There is such a food company, not many people know about it, but about ten years ago, it cooperated with supermarket giants Wal-Mart, Sam's, and RT-Mart to provide them with sausages and prefabricated dishes all year round.
It is Teward, which came out of the Northeast. It is most appropriate to call it the hero behind the high-end supermarket, and now in addition to the stable and continuous supply of To B products, some To C consumer-oriented products are also in full swing in the hottest live broadcast room channels.
From 2021 to 2023, Tehuade's average annual revenue will exceed 100 million.
01. A catering entrepreneur who came out of a small town in the Northeast
Recalling the beginning of his business in 2001, Zhang Xia still remembers it vividly. At that time, she was working as a hotel manager in Mudanjiang in northeast China, and her husband Wang Tianshi also had a stable job in a state-owned bank. It is a very small factory, workshop-style production, only 9 workshop workers, 2 sales outlets, and annual sales of about hundreds of thousands of yuan.
After thinking about it for a while, the husband and wife, who were unwilling to go to work, decided to give it a try. They held a family meeting to discuss, and at first, of course, they voted against it, but in the end they persuaded their families to resign from their iron jobs, sell their wedding rings, borrow hundreds of thousands, start a self-made business, and name the company Tehuad.
Two years later, in 2003, RT-Mart entered Mudanjiang, and this expansion strategy in the supermarket industry affected suppliers like Zhang Xia when it was put into the individual of the times.
▲ (Zhang Xia, founder of Tehuade.) Photo courtesy of the interviewee)
"Locals know that RT-Mart is a supermarket from Taiwan and have admiration for it. However, our company was small at that time, and the difficulty of trying to break into it can be imagined, and it was impossible to talk about it. Zhang Xia recalled to "City Boundary", "We inquired about the itinerary of the next few stops of the purchaser, so we simply bought tickets and followed all the way behind." Tehuade's perseverance finally moved "Party A" and gave them a 5-minute opportunity to communicate, and Zhang Xia bluntly threw out the idea of "wanting to settle in and cooperate". But the other party replied, "The sausage cooperation with someone else's family has been signed." Zhang Xia thought to himself, no matter what, he must go in first. In the end, she reluctantly took over the job of selling side dishes at RT-Mart, which was actually a semi-finished dish in the early days, cutting and washing the ingredients, and customers took them home and fried them with seasonings and eaten.
This kind of compromise is not the way to do it after all, and selling your own specialty sausages is the right thing to do. Zhang Xia later learned that including RT-Mart, all the supermarket meat is basically not profitable because it is a vegetable basket project for the common people, she seized this pain point and RT-Mart to talk about her own ideas, sausages do not belong to pure meat, put sausages in the meat customer area to sell, and help the supermarket increase the gross profit of the overall meat customer area. The other party also put forward a "whimsical" sales request of "10,000 yuan a day", and Zhang Xia led the company to do it.
"It can be said that it is super difficult, and this is a customer negotiation that impresses Zhang Xia the most. Zhang Xia didn't expect that it was this negotiation that allowed her to create a company with an annual revenue of more than 100 million yuan many years later, and also did her business abroad, and even had the idea of sprinting to the capital market.
In the words of Wang Tianshi, in Zhang Xia's eyes, there is nothing that cannot be done. With this resilience and momentum, Zhang Xia led Tehuade to gradually step out of Mudanjiang, enter the Dalian market in 2003, and open up the Beijing market and Shanghai market in 2005 and 2006. The company's cooperation partners also cover many well-known supermarkets - Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Sam's, Ole', Freshippo, Metro, ALDI, etc.
I believe that many loyal fans of Sam's and Hema have bought army hot pot, cheese sausage, Taiwanese sausage, chicken roll beef roll, pizza salami, as well as this year's new products Malatang and Northeast Sauerkraut Pot, in fact, these explosive products are all from Tehuade.
Take the army hot pot as an example, the first time the things made were not decent, Zhang Xia took them to drive the car door to door to the restaurant to place an order to taste, Zhang Xia led the team through 60 or so home tasting, to understand the appearance and taste of the army hot pot. Later, he was introduced to the hometown of Korean miso to get authentic Korean miso, and after returning to China, he repeatedly debugged it as the base sauce for the army's hot pot. This is not enough, the army hot pot also put Tehuade's own sausages, luncheon meat, vegetables, rice cakes, cheese and so on. From the concept to the launch, after 9 months, after more than 20 polishing and debugging, the army hot pot was finally born, and it was sold out as soon as it was launched on the supermarket shelves. "This single item alone sold more than 10 million sales in a month, which was still 6 years ago. ”
After being familiar with and mastering the unique methodology of cooperating with large supermarkets, Tehuade's channel expansion has become smoother and smoother, and its revenue has also risen all the way. So in 2024, Zhang Xia set a small goal for the company, "to the next level".
02. High-end innovative products help
"City Boundary" learned that a live broadcast room had just found Tehuade not long ago and wanted to customize a sausage product that was not available on the market, requiring that there be large meat particles in it and no water-retaining agent (an additive). The two sides are efficient, the goals are clear, and they will make a decision after meeting three times before and after. Previously, in Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room, Tehuade's sauerkraut pot had appeared.
As the growth point of the company's performance in 2024, Zhang Xia attaches great importance to the channel expansion and development of the consumer side of To C this year, according to Zhang Xia, the sausage products specially customized for this cooperation will be launched in the live broadcast room at the end of April and early May, and the sales are expected to be expected.
"Other channels are also catching up, so we are still very confident about growth in 2024. Wang Tianshi added.
When the demand is large, the output will naturally have to keep up.
Tehuade's current company layout is that Mudanjiang is the old production base, Shanghai is the R&D center, Tianjin has two sales companies, and Beijing also has a branch. In Yancheng, Jiangsu, it will be the headquarters of the company in the future, and it will also be the main body of the company's possible listing in the future, and a new factory will be built in Yancheng Tehuade, which is expected to be put into production within this year.
In the process of a company's large-scale expansion, the biggest concern is product quality and safety control, and food safety is a bigger problem in China.
After gaining a certain market share, the pace of research and development slowed down. Zhang Xia set a "focus" strategy for the company, first reducing the annual SKU to 48, and then streamlining 8 from 48 for the main attack, which is to work product leanness.
Not only that, in the process of communicating with the "city boundary", the two founders repeatedly emphasized the positioning of Tehuade as "making mid-to-high-end innovative products".
Chairman Wang Tianshi told "City Boundary" that 90% of Tehuade's products are not available on the market, such as kimchi sausages, Angus grain-fed beef sausages, turkey celery breakfast sausages, and cheese sausages. To this end, the company has invested huge R&D energy and funds. "Innovation is the core competitiveness of Tehuade. In 2022 alone, we developed 108 products in a year, almost one in three days. At a German exhibition, he was surprised to find that even Germany, which is the best at producing sausages, has more than 2,000 types of sausages, and has found three new products that are not available locally.
This innovation is made possible by the company's R&D team, which includes German sausage experts with more than 30 years of experience in sausage making, chefs in five-star hotels, and partners from Southeast Asia.
▲ (Tehuade star products: Northeast sauerkraut pot, Angus grain-fed beef sausage.) Photo courtesy of the interviewee)
In terms of cost, Tehuade is also willing to cut materials. The meat products purchased are all from well-known listed companies such as CP, Shuanghui and Yurun. The overall level is benchmarked against internationally renowned brand sausages. "It's all about the high end. Although the amount of low-end is large, it can't go far, and good things must go long-term. Wang Tianshi said.
Another important expense for companies that combine food production and sales is logistics costs. This is also one of Teward's unique advantages. The best-selling sukiyaki pot on the shelves of a shopping mall used to be washed and cut vegetables by supermarket employees, and the average human efficiency of a single pot was 21 minutes.
Zhang Xia left an assignment for several logistics supply chain companies in his hand - "Whoever can solve the problem of human efficiency for me, this project will be done for whom". Finally, through the integration of various logistics factories, it delivers the upgraded finished ingredients to the supermarket, and increases the human efficiency of a single pot to 7 minutes. At present, Tehuade's logistics south to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, north to Shenyang, Dalian, all can be covered, Beijing, Shanghai such a big city not to mention, the company can do the country's first and second tier cities refrigerated goods every other day. Zhang Xia knows that some raw materials are in a hurry in supermarkets and cannot be delivered by others, but Tehuade can deliver them as soon as possible.
When it comes to the next plan, Zhang Xia said that first of all, it is necessary to adhere to the positioning of the middle and high-end, secondly, to make the main products sausages and prefabricated dishes healthier and more nutritious, and finally to hope that the company will be strong and long-lasting.
In addition, there are two things that must be done this year, one is the short video live broadcast, Zhang Xia believes, "Our two founders shuttle around the world every day, and they are food exploration stores, and they are traceable to the source of raw materials, so it is a pity not to do live broadcasts." ”
The second thing is to go to sea. After long-term overseas observation, Zhang Xia found that the consumption power of Europe, America, Southeast Asia, Singapore, Japan and South Korea is very good, which made her want to go out. For this reason, in the next period of time, Tehuade will frequently appear in Paris, Singapore, South Korea and other sausage exhibitions.
The company also has the idea of going public, the most obvious sign is the introduction of private equity funds, the beginning of formal shareholder management, from the structure and management of the enterprise more perfect.
However, "in the past two years, it has been difficult for food (enterprises) to enter the capital market. Only when enterprises need the help of the capital market, our enterprises will naturally embark on this path. In fact, many non-listed companies are hidden champions in the industry, and Tehuade is committed to doing long-term things - creating the world's first brand of high-end sausages. The founder, Wang Tianshi, thought and looked into the distance.
Author | Chen Chang
Author | Chen Fang
Operations | Liu Shan