Once upon a time, the farmhouse attracted many city tourists to seek solace for the soul with its unique rural flavor and idyllic scenery. Visitors can taste authentic farm food and local products in the small courtyard of the farmhouse, and enjoy the charming rural scenery.
In their spare time, tourists often go to nearby scenic spots to enjoy flowers, scenery and climb mountains, and when they are tired, they return to the farmhouse to enjoy local products, take a break, or play mahjong to relax.
However, with the passage of time, the once thriving farmhouse is no longer what it once was.
On station B, a short 10-minute video has received millions of views, and there are more than 3,000 comments, and the theme of the video is directly related to the scenery of the farmhouse.
Not only on Station B, but also on Douyin and Xiaohongshu, there are also farmhouse owners who share their helplessness and sadness about the closure of their farms and restaurants.
The data shows that the farmhouse is facing a severe wave of closures. According to the company's information, there are currently more than 80,000 enterprises with "farmhouse" as the keyword and the status is cancelled or revoked. In the first 11 months of this year alone, nearly 7,000 farmhouses went into decline.
01■
Cancellation and revocation of farmhouse restaurants "greatly shrinked"
Speaking of which, everyone should be familiar with the farmhouse, it is a special catering format that integrates farmhouse dishes, farmhouse meals and farmhouse scenery.
Usually located in rural areas, the environment is quiet and fresh, giving a sense of tranquility and relaxation compared to the hustle and bustle of the city.
At the farmhouse, visitors can taste authentic farmhouse dishes, which are mostly made from local agricultural products, which are pure in taste and nutritious.
At the same time, visitors can also experience the joy of farm life, such as participating in agricultural activities, picking crops, raising animals, etc.
Therefore, farmhouse has become the first choice for many people to relax and vacation. I vaguely remember that when I was a child, as long as the family went out on weekends or holidays, they would choose a nearby farmhouse.
At that time, I still remember that there were more than 30 villages alone, and there were farms, rural restaurants, people's houses, small kitchens, and names. At the time of the fire in the farmhouse village, there were more than 200 farmhouses in the family, and each household opened a farmhouse.
However, this kind of grandeur only exists in vague "memories". Back to reality, the farmhouse is no longer "in the prime of life", it has entered the "old age", and it does not have the style of the past.
So in recent years, there has been a lot of news about the recession of farmhouses in various places. For example, near Liquan in Xianyang, there are 7 or 8 farmhouse shops that have been open for ten years, and the business is not as good as before, and the customer flow has dropped significantly, which makes people sigh.
This is true in Chongqing, Guangzhou and other places. If a reporter ran to the entrance of Hufeng Village, Jiulongpo District, Chongqing, a guiding monument was erected, which marked the information that there were 12 farmhouses in the village. However, after entering the village, 11 of them closed down one after another, and only one was still open.
Some reporters also noticed that in Guangzhou, where they are located, a number of farmhouses in Conghua, Nansha, Luogang and other places, such as Hongyang Farmhouse, Xibian Farmhouse, Zhicheng Farmhouse, etc., have also closed their doors.
In addition to reporters from all over the country who found that some farmhouses had closed down, netizens who had opened farmhouses in various places also expressed their sadness on the Internet.
A boss of a farmhouse in Jinhua City said that he had no choice but to transfer his family farm to someone who was destined to do so because he had no intention of running it; a boss in Guizhou, who had been running a farmhouse for four or five years, was now riddled with debts; and a boss in Hancheng, Shaanxi Province, said that the farmhouse he had built at a cost of 10 million yuan had been unpatronized in three months since it opened, and it was estimated that it would not be far from going out of business.
In fact, judging from the cold data, the scale of the farmhouse is also "shrinking significantly".
According to data from Qichacha, as of March 2024, there are 201945 registered farmhouse enterprises in the country, of which Sichuan Province has the most, reaching 25,996, and Chongqing has 18,808.
As of March 2024, a total of 84,199 farmhouse enterprises have been cancelled, 6,880 in Chongqing, and 8,526 in Sichuan. That is, more than "8" 10,000 farmhouse enterprises "disappeared overnight".
There are two reasons why the farmhouse is in such a difficult situation.
First of all, the homogenization is serious, and the attraction is not as good as before.
After one farmhouse became popular, other farmhouses began to "copy and paste".
You dig a pond and surround a yard, and I also test the water; you build a shed and set up a stove, I can too; you carry out activities such as picking and fishing, and I will also add; you do the Chinese of Guan, focusing on the decoration of Guanzhong, and I will also do it.
As a result, in the same area, the vast majority of farmhouses look like "brothers", from dishes to decoration, from services to activities, the main focus is a "copy and paste".
As a result, the entire farmhouse market is seriously homogeneous, lacking innovative content, and it is difficult for tourists to repurchase after trying it.
Secondly, the stealing of customers is serious, and the ingredients are perfunctory, which dissuades many tourists.
In addition to the lack of innovative content, one of the biggest problems of the farmhouse is "perfunctory" and stealing customers. On the one hand, it is trying to rip off customers, which leads to consumer complaints.
A consumer in Guangxi said that the free-range chicken in a farmhouse in Liuzhou, Guangxi Province, has risen from the initial 98 yuan to 218 yuan. In addition, a green vegetable sells for 60 yuan, and a pot of old fire soup sells for 80 yuan, which makes people shout: slaughter the guests as fools.
Some netizens posted that they played once in Tieshanping, Chongqing, and were asked for 3,120 yuan when they left the checkout, and the other party also confidently said that this was an additional "private room fee".
On the other hand, "perfunctory" dishes. A friend once shared that he saw with his own eyes that when the owner of the farmhouse prepared the dishes in the back kitchen, he used "semi-finished products and pre-made dishes", which was in too much contrast with the selling points of the ingredients he advertised, "picked on the same day" and "pollution-free vegetables".
02■
The farmhouse has fallen, and the farmhouse catering has risen
The farmhouse is "down", but the demand for the farmhouse is still there. On the one hand, people still like the authentic "flavor food" of other countries.
In the "2023 Xiaohongshu Annual Life Trends" report, "eating authentic flavors" ranked second, and the number of notes related to "eating authentic flavors" in 2022 increased by 227% year-on-year.
On the other hand, people still yearn for "country life". According to the "2023 May Day Travel Data" released by Ctrip, orders for rural tours have recovered to 242% of the same period in 2019, and tourists from big cities have become enthusiastic about rural tours.
However, compared to farmhouses, the customer base that yearns for "country life" has changed. In the past, the post-70s and post-80s who went to the farmhouse were basically post-70s and post-80s, and they would take their families to spend a vacation occasionally, but with the passage of time, the mainstream customers who went to the "countryside tour" have become the post-00s and post-90s.
According to Ctrip's "2023 May Day Travel Data" report, among the order groups for rural tours, the post-00s ~ post-90s are the main customer groups, exceeding the post-80s.
People's "demand for rural longing" is still there, and the "demand" for liking to eat food from other places is also there, but the customer base has changed and become a younger generation. This also indirectly led to the collapse of the farmhouse and the rise of farmhouse catering.
What is "farmhouse catering" is that entrepreneurs have redefined, reconstructed and subdivided the "farmhouse" model according to the young customer group's yearning for the "countryside", the liking for the flavors of other places and the escalating demands.
To understand "farmhouse" catering, let's first sort out the needs of consumers, I think there are three types of needs:
One is the demand for tourism, to seek their own "country life" in distant places;
One is the demand for convenience, I don't want to go too far, I hope to experience the "rural scene" in the city;
The last category is category appeal, hoping to eat "snacks from other places".
For each type of need, entrepreneurs have designed a corresponding business plan.
In response to demand one, move the city restaurant into the "countryside".
More than 70,000 articles about "village coffee" have been shared on Xiaohongshu, giving birth to a new business model called "village coffee".
The core idea of this model is to bring the atmosphere of an urban café into a rustic setting, such as between the mountains, in the middle of a field, on the banks of rice paddies, or in an orchard by a small river.
In short, it's a clever blend of "coffee genre" and "rural scene". The scene is very diverse, it can be the combination of coffee and Guanzhong folk customs, or the collision of coffee and farms, or the coffee experience in the southern French style.
"Village coffee" is not a new thing.
In the village of Zhukula in Yunnan Province, coffee has been integrated into the daily lives of local ethnic minorities and is known as the "living fossil of Chinese coffee", the small town of Fushan in Hainan has been actively promoting its rural coffee culture since the early 2000s, and the village of Fuba in Kang County, Longnan, Gansu Province, has been a pioneer in renovating old warehouses into chic cafes many years ago.
However, for entrepreneurs who are interested in trying this model, the key is to adapt to local conditions and do what they can, and avoid blindly following the trend.
In addition, the innovation of the country restaurant is not limited to coffee.
Taking Wang's courtyard as an example, its store is located in the village, the decoration style is full of "rustic", the store displays farming ingredients and traditional farm tools, the overall design integrates the classical Chinese garden style, the quaint house and the garden scenery complement each other, garden, lake, granite road and other elements, providing customers with a new experience of immersion in nature, enjoying catering and environment.
In response to the second demand, copy the "rural environment" into the restaurant.
Even if a restaurant in the city can be moved into the countryside, on the contrary, we can recreate the scene of the countryside in the restaurant.
A prime example is the popular Garden Restaurant, which uses landscaping techniques to integrate the restaurant with the water and greenery, and to show the splendor of nature in a miniaturized way.
In addition, "Tucai Restaurant" also has a place in the market, such as Ben Luo Bu, Nong Ji, Lao Xiang Chicken and other brands.
In the case of Lao Xiang Chicken, it extends the "earthy" element of the farmhouse to the selection of ingredients and marketing strategies. The farming record refers to the "Hunan hometown", and successfully restores the "Hunan rural scene" by integrating Hunan rural elements, making consumers feel as if they are in the countryside of Hunan.
In addition, the popular "courtyard restaurant" in the market is based on the classic courtyard and has a scenic spot style with mountains and rivers. In fact, in recent years, through the reproduction of rural scenes, various types of "rural restaurants" have been derived, such as cave restaurants, field restaurants, vegetable restaurants and folk restaurants, which respectively integrate the elements of caves, fields, farmland and folk villages into the restaurant.
In response to the third appeal, the local snacks are either gathered together or opened separately in the city.
As we said above, consumers go to the countryside, in addition to traveling, but also to taste the authentic "flavor" food of other places.
Among them, there are two solutions in the market, one is to gather local snacks for foreign tourists to create a folk snack street;
The first is to bring local flavor food into the city that consumers can reach faster in the way of branding.
First of all, the first is to gather local snacks for foreign tourists to create a folk snack street.
For example, in Yuanjia Village, in order to meet the needs of tourists to taste all the snacks in a short time, they have gathered all kinds of Guanzhong snacks such as mutton blood in powder soup, fried oil cake, biangbiang noodles, Shaanxi Liangpi, artichoke glutinous ba, hot and sour noodles, chop noodles, steamed pork, pot helmets, cured meat and steamed buns, etc., and successfully created a Guanzhong snack street containing 100 different delicacies.
For time-critical tourists, Yongxinfang has adopted a "condensed version" of the Yuanjiacun snack street model, opening a streamlined version of the snack street near Chaoyangmen in Xi'an.
This flexible and changeable way not only meets the needs of different tourists, but also effectively promotes the local snacks in Guanzhong.
Secondly, the first is to bring local flavor food into the city that consumers can reach faster in the way of branding.
For example, the Northeast gourmet iron pot stew has been branded by entrepreneurs from all walks of life into Beijing and Shanghai, and has become a beautiful landscape of first-tier cities.
There are also the villagers' chickens and farming notes we mentioned above, which have moved the local chickens and side dishes that are only available in the countryside of Jinan and Hunan into the city, triggering a series of queuing effects.
In fact, there are different snack market shops in the market, where the flavor snacks of different places are packaged together in one store and moved into various cities.
There is a brand of Xi'an snack restaurant, which brings the common snacks to Beijing and is well received by the people of Beijing. In fact, in Beijing, there are Sichuan snack collection stores, Hunan snack collection stores and so on
Brief summary:
From the point of view of demand and industrial upgrading, farmhouses have not died out, but have to be "upgraded" and segmented in order to better adapt to new changes, new markets and new customer groups.
Of course, in this evolution, the traditional farmhouse model that cannot adapt to the market demand will be eliminated.
This trend cannot be reversed, because in the highly competitive and unpredictable F&B market, only the fittest survive. And if you want to be "fittest", you have to keep evolving.
-END-作者 | 邹通出品 | 餐饮O2O