Crayfish is a business with a low threshold, but a low survival rate. Since 2008, Chai Biao has taken root in the crayfish track, and has been doing it for more than ten years, making the fat shrimp village a signboard of Wuhan crayfish.
In late March, in Wuhan's Fat Shrimp Village Yellow Crane Tower co-branded store, Chai Biao was dressed in a gray suit, talking and laughing freely in front of the camera. If it weren't for his iconic bald head, it would have been hard for others to guess that he still spends his days in the back kitchen arranging work.
According to the old employees of Fatty Shrimp Village, shaving his head was a habit left by Chai Biao when he was a chef, so that he did not have to worry about his hair falling into the food and affecting the food safety of the restaurant.
Chai Biao is the founder of the Feifei Shrimp Zhuang brand, and in recent years, his popularity in the catering industry has become more and more high, thanks to the increasing number of stores and brand awareness of Feifei Shrimp Village in recent years. As a brand focusing on direct sales, the total number of stores has approached 50, with an average of 5-10 new stores added annually in the past three years.
The Yellow Crane Tower co-branded store where the red coffee said on the day of the catalog system had set a record of queuing more than 2,000 tables in a single day, and now there is still a long queue at the door of the store every time the meal arrives.
On the one hand, as a chef, he is almost obsessed with the high standards of ingredients, and cannot tolerate products that are not delicious or fresh. On the other hand, he was an entrepreneur who standardized ingredients and ingredients early on, and now delegates some of his authority to younger management.
Chai Biao, like many ordinary people from the grassroots, does not have a high degree of education, nor has he systematically studied management courses, how did he realize the brand of Feifei Shrimp Village? At each key node of brand development, how did he make decisions? Chai Biao responded one by one in the "Red Coffee Talk" column.
In the first year of the store, I only slept 4 hours in the morning
but only "earned" 20,000 yuan
Around 2005, after returning to Wuhan from Zhejiang, Chai Biao worked as a chef in a Chinese restaurant. After a period of observation, he found that the main audience groups of the two dishes are young people, but the roasted snails sell relatively better, selling more than 100 catties a day, while the sales of braised prawns with crayfish as raw materials are relatively poor, and they can only sell about 20 catties a day.
Chai Biao believes that the reason for the difference in sales of the two dishes is not that crayfish is not as popular as snails, but because the taste of crayfish has not been improved, and there is a lot of room for improvement. So, he combined the flavor of roasted snails to improve this stewed prawn in oil repeatedly. Slowly, the sales of braised prawns rose from 20 catties a day to more than 200 catties a day, surpassing the roasted snails.
This also made Chai Biao begin to realize the potential of crayfish, "A store selling more than 200 catties of crayfish a day should not reach the upper limit." ”
Two years later, when the restaurant was about to be demolished, Chai Biao decided to go out on his own and open his own crayfish restaurant. Based on his previous experience in successfully improving the flavor of crayfish in restaurants, Chai Biao believes that he can sell more crayfish.
In April 2008, Chai Biao and Zhang Yanli found a store on the street side of Shipailing, Hongshan District, Wuhan, with a small area and a total of more than 40 seats. "The reason why it's called 'Fat Shrimp Village' is because I want the shrimp I sell to be fatty. Chai Biao said.
△ The first store of Feifei Shrimp Village
Soon after starting the business, Chai Biao took on almost all the things in the store, from riding a tricycle to the vegetable market to buy shrimp, to cutting shrimp, washing shrimp, and roasting shrimp...... In order to open the store, Chai Biao often slept only 4 hours a day at that time.
Despite all the efforts, business in the early stages of Fatty Shrimp was very bleak. According to Chai Biao's recollection, counting his own labor costs, he may have earned more than 20,000 yuan in the first year, but in fact, opening a store almost did not generate any profits, which was less than the money earned by going out to work.
"At that time, there were no customers in the new store, and we required fresh ingredients, and all the ingredients had to be purchased and consumed on the same day, so the loss rate of ingredients was relatively high, and we made the ingredients that could not be sold into staff meals and ate them. The cost of food procurement is also relatively high, we only need prawns, good shrimp, the procurement cost of high-quality shrimp per catty is 3-5 yuan more expensive than the average of peers, this high standard procurement has continued to this day since then, and now this standard has been improved to an average of 7-8 yuan more expensive than peers. Chai Biao said.
And this insistence has also made the business of Fat Shrimp Village gradually improve. In the second year of the business, with the word of mouth of some regular customers to expand the popularity, the business of the store is getting better and better, and a long queue has gradually formed at the door of the store, "Since about 2010, there are one or two hundred tables in line at each restaurant. ”
Seeing that one store could no longer accommodate so many customers, Chai Biao came up with the idea of opening a branch. From 2010 to 2013, Feifei Shrimp Village successively opened 2 branches in Wuhan Nanhu Avenue and Optics Valley, bringing the total number of stores to 3. During this period, the crayfish market in Wuhan also began to heat up gradually.
Blindly go to Zhengzhou to open a store,
It is the biggest heel since the establishment of the company
Around 2014, crayfish fever gradually swept the country.
Wuhan Wansong Garden, Beijing Dongzhi Gate, Nanjing Hanzhong Gate, Hefei Ningguo Road, Changsha South Gate...... There are a number of food courts across the country that are famous for crayfish suppers, and almost every crayfish shop is full.
At that time, the business of the store of Fatty Shrimp Village was also very hot, and there was a long queue at the door of every meal. "There are scalpers selling our meal tickets at the door, charging 200 yuan a piece, and queuing up until about 12 o'clock in the evening. Chai Biao said.
But in Chai Biao's view, the fat shrimp village, which was booming at that time, fell into a certain business bottleneck. Opening 3 stores seems to be close to the limit of management, and opening more stores will face the problem of inconsistent product taste.
At that time, there were two main factors that led to the inconsistency of the taste of the product, one was the inconsistency of the crayfish sauce, and the other was that the flow of kitchen staff would also lead to changes in taste. "During the period from 2010 to 2013, because of the good business of the Feifei store, many kitchen staff chose to change jobs and start their own businesses, etc., and the mobility was relatively large, and if the store continued to rely on the chef, it may face many obstacles. Chai Biao said.
Zhang Yanli, who has worked in Taiwan-funded enterprises, suggested to Chai Biao that he should start to standardize products, so that he can go long-term. But at first, Chai Biao was more resistant to this, "As a chef, I think cooking should be a handicraft, so many ingredients, cooking links, how can it be standardized?
It wasn't until Chai Biao happened to participate in a class organized by Yum Restaurant Group, in which the teacher explained in detail the standardized chain system of McDonald's and KFC and gave an example: "A car has more than 10,000 parts, and the car can achieve streamlined production, why can't dozens of seasonings in Chinese food?"
This sentence made Chai Biaomao pause.
Soon after, Chai Biao began to explore the standardization of products from the development of standardized sauces, and first took the core product of braised prawns, the core product of the fat shrimp village, to do experiments and establish standards little by little. For example, buy a small grinder, put in the various seasonings needed for this dish to crush, and then disassemble the recipe grams and cooking steps, etc., and then gradually transition to find a foundry for production. "It took a few years, and by 2018, Feifei Shrimp Village had completed the standardization of all its main products. ”
In 2014, Feifei Shrimp Village formally established the operation department, personnel department, finance department, and marketing department, and began to build a corporatized management structure.
The effect of this reform was immediate, and the number of stores accelerated. A year later, Feifei Shrimp Village successively expanded stores in many areas of Wuhan, and the total number of stores increased to 8, and began to try to expand outside the province to open stores in Zhengzhou.
But the first attempt to go outside the province made Chai Biao a big heel, and the store was only open for a year, but it lost more than 3 million. As for the reason for this failure, Chai Biao believes that the main reason is that he does not know enough about the local customs and industry conditions, as well as his personal blind confidence, "I was too young at that time, and I always felt that if I succeeded in Wuhan, I could go to other cities." ”
At the same time, the expansion of stores outside the province has also exposed the core shortcomings faced by the crayfish chain - the supply chain. "Crayfish must use live shrimp that arrives at the store on the same day, the biggest advantage of opening a store in Wuhan is that all live shrimp, from the field to the table only takes 4-5 hours, to open a store outside the province is bound to face the problem of live shrimp distribution. ”
The instability of the supply chain is not only reflected in the lack of expansion of stores outside the province, but also in the usual supply of ingredients.
"At that time, crayfish was often a price in the morning and a price in the afternoon, and the price per catty of crayfish could rise from 30 yuan to 80 yuan in one day. The price of the customer-facing dishes in the store is the same, but if the purchase price is high, it will pull down the profit of the product. Chai Biao said.
If customers form the concept of "eat good shrimp, come to fat".
Fat Shrimp Village is half the battle
In Chai Biao's impression, 2015-2018 is the most popular period in the crayfish industry, but this period is also a difficult period for Fatty Shrimp Village.
The crayfish market has gradually formed an irrational overheating trend, and countless people have poured into the track to pan for gold, which has not only pushed up the popularity of the category, but also created various chaos, such as endless food safety problems.
The market competition is also sliding from benign to vicious, and stores of various categories have launched "broken bones" crayfish drainage products, 99 yuan and ten catties, 19 yuan and 9 yuan a piece...... To a certain extent, it has affected the business of many crayfish shops.
△ Offline crayfish restaurant promotion price war, photo by Red Meal Network
Chai Biao said that at that time, many crayfish merchants could not bear it, and in order to ensure the profits of the store, they reduced the quality of crayfish, such as replacing them with small shrimp, but this fell into a vicious circle - consumers were dissatisfied with the product and were even more reluctant to come.
At that time, Feifei Shrimp Village did not choose to lower the standard or raise the price. "If consumers are allowed to form the concept of 'eat good shrimp, come to fat', we will be half the battle. Chai Biao said.
However, the cost of this is that from 2015 to 2018, the profit margin of Fatty Shrimp has been lower than that of its peers at that time. During this period, Chai Biao and the team once discussed whether it was necessary to change the format and diversify the business risk, but in the end they decided to settle down, not to touch the track that they were not familiar with, and to focus on doing a good job of crayfish first, because he believed that the "bubble" would always burst, and the market would eventually return to rational development.
But we can't just passively wait for the market to change, Chai Biao made another decision to break through from the short supply chain and seek stable suppliers.
At that time, the strategy of Feifei Shrimp Village was to make profits to upstream suppliers and collect shrimp at a higher purchase price, so as to ensure that the store could get the largest and best quality shrimp on the market as soon as possible, and at the same time gradually select high-quality cooperative suppliers.
In 2018, Feifei Shrimp Village signed a strategic agreement with Hubei Crayfish Industry Holding Group, which became the main raw material supplier of Feifei Shrimp Village.
Then, Chai Biao was more confident in the quality of the product, and he set a rule: the crayfish used in the Fat Shrimp Village must be higher than the specifications used in the general crayfish shops in the market during the same period, and more than 2 specifications.
At the same time, unqualified products should be resolutely eliminated. Once, during the inspection of the store, Chai Biao found that the ingredients sent by the supplier were unqualified, so he asked the supplier to remove all the same batch of ingredients from all stores, resulting in the inability of all stores to operate normally that day.
"This is a big accident, and the inspiration to me is to adopt a reward mechanism for suppliers, and Feifei Shrimp Village will select the top three high-quality suppliers every year and give a cash reward of 3-50,000 yuan. Chai Biao said that since then, suppliers have been very active in supplying Feifei Shrimp Village.
After sorting out the supply chain, the growth of the number of stores in Feifei Shrimp Village accelerated again, with a total of 6 stores opened in 2019, with a total of 22 stores, and from 2020 onwards, it has successively gone out of Wuhan and opened stores in Shenzhen and Xi'an.
During the accelerated development of the Fat Shrimp Village, the bubble in the crayfish market burst as Chai Biao predicted.
Around 2019, a large number of offline stores in the crayfish market were reshuffled. According to Qichacha data, from 2019 to 2021, the number of registrations of crayfish-related enterprises showed a downward trend, with 2,202 registrations in 2021, only one-third of the new registrations in 2018. At the same time, the number of cancellations of crayfish-related enterprises remains high, and in 2021, the number of cancellations reached 1,193, accounting for half of the new registrations.
In Chai Biao's view, with the gradual withdrawal of stores that want to make quick money, the cooling of the crayfish market is actually a good thing for stores that are deeply involved in the industry, and the cooling of the market does not affect his continued optimism about the crayfish industry. "In recent years, the scale of the crayfish market has maintained continuous growth, indicating that the development in recent years is generally relatively benign. ”
The chaos in the past few years has also had a subtle impact on the psychology of consumers, consumers gradually from choosing cheap crayfish to more inclined to choose crayfish specialty stores, Chai Biao judged that this will be a new opportunity for crayfish brands to take the quality route.
"Around 2019, my team and I judged that the opportunity that belonged to us had come, and we set a plan to open at least 5 stores every year, but due to the impact of the epidemic, the speed of store expansion was not obvious for the time being, and it was not until after the epidemic that we really let go of our hands and feet. Chai Biao said.
Make the crayfish to the extreme, and always follow the young people
Now in the 16th year of entrepreneurship, Chai Biao's work has become more and more busy.
In 2023, Feifei Shrimp Village will open 8 stores in one go, with a total of nearly 50 stores, "From 2020 to 2022, we took some good stores at low prices, and they will be opened in the past two years." Last year, the first store was opened in Hefei, and Dianping showed that as of press time, the store ranked first in Hefei's Dianping's "Food List" and "Crayfish Hot List".
At the same time, since last year, Feifei Shrimp Village has also promoted brand upgrading by continuing to build boutique flagship stores.
Taking advantage of the boom of tourism consumption in the past two years, Feifei Shrimp Village has built the flagship store of the Yellow Crane Tower co-branded store at the beginning of 2023, with an average daily turnover rate of 12-13 units in the peak tourist season, receiving more than 2,000 tourists from all over the country every day, becoming a well-known landmark restaurant in Wuhan.
△ The first Yellow Crane Tower co-branded store in Feifei Shrimp Village
This year, Feifei Shrimp Village will continue to build a new benchmark store type. Chai Biao revealed that in April, Feifei Shrimp Village will build a new flagship store on Jianghan Road, with a store area of more than 3,000 square meters, and take a retro and fashionable decoration style. In May, the second Yellow Crane Tower co-branded flagship store will also be officially opened. Subsequently, Feifei Shrimp Village will also build two cruise shops by the Yangtze River, allowing customers to eat lobster while enjoying the river scenery.
It is expected that by the end of this year, the total number of stores will exceed 50.
As more and more stores opened, Chai Biao felt that his time was becoming less and less. He gets up at 7 a.m. every morning, holds meetings with the company's management and operations in the morning and afternoon, and patrols various stores in the evening, often going home until midnight.
"Compared with before, we have a heavier responsibility on our shoulders, there are so many employees to feed internally, and externally, Feifei Shrimp Village has obtained the joint authorization of the Yellow Crane Tower, and has the opportunity to develop the century-old building on Jianghan Road, and we are more obliged to do a good job in Wuhan's tourism 'business card'. ”
However, Chai Biao has also started some new plans, such as in addition to product control, the company's other business sectors have been handed over to young people to do, cultivate young management talents, and accelerate the introduction of talents from outside.
From the beginning of the business to the present, Chai Biao is clearly aware that crayfish is a business for young people, and the core must be built around the needs and preferences of young consumer groups, and whether it can do a good job is also related to the future of Feifei Shrimp Village, "Feifei Shrimp Village should insist on doing two things: one is to make crayfish to the extreme, and the other is to always follow young people and do the brand that young people like." ”
The crayfish track still lacks a national brand, and Chai Biao's future planning for Feifei Shrimp Village is being launched.
"Limited by objective conditions such as supply chain and cold chain transportation, it is very difficult for crayfish to become a national chain, but if you choose a few key cities to build stores in the country, there are still opportunities to do it, such as Changsha, Xi'an, Shenzhen, Hefei, Xuyi, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shanghai...... In the future, it is possible to open stores in these cities. Chai Biao said.
At the same time, as a catering brand in Wuhan, Chai Biao also hopes to let crayfish represent Chu cuisine more often. In January this year, Fatty Shrimp Village was invited by the restaurant association to participate in an exchange dinner held in Frankfurt, Germany, and served the Chu dish of braised prawns to the local "Chinese New Year's Eve Dinner", which was welcomed by the locals.
"It is already difficult for crayfish to go to the whole country, and it is even more difficult to go overseas, so it is necessary for enterprises and associations to work together to carry forward the cultural business card of Wuhan. Chai Biao said.