文 |Rita
At present, China's catering overseas has formed an echelon prototype.
In the first echelon, there are mainly tea and coffee brands, such as Mixue Bingcheng, Gong Cha and Sunrise Chatai, which have more than 1,000 overseas stores; the representatives of the second echelon are mainly hot pot and fast food brands, such as Shaxian Snacks and Tehai International (Haidilao), etc., and the overseas stores have reached more than 100 stores; and the main meal brands are also successively laying out the overseas market, forming the third echelon.
Of course, this pattern has only begun to take shape, and there is still the possibility of change, and latecomers will prevail.
Because, in 2024, more and more catering brands intend to bet their "chips" on going overseas. Brands that have already gone overseas want to win a higher market share and seize the opportunity, while leading catering brands that have not yet gone overseas also plan to "win by surprise" overseas and open up a second growth curve.
involution of China,
Overseas when the storm is rising
The reason for this phenomenon is that it is inseparable from market changes at a large level. "The escalating competition in the domestic catering market has prompted many catering brands to actively explore overseas markets and find new growth points," said Yuan Lijun, vice president of the Shanghai Catering and Culinary Association, at the Dialogue with Sailors private meeting held by MorketingGlobal.
Yuan Lijun, vice president of Shanghai Catering and Cooking Association
Why?
Because the domestic volume is not moving, and at the same time, many enterprises themselves have also encountered a ceiling in the development process, especially some catering companies that have a high market share in China, and the store coverage in domestic cities is already very high. On the other hand, overseas, there is an ample market that can be tapped, and brands can choose cities that match their own products to enter the market.
We can look at two sets of data about this:
1. The international Chinese food market has exceeded 260 billion US dollars, and it is estimated that by 2026, the international Chinese food market will account for 10.8%;
2. According to the "Quality Casting Brand Achievement of the First Business Card of Chinese Food Going to Sea" issued by Zhejiang Securities Co., Ltd. According to the report, in 2021, the size of the Chinese food and beverage market in these 12 different countries has reached: the United States US$48.1 billion, Japan US$10.6 billion, Singapore US$7.6 billion, the United Kingdom US$6.1 billion, South Korea US$3.9 billion, Canada US$3.2 billion, Thailand US$2.6 billion, Australia US$2.5 billion, Malaysia US$2.4 billion, Indonesia US$2.3 billion, Vietnam US$1.8 billion, and the United Arab Emirates US$400 million.
It can be seen that the scale of Chinese food in overseas markets has been expanding. "Taking Melbourne as an example, in the past two years, there have been a lot of post-85 young people, some post-85 young couples have sold their houses in Shanghai, bought a big mansion in Melbourne, bought a nanny car, the number of Chinese has increased, and they like to go to dinner and drink tea at noon in the evening, including 20 million Chinese in Indonesia and 10 million Chinese in Thailand; these countries have a large Chinese population base and stronger spending power," Yuan Lijun shared.
Of course, the market level is only part of the reason, and more importantly, "the time has come"!
Nowadays, Chinese catering culture is gradually "emerging" in the world, and it is not only overseas Chinese who love Chinese food. Some time ago, there was a very hot topic, Chinese all over the world, like a mercenary went to the Amazon primeval jungle to perform a mission, only to meet a fellow villager selling instant noodles in the jungle, there is an Internet celebrity couple, went to the loneliest town, and the only restaurant Chinese opened....... If we put aside the joke and take a closer look, we will find that the market space of overseas "Chinese catering" is huge, and there is a huge user base: overseas students + overseas travelers + overseas people who are interested in Chinese food.
First of all, at the level of overseas students, "judging from the data, there are more than 60 million overseas Chinese in the world, and more and more overseas children are staying, and a Chinese hot pot and a cup of bubble tea to relieve homesickness have become the choice of many overseas Chinese," said Zeng Qiao, founder and CEO of Morketing.
Secondly, at the level of overseas travelers + overseas people interested in Chinese food, Chinese food culture has gradually radiated from Southeast Asia with the development of short videos. According to data from GrabFood, a food delivery platform, the average person buys 4 cups of bubble tea per month in Southeast Asia, 5 cups of milk tea per person per month in the Philippines, and 6 cups per person per month in Thailand, and consumers spend nearly $4 billion a year on new tea drinks.
Zeng Qiao shared, "In addition to Southeast Asia, people who love to watch short videos should often be able to see bringing foreign friends to experience Chinese food, leaving children to cook Chinese food abroad for foreign friends, etc., in fact, there are also many users on TikTok who are spreading Chinese food and taking the lead in helping Chinese food go overseas to make a good impression."
On the one hand, the Chinese food culture is constantly expanding, and on the other hand, the actual status quo is "the scarcity of overseas catering talents, Chinese food, and catering".
"Once, I had a conversation with the French restaurant association, and I talked about the shortage of Chinese chefs in Paris, France, and said that they had used the power of black brands to 'kidnap' the chefs. This seemingly joking sentence represents the scarcity of foreign Chinese chef talents, and there is still a big gap compared with the level of domestic chefs, because in recent years, our restaurant has been very strong, making rapid progress, and intensively cultivating local cuisines around the world. However, the scarcity of talents in overseas markets remains unchanged, so how to achieve standardization and talent docking is a great challenge for Chinese food to go overseas," said Yuan Lijun.
In addition, most of the catering enterprises are in the early stage. According to MorketingResearch's incomplete statistics on the number of new catering cities going overseas, many Chinese catering companies have only 1-3 countries now. This means that a large number of catering companies have only begun to enter the overseas market, and the industry is still in its early stages.
Moreover, at present, many of the catering enterprises going overseas are mom-and-pop shops, and they only open restaurants with the help of natural geographical advantages. Many overseas students told Morketing Global that many Chinese restaurants in overseas tourist spots or other places are not delicious in terms of taste, but many Chinese are forced to choose at that time, there is no room, it is difficult to eat but can only accept, so it is difficult to eat and expensive.
Going to sea "three-plate axe"
Therefore, in the "wasteland development stage" of catering going overseas in the early stage, the higher the product power, the more mature the catering enterprise, and the higher the potential and success of going overseas. Especially when everyone already has a certain reputation in China, the actual threshold is lower. So what can catering companies do when they go overseas?
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The first trick: understand the market
As the saying goes, only by knowing oneself and knowing one's opponent can we win all battles, grasp consumption and market trends, and better grasp the context of brand management. In fact, to understand the market, one is to understand the laws and regulations of the country you choose to go to sea, and the other is to understand the industry trends, understand the development trends of different countries in food categories, and fight targeted wars.
For example, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act is the core of the U.S. food safety law, requiring the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to govern the production, processing, packaging, and storage of domestic and imported foods other than meat, poultry, and some eggs.
At the same time, many countries also prohibit false advertising of food and exaggerated efficacy in laws and regulations, including the hygiene standards of restaurants, and the management of personnel also have corresponding laws and regulations.
Therefore, the first step for catering enterprises to go overseas is to study whether their products, hygiene management, and personnel management can meet the standards of the countries going overseas.
Secondly, in addition to food laws and regulations, it is also important to understand the food and beverage consumption trends in the local market. In this regard, Morketing took stock of the food consumption trends in Southeast Asia and the United States in 2023 based on the TikTok platform, hoping to provide some inspiration for catering companies that want to go overseas this year.
- In 2023, it will achieve rapid growth in the track of "snacks, condiments, beverages and convenience foods" in Southeast Asia
From the perspective of the scale of Chinese food e-commerce in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia rank high, with US$810 million, US$420 million and US$300 million respectively.
At the food track level, based on the growth rate of China's food track in the above three countries, the four major tracks of "snacks, condiments, beverages and convenience foods" have developed the fastest, with a basic GMV growth of one million per month. In addition, throughout Southeast Asia, the growth rate of canned food is 24%, the conversion rate of puffed food is high, and some companies in the coffee market have achieved million-dollar performance with single products alone.
In terms of consumer trends, "Health & Beauty & Deliciousness" is the dominant category, with Indonesia mainly favoring delicious food and eating it immediately, Vietnam preferring dry snacks and preferring healthy products, while Thailand is more popular with consumers in the category of nutritional and delicious supplements, pursuing health, beauty and delicious indulgence.
In general, the market demand in Southeast Asia is clearly segmented, and the water drink category pursues good drinking/weight loss and beauty, especially in Thailand, this trend is more obvious; at the same time, health functional foods are highly sought after; snacks are mostly low-priced, and have not yet been consumed and upgraded; the coffee category is mainly coffee powder & weight loss function formula; spicy turkey noodles have a niche popularity.
- In the U.S. market, pickled food, coffee, tea, and instant noodles are worth paying attention to, among which coffee and instant noodles are growing at a rate of 10 times
In terms of consumption trends, snacks are divided into two categories: fun and delicious snacks and fitness snacks; coffee is still in the early stage of development; convenience foods, such as self-heating pans and turkey noodles, have a niche popularity; the demand for health and energy is reflected in most beverages; condiments and dry finger foods tend to be spicy and sour.
In this regard, brands can find their own advantages based on category insights.
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The second trick: be flexible
Of course, understanding the market is one thing, and on the other hand, it must be "flexible" enough. In the process of going overseas, enterprises often encounter different problems, and only by being flexible can they better cope with various complex markets and avoid potential risks.
And the premise of flexibility is not to be afraid of failure. "When we go from China to a new city overseas, sometimes we get lost or go the wrong way, but we will get familiar with it after walking a few more times and staying for a while, so we still have to pay the tuition fees," said Song Jidong, head of Mengniu's overseas business.
How?
The first point is to make a lot of efforts to do some deeper insights around the local consumers and markets.
In addition to the above-mentioned consumption trends in different regions, overseas companies also need to do a lot of detailed things: clarify your market positioning, formulate your product strategy, as well as price and channel strategies. For example, in terms of price positioning, you can refer to the situation of competitors, and then combine the cost to price, and provide different pricing combinations.
The second point is to iterate in small steps, first enter the market from export and trade, and see how well consumers accept it. Or find some OEMs, first test the market's acceptance of their products, run in small steps, and stand in line while running.
For example, at the product level, companies can start with products that are not prone to error, and then adjust and iterate on products according to the preferences of local people. In December last year, Heytea opened its first offline store in the United States, and at the beginning of its opening, it only provided common fruit teas such as grapes, mangoes, and grapefruits. Not only because this is a classic product of Heytea, but more importantly, it can reduce the pressure on the supply chain of Heytea and leave a relatively large space for subsequent product structure adjustment.
The third point is to communicate with experienced companies. "In the past few years, Chinese companies, especially in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, have cultivated the first batch of talents to go overseas, so we should communicate more with these companies that went overseas in the early years," Song Jidong said.
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The third trick: make content
In fact, for catering enterprises that have a certain foundation in China to go overseas, they can use the marketing capabilities accumulated before to promote their own products and display user experience, and closely integrate with local users through short videos, live broadcasts and other forms.
We have observed that many catering companies attach great importance to content, especially short video content. "We started to cooperate with TikTok when we opened a store in Indonesia in 2021, including today in the past two or three years, and TikTok is also All In TikTok, not only in Indonesia, but also in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Why it is important to make short video content mainly lies in the following three points:
1. Crowd matching. According to the data, 65% of TikTok users are very fond of snacking. At the same time, the exposure of food-related content is as high as 4 billion, which is equivalent to an average of more than 16 times per TikTok user per month to expose food and beverage-related content. In addition, compared with other platforms, the interaction rate of food and beverage content related to TikTok is 1.6 times higher.
2. Possibility. Content marketing has the potential to make a brand a super hit. Taking TikTok as an example, catering companies go overseas to do subdivision tracks in different markets, and they can seize the opportunity by choosing the right explosive products, which can account for 50%+ of a single store.
MorketingGlobal observed an eye cream product and created a viral video on TikTok showing the effect of smoothing wrinkles in time, and then the eye cream quickly ran out of stock, and the sales volume reached the brand's sales in the past 6 months a week after the video was broadcast.
This means that if your content is good enough, it is very likely that your product will quickly become a "hit". In this regard, how can catering companies do a good job of "content"?
Step 1: Enter different social platforms and establish content touchpoints so that users can see your brand on the site.
Owen Yang, vice president of Happy Sheep, said that operating his own TikTok enterprise account can solve the problem of cultural generation gap for free. "In the process of dissemination, we found that many products and ways to eat, overseas consumers do not know, for example, when I first went to the United States, many Lao Mei shabu shabu is to put noodles first, then vegetables, and finally meat, so the noodles become a lump, there is no way to make soup, can only keep adding soup to him, he thought this is a military pot, and then we demonstrated how to make the correct shabu-shabu through the content, first shabu-shabu, then shabu-shabu, and finally noodles."
So later, Happy Lamb began to produce popular Chinese content. "We had a lot of herbs in our soup pot, such as grass fruit and angelica, and then there was a customer in the store who was looking at what "grass fruit" was, and I ran up to him to tell him that it couldn't be eaten, but he put it in his mouth before he could run up. So we started to 'educate' overseas consumers through content that they can't eat grass and fruit."
Owen Young, Vice President of Happy Lamb
Of course, in this process, brands still need to build a small content team of more than 2 people, find the positioning and personality of the account, and then assist in high-quality content, do heavy operations, and actively participate in user reviews in order to achieve better results.
Step 2: Learn to combine with the topic, find the content that users like, and expand exposure.
It's easy to open an official account, but it's not easy to do a good job of content. When producing content, enterprises actually need to pay attention to "what content is really interesting to users?" in real time, so as to better attract attention.
MorketingGlobal understands that at present, on the TikTok platform, the three types of catering topics of "Chinese style, big health, and functionality" are very hot. Specifically, let's look at the analysis:
Chinese style, content related to local cuisine, spicy challenge, and Chinese tea is favored by users.
Local cuisines are out of the circle, and the products are hot, such as Southeast Asia and the United States, which have a high acceptance of China's regional cuisines. For example, foreign consumers like pancakes and white meat very much, and at the same time will make some related content, after the content is popular, so that users who don't know what Chinese food is, start to be interested, and if they are interested, they will buy it, and then publish relevant content, so as to achieve the effect of getting out of the circle.
It is worth noting here that, unlike in China, if you look at the short menu, you will think that this restaurant is very ordinary, but many overseas restaurants are "large single product stores". For example, a hamburger restaurant only sells hamburgers but only has different meats, and Korean soup restaurants only sell soup rice. If a Chinese restaurant goes overseas to prepare a long menu, although it may be rich in variety, but for overseas people, they may need to explain what different dishes are, because they do not understand Chinese food culture and have obvious food culture barriers. Including eating habits, overseas is one for one person, and domestic is shared together. Therefore, this means that there are development opportunities for catering companies to go overseas and go large single product stores.
In addition to local cuisines, overseas users are also very fond of "spicy challenge" related content, such as hot pot, spicy hotpot, and spicy fragrant pot, and North America mainly likes spicy challenges; Southeast Asian hot pot has more diverse gameplay, and consumers like to participate in spicy challenges and stunt challenges.
At the same time, on TikTok, with the blessing of Chinese tea culture, Kung Fu Tea, Porcelain Jubilee, which went to sea earlier, and the Nishang Tea Dance, which just opened in Las Vegas, USA, have been loved by many users.
- Like health content, more and more consumers are transitioning from milk powder to fresh milk, from milk tea to fruit tea.
In terms of segmentation, on the one hand, users prefer "0 sugar", plant-based is prevalent, such as oat milk, coconut milk, soy milk, nut milk, and users often post topics such as "vegetarianism, building tolerance "gluten-free", and no additional added sugar" on TikTok.
In addition, sparkling water is also selling very well on TikTok, including on Amazon, and recently lacroix sparkling water in the United States is very popular. At the same time, in the overall sparkling water category, the growth rate of flavored sparkling water is much higher than that of original sparkling water. In addition, sparkling water is also very suitable for DIY, how to use the flavored sparkling water I bought, customize a special drink I make at home, is also a very good content direction.
- Functional, everyone loves to watch "professional home brewing, workplace brewing" and "health care" content.
For example, Southeast Asia prefers "weight loss coffee for healthy beauty and weight loss", so companies can actually produce content for home brewing scenes for professional weight loss people, while North America prefers black coffee, which can be combined with workplace brewing and other scene content.
For example, how can an ordinary coffee brand compete with a strong coffee brand in Southeast Asia? In fact, based on the category and content that users like, the product category can be functional, and the content can be linked to the health care function.
In terms of health preservation, in Southeast Asia, we can focus on the content direction of "daily health preservation", "functional satisfaction" and "classical", and in North America, we can focus on the content based on the needs of users, for example, British tea, Japanese matcha, Indian tea and other exotic flavors are very hot in North America, so you can produce some content of tea culture in different countries.
Step 3: You still have to find influencers to amplify the content.
Influencer marketing and overseas catering companies can refer to this path - "first find a large number of KOCs to find exclusive grass planting scenes, then use mid-waist influencers to improve user awareness, and finally find top influencers to further stimulate users' interest in purchasing".
In the process of influencer marketing, we need to use the content to the extreme. For example, after the talent finishes the content, how can the enterprise reuse it?
In fact, you can do some advertising to continue the popularity, and once again expand the number of orders and exposure. In the case of TikTok, organic traffic does not disappear just because a business buys commercial traffic, but instead lengthens the amplifier. At the same time, under the content of the influencer, you can embed more hooks to promote purchase and efficiently attract and convert. Like what:
1. The user clicks on the anchor conversion component at the top of the comment area of the influencer video to jump to the landing page to guide the purchase;
2. You can make a promotion code for exclusive activities for influencers, amplify the benefits and accurately measure the conversion effect of talents;
3. You can add in-depth endorsement of external links to the personal homepage of the influencer to reach fans and high-interest groups in addition.
Generally speaking, if there is content with good organic performance, you can use this content as a "seed" and use the advertising ammunition library to increase investment, so that more people can see good video content, and bring more transactions and conversions to the enterprise.
epilogue
Finally, catering companies also need to pay attention to one point when going overseas, not only on the Chinese, but also on people from different countries.
"70% of the customers in our stores are foreigners, so the brand should no longer do Chinese business, the number of Chinese is limited, but there are 300 million Americans, and the concept and thinking must be changed. Of course, this also has something to do with the category, and we can't compete for coffee, but making Chinese food is the best bargaining chip in our hands, and it's good to talk about characteristics," said Owen Yang.
However, whether it is a Chinese business or an overseas business, it is certain that the era of Chinese catering has arrived.