When it comes to strategies related to reducing costs and increasing efficiency, almost every restaurant has their own methodology, such as optimizing the menu structure, reducing SKUs, changing employees, and improving the turnover rate in private domain operations. However, these strategies are good, but in the view of Luo Huashan, catering O2O, "all efficiency revolutions come from changes in production tools." ”
From the perspective of first principles, the essence of all business competition is efficiency, and the efficiency of the catering industry has the following three series of indicators: operational efficiency, that is, human efficiency, ping efficiency, timeliness, product efficiency, etc.; customer acquisition efficiency, that is, order rate, conversion rate, repurchase rate, etc.; capital efficiency, that is, gross profit margin, return on investment, overall capital turnover rate, etc.
To win this efficiency war, there are six core key variables: equipment, intelligence, digitalization, chain system, supply chain, and partners. The first three are mainly determined by the hardware, while the last three belong to the soft system. Aside from the soft system, the smart equipment represented by the hard system is a universal tool for catering enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
However, specifically, how do smart devices help restaurant companies reduce costs and increase efficiency?
At the 2024 China Wandian Chain Conference successfully held by Catering O2O Joint Prefabricated Dish Ingredients Home, What is Worth Joining, China Ingredients E-commerce Festival, and Zhongtou Alliance, representatives of catering O2O Luohuashan, Shenzhen 63 Degrees Technology, Shanghai Weichu Technology, and Shanghai Fortune Commercial Service jointly conducted in-depth discussions on the issues.
The following is the transcript of this roundtable forum, organized by catering O2O.
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Catering smart equipment
There are 3 solutions to reduce costs and increase efficiency
Host Catering O2O Luo Huashan: Catering is entering the era of new quality productivity, with the continuous intensification of the industry's involution, cost reduction and efficiency increase have become one of the key words. From the perspective of the guests, how do you think you can help the catering to reduce costs and increase efficiency?
Pan Bingcai of Shenzhen 63 Degrees Technology: 63°'s main business is a stir-fry robot, and it has pioneered a drum multi-pot stacked stir-fry machine, which is stacked with 4 pots with a width of 0.6 meters, washing the pot and stir-frying, completely separating and stir-frying, which is more efficient, and at the same time, it has high power, equivalent to the effect of 30Kw fierce fire stir-frying, which directly solves the pain point of the lack of firepower of traditional stir-fry robots.
In fact, it has been nearly 20 years since the birth of China's stir-fry robots, why has it not been widely used? In my opinion, there are mainly the following reasons: first, demand, second, new technology. Only the convergence of demand and new technology can make a fundamental change in the entire industry.
But at present, for many catering owners, their needs are: the use of labor in the catering kitchen is large, and they hope that the kitchen will be mechanized to save labor costs; the cost of manual training is high, and they hope that the use of kitchen equipment is as simple as possible, and it is best to fool it; at the same time, the cost should be cheap enough, not too expensive, at least cheaper than labor. Finally, it should not occupy too much space in the store. If the average cost of the machine is more expensive than that of labor, the boss will not want to use the machine.
In the integration of demand and technology, there is a principle called the 10 times better principle. That is, once the technology and demand are integrated, it must be 10 times better than the existing solution. Only in this way can it be used on a large scale in the industry. From the perspective of catering, what we do is to create a smart device that is 10 times more human-efficient in the current catering at a very low cost and an excellent solution. The 63° prior technology has been able to realize, and the cost of the stir-fry machine has dropped from tens of thousands to thousands of dollars, and the rent is even as low as a few hundred yuan.
Nowadays, many restaurant companies have their own signature hits, and hundreds or even thousands of copies are sold every day, and the cost of such an order is very high through manual realization. And if the explosive products are cooked by machine, this problem can be directly solved. Similarly, there are some fast food brands with a large proportion of stir-fried dishes.
In short, the repetitive and complicated work is quickly released by the machine to improve the efficiency of kitchen products.
Guo Na of Shanghai Weichu Technology: Founded in 2017, Weichu Technology has successively served Internet celebrity brands such as Seven Young Masters and Four Young Youths, undertook customized equipment maintenance services, and also received relevant investment from Haidilao in 2018, which is the only after-sales platform for commercial kitchens in China. There are 500 after-sales outlets across the country, covering 700 cities, serving hundreds of manufacturers and chain enterprises across the country, such as Lanxiangzi, Feifei Shrimp Village, Lushanchuan, etc.
In this era of price involution, how to reduce costs and increase efficiency and quickly improve the efficiency of dining? We start from the needs and pain points of the catering kitchen, and help the catering brand design a standardized kitchen line, so as to help the brand improve efficiency and expand rapidly.
Taking Lanxiangzi as an example, we directly optimized the layout of the whole store equipment and the use of three-dimensional space, compressed the space of Lanxiangzi's kitchen equipment to 40-50 square meters, greatly reducing the floor space of the kitchen, and at the same time ensuring that Lanxiangzi stores create an average of 3-50,000 yuan per day. Similarly, there is Lushanchuan, through the exclusive mold opening and customization equipment for brand needs, we have directly increased the efficiency of Lushanchuan brand stores by 30%.
In short, Weichu Technology is mainly at the level of kitchen equipment, developing new equipment in a customized mode according to customer needs, so as to improve the efficiency of brand dining.
Huang Kai of Shanghai Vary Commercial Services: Founded in 1972, Vary Commercial is one of Yum's global suppliers, providing maintenance and maintenance of commercial equipment for Yum in the Chinese market. Traditionally, equipment failures are usually queried in C language, but since last year, Fali has introduced a self-developed large model base, which can already realize our judgment of fault phenomena in the form of prompt words and RAG.
This year's two sessions mentioned two key words, the first is new quality productivity, and the second is artificial intelligence +, to solve the problem of what artificial intelligence adds. This first needs to solve a problem, what can artificial intelligence do? At present, the main thing is perception, transmission and processing.
At the perception level, Fali mainly focuses on the perception of equipment status, such as the current, voltage, usage status, temperature change of the equipment, etc.;
At the processing level, we used to only be able to look at the data generated by the camera, but now we have a convenient model ability, which can intelligently check the work efficiency of catering staff, such as whether the standards of the kitchen are met, whether the cleaning is in place, and whether various utensils are placed in the correct position, all of which can be judged in real time by the system. Traditionally, if one person can only control one store, then through Fali's intelligent business system, one person can already control three stores. Fali is to improve the efficiency of human work and reduce costs and increase efficiency of catering enterprises by replacing manpower with intelligence.
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2024 will be:
The year of the blowout of smart devices
Moderator: What is a 10,000-store chain? In addition to the replication of stores and talents, the 10,000-store chain also includes the chaining of technical equipment. From your own point of view, what is the company still doing to promote the chain of restaurant enterprises and 10,000 stores?Where are the application scenarios of smart devices in the future?
Pan Bingcai, Shenzhen 63 Degrees Technology: We are now focusing on the large-scale model design of the catering track. This large model can be continuously fed with data to cultivate the model's ability to think and make decisions. Different companies can feed different data to cultivate a large model unique to the enterprise. In short, the data determines how the model will look in the future. Just like a child, the newborn is a blank sheet of paper, and each parent paints a different color on the child, thus raising their own child.
We envision a restaurant buying our large model and feeding it with its own data. In the future, this large model will grow into a unique model for restaurant companies, and even become one of the core competitiveness of the brand in the future.
Huang Kai, Shanghai Vary Commercial Service: From the current business situation, we found that the higher the sales volume of the chain store, the higher the acceptance of the system. Small-scale and traditional Chinese catering brands are less receptive to the system. The root cause is the low ability of the kitchen staff of the brand of small catering enterprises.
It can be seen that the development of smart devices is not a technical problem, but a question of how to use technology. In most cases, there is a big gap between our real users and our ideal users, and the most important thing we need to do now is to close this gap by optimizing the system. For example, the system is constantly optimized so that it is constantly biased towards foolish operation.
Moderator: With the attention and research and development of catering smart devices by brands such as Hey Tea, Nai Xue's Tea, and Haidilao, many people in the industry feel that catering smart devices are ushering in an explosive opportunity. Please talk from your own perspective, do you think 2024 will be the year of smart device blowout development?
Pan Bingcai of Shenzhen 63 Degrees Technology: In my opinion, the stir-fry robot will most likely not become a general-purpose robot in the future, but will become a series of products that distinguish functions, focus products, and can be continuously subdivided. If you want to measure whether a stir-fry robot is universal, 63° mainly depends on several indicators.
First, the customer purchase rate. That is, when we bring customers over to see the product, how many people sign the order. If the customer purchase rate has exceeded 50%, it means that this stir-fry robot caters to the market. After all, many of the customers who show them are actually invalid customers. And this indicator 63 ° has already been completed.
Second, the abandonment rate. When the customer abandonment rate is less than 10%, or the utilization rate in chain restaurant companies can reach 100%, even after the store is closed, the restaurant company will still bring it to the new store to use, indicating that this stir-fry robot is already very universal.
Third, the repurchase rate. Is the new store equipped with the same robot as standard? What is the purchase scale of a single customer? Is the maximum purchase of a customer 10, 100 or 1000 units? If there are only 10 units, it means that the market has just begun. 100 units, indicating that there are already many restaurant companies in the application. 1000 units, the market has entered the certainty. 63° expects the company's maximum purchase volume of a single customer to exceed 1,000 units by the end of the year. In our view, the outbreak of stir-fry robots is no longer a trend, but a definitive event.
Huang Kai, Shanghai Fortune Commercial Service: I agree with 63° Technology's view that the outbreak of smart devices has become a definitive trend. Because restaurant companies want to realize chain stores, product standardization like KFC and McDonald's is the way to go, and the most difficult to achieve standardization of Chinese food is the kitchen, and smart equipment is obviously a good solution.
As long as we observe a little, we can see that there are now many catering stores that not only use stir-fry robots for stir-frying, but also have intelligent rice machines; Heytea even peels fruits by machine; Nai Xue's tea has directly developed a tea-making machine; and even small catering enterprises do not use all kinds of intelligent catering equipment. Obviously, smart devices have gradually become another infrastructure in the chain of restaurant enterprises and 10,000 stores, following the supply chain.
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