheng has built a trinity industrial chain of "R&D and production, warehousing and logistics, and operation management", the industrial chain of Juewei Duck Neck covers food research and development, production and processing, logistics and supply, and other fields......
Almost all 10,000-store brands have worked hard to deepen the supply chain. Such supply chain management capabilities can not only do low costs, but also improve the company's operational efficiency and provide efficient store replication efficiency for brands.
2. Aim at the sinking market
The real China is hidden in the sinking market. The population of cities below the third tier in mainland China accounts for about 70% of the total population. China's sinking market, with a population of about 1 billion, hides huge consumption potential. Cost performance is the greatest common divisor in this market.
China's 10,000-store catering brands, including Luckin, Wallace, Mixue Bingcheng, etc., are all taking the affordable route. According to the data of the seventh population census, there are 72 million Chinese with an average monthly disposable income of more than 5,000 yuan, and 960 million people with a monthly disposable income of less than 2,000 yuan. Affordable catering is the most common choice for ordinary Chinese people.
3. Large single product strategy
What is a large single product? A large single product is the main product of an enterprise or brand, and the company can often rely on the large single product to expand rapidly, occupy the market, and play the mind. China's Wandian brand is also following this logic.
For example, Zhengxin Chicken Chop was originally called Zhengxin Snack, with more than 100 SKUs, but in order to better develop, 90% of the products were cut, and only the chicken steak and a few products were retained, and it was renamed "Zhengxin Chicken Chop". After that, the number of Zhengxin chicken steak stores increased rapidly to 10,000 stores. Focusing on "chicken steak" is to occupy a mental place.
The rapid expansion of Luckin is also inseparable from the strategy of large single products. Luckin's new products are fast and have a lot of SKUs, and it launched 24 ready-made drinks in the second quarter of this year alone, but this is not contrary to the "big single product strategy".
Luckin's large-scale single product strategy lies in launching one phenomenon after another, such as raw coconut latte, coconut cloud latte, raw cheese latte and so on. Luckin's popular single products quickly occupied the minds of users, and even brought the effect of driving the brand with single products.
4. Digital intelligence support
The construction of intelligent and digital platforms has become an important promoter for the development of Wandian catering enterprises, and even become infrastructure.
At the beginning of its establishment, Luckin set up a technical team of about 400 people, developed its own app, and carried out digital-related technical reserves in all aspects of store location, operation, supply chain, etc., and finally realized the self-development and integration of the company's front, middle and back office systems.
Luckin's software and hardware R&D investment in the early stage was close to 2-300 million yuan. This undoubtedly shows that the Luckin team has a unique vision. Luckin has nearly 1,000 people in the technical team at its peak, because it attaches great importance to the accumulation of digital technology, and now Luckin still invests tens of millions of yuan in technology every year.
Nowadays, almost all of Luckin's business and management are data-driven. At the beginning of its establishment, Luckin identified a data-driven development path, and the key to being data-driven is to master data sovereignty.
Luckin's self-developed integrated system has run through, and the back-end investment in operating 2,000 stores and 10,000 stores is almost the same. The more consumers and the larger the amount of data accumulated, the more accurate the algorithm in the Luckin backend will be trained, which will be the greater the value and contribution to promoting Luckin product development, store operation and supply chain management.
Judging from the data, the "raw coconut latte" that came out of nowhere in recent years has created one sales miracle after another: "sold out in 1 second" and "sold 100 million cups in 1 year"...... Coffee brands are vying to imitate it.
Today, Luckin has maintained a rate of releasing a new product almost every 3 days, with a total of 77 new products launched in 2020, 113 in 2021, and 138 new products in 2022.
And behind all this, it is thanks to Luckin's strong product digital research and development capabilities.
The secret of KFC's success lies in standardization and digitalization, ensuring replicability and efficiency. Digitalization has penetrated into all aspects to help refined management, and its total number of online members has exceeded 100 million, making it the restaurant company with the largest number of members in China.
It also has more than 600 IT technicians and invested more than 100 million yuan in research and development to create a cloud information center platform integrating cloud computing, big data analysis and technology development.
The Guoquan Cloud Information Center aims to transform the informatization and intelligence of each circulation link of the supply chain, empower data, improve the comprehensive management and control of the supply chain, promote the efficient operation of upstream suppliers and downstream stores, and provide suggestions for the precision marketing of stores.
Finally, through business model innovation and strong digital capabilities, Guoquan achieved a scale of 10,000 stores in 5 years.
In the next three years, KFC plans to add more than 1,200 stores per year. McDonald's is also expanding rapidly, aiming to exceed 10,000 stores by 2028. The competition between international F&B brands in the Chinese market is becoming more and more fierce, and local brands are facing huge challenges.
For catering enterprises, continuous innovation, improvement of quality and service, and keeping up with the trend of digitalization are the keys to winning the market and realizing the chain of 10,000 stores.
5. Franchise fission
Without exception, the 7 major 10,000-store food brands have adopted the franchise system to achieve rapid fission and store opening.
After the epidemic, many brands began to rethink the franchise chain system, and direct brands such as Taier, Le Caesar, and Zhou Heiya have opened up to join, and for a while, franchise chains have become the hottest topic and trend in the catering industry.
In the past two years, direct brands have turned around to join, especially in early March, China's leading catering brother Haidilao opened up to join, which caused a heated discussion in the catering circle.
The phenomenon of Haidilao's franchise has formed a new cognition in the catering circle: the end game of catering is franchise, and the end game of franchise is the chain of 10,000 stores.
Deepening the industrial chain, aiming at the sinking market, large single product strategy, digital support, and franchise fission are the common characteristics of Wandian brands, and they are also the support behind the reason why these brands can become Wandian.
Many catering brands have a "dream of 10,000 stores" and have the ambition to make 10,000 stores, but such a scale cannot be achieved by relying on enthusiasm. Only by figuring out the "password" behind Wandian can we avoid confusion and have the opportunity to become a real "brand" of Wandian.
Based on this, catering O2O joined forces with 50+ brands of thousands of stores and industry experts to hold the 2024 China 10,000 Store Chain Conference in Wuhan, Central Plains on March 28-29 to discuss how to do a good job in franchising, how to expand franchise brands at a high speed, how to build the underlying logic of 10,000 store chains, and how to build supply chain and organizational strength?...
This conference is also held at the same time as the 20th Liangzhilong China Food Ingredients E-commerce Festival in 2024 and the Zhongtoumeng Franchise Exhibition, which is a very grand exhibition + summit + study tour to Wuhan, which is the beginning of the year to open the fog and understand the 2024 catering trend!
From March 30th to 31st, the catering O2O research camp walked into Wuhan and visited Zhou Heiya, Helensi, Fatty Shrimp Village, Grandpa Bu Tea, Erchang Soda, Evergreen Mai Xiangyuan, Biaotou Fried Skewers... Let's take a look at the new consumer power in Wuhan.
From March 28th to March 30th, 4 days, 3 exhibitions, 30+ summit events, and 400,000 catering people gathered in Wuhan, what are you still hesitating about?
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