"Salt sauce is spicy and spicy, accompanied by coriander. Do not taste this taste has been months, the entrance is crisp and slippery as if choking. For hot pot, the Republic of China writer Gu Sui described it this way.
By now, hot pot has changed from a "rare product" to a "healing product". If there's anything that can withstand the cold of a winter, hot pot must be on the list. Hot pot has always been the favorite of consumers, especially in recent years, this preference has become more "blatant".
According to the "2021 National Day Golden Week Consumption Trend Report" released by Meituan, during this year's National Day, the order volume of hot pot categories in first-tier cities increased compared with before the festival, with Guangzhou hot pot orders increasing by 78%, Shenzhen hot pot orders increasing by 65%, Shanghai hot pot orders increasing by 34%, and Beijing hot pot orders increasing by 26%.
The growth of consumption has also made more and more hot pot brands become rookies and are concerned by major investment institutions.
VCPE support hot pot "upstart"
The appeal of hot pot to capital is as tempting as it is to diners.
Since 2020, hot pot restaurants, hot pot ingredient supermarkets, self-heating hot pot and hot pot base have become popular tracks. According to the data of enterprise investigation, the number of hot pot enterprises registered from January to mid-September 2021 reached 50,762.
According to the data of the "China Catering Category and Brand Development Report 2021", the market size of the national hot pot in 2020 will be nearly 600 billion yuan, and there will be nearly 600,000 stores. Data from the China Commercial Industry Research Institute also show that it is expected that in 2021, the size of the hot pot market will reach 521.8 billion yuan. Capital has entered the hot pot market, and it is also the 100 billion-level market behind the hot pot.
According to the incomplete collation of public data, in the past six months, nearly 3 billion yuan has poured into the hot pot industry, and the upstream and downstream enterprises in the hot pot industry have successively raised funds, behind which there is no shortage of FIRST-line investment institutions focusing on consumption such as IDG Capital, ByteDance, Gaorong Capital, and Black Ant Capital.
In February this year, Lazy Bear Hotpot announced a series A financing, with investors being ByteDance, Xingtuo Capital and Yusheng Capital.
At the end of June, it was reported that after obtaining nearly 100 million yuan of financing from Tomato Capital last year, Banu Hotpot is about to complete a new round of financing of more than 500 million yuan
In August, Chongqing hot pot head brand "Zhou Shi brother" officially announced a new round of financing, has previously completed a round of financing of 100 million yuan A, exclusively invested by Black Ant Capital.
Entrepreneurs who have been crawling in the track of hot pot shops, after continuous attempts, have stepped out of a number of "Kangzhuang Avenues", which not only won the recognition of consumers, but also let capital see the possibilities of this track, and the stories told by entrepreneurs also made most investors stop.
Taking the hot project Banu hot pot in the VC circle as an example, in the new round of financing that has not yet been determined, the value of banu hot pot has reached the order of about 15 billion yuan.
Hot pot upstarts are frequent, and more and more "Banu hot pot" makes capital dazzling, but can this "good prospect" that looks crazy really bring surprises to investment institutions?
Internet red hot pot is red everywhere but difficult?
If the brands represented by Sichuan hot pot in the past were going hand in hand and doing nothing, then the current hot pot is because of the wide variety and has to "fight" head-on. Everyone behind the hot red soup wants to come in and share the cup of soup, and the upstarts are constantly churning out. The once-popular "spicy space", "small fat sheep", "Dezhuang" and other chain hot pots have no longer had the original "pomp", and the heat has dropped again and again. Although the new brand and internet celebrity restaurant have attracted a lot of heat in a short period of time, it is not an easy task to go more steadily.
For example, for the head player represented by the hot pot, on February 16 this year, Haidilao's stock price reached an all-time high of HK$85.80 per share, with a market value of more than HK$450 billion. As of October 15, 2021, Haidilao's current opening price is HK$29.5 per share, and the current total market value is HK$161 billion, an evaporation of nearly HK$300 billion from the market value at the beginning of the year.
In addition to Haidilao, Sipping has decided to close about 200 loss-making stores this year and not to expand new stores this year. In addition to the head players, some new hot pot brands also seem to encounter some problems in the process of development, and the new consumer planet summarizes three points for everyone:
First, pay attention to marketing, queuing up to punch cards is standard
Want to enter the net red hot pot shop, an indispensable obstacle is "queuing", especially on the weekend, all the slightly famous hot pot shops are sitting in front of a lot of people waiting for the position, take the Haidilao hot pot, when the fame is at its peak, it is difficult to eat without waiting for four or five hours.
Then there are star hot pot restaurants like "Xianhezhuang" and "Shangshangqian", which come with their own hot spots, and a few days before the new store opens, there will be a long queue of several hours... When the star Chen He first opened in Sichuan's "Xianhezhuang", the business was extremely hot, and even some netizens complained that they waited for 8 hours to eat until 4 p.m. to 12 p.m.
But this kind of popularity is not evergreen, in the era of fast consumption, there are not many people who can queue for a hot pot for a few hours, but not many. The long line of internet red hot pot shops will eventually "become shorter", when the freshness of consumers has passed, relying on celebrities and upstarts in internet celebrity marketing, the turnover rate is reduced again and again, and naturally it cannot be long-term.
Second, direct operation and franchise, neither of which is a perfect solution
As we all know, direct operation and franchise are two common expansion models used by new consumer brands in recent years. It is true that these two models have brought new opportunities for brands, but from another point of view, whether it is direct operation or franchise, it has brought greater operating pressure to upstart brands, especially in the later stages.
On August 24, Haidilao hot pot released a financial interim report, according to the financial report, the total number of Haidilao restaurants has increased from 1298 at the end of 2020 to 1597 in the first half of this year, but the average turnover rate has declined seriously, which is the strongest operating indicator of Haidilao. As of the end of June this year, the average overturning rate of Haidilao was 3 times/day, compared with 4.8 times/day in 2019.
On the one hand, it is crazy to open stores, but on the other hand, it is a decline in profits: in the first half of 2021, the profit attributable to Haidilao owners was 94.529 million yuan, compared with the same period last year, but the profit margin was less than 1%. In the same period of 2019, the profit attributable to haidilao's company owners was 910 million yuan, a huge gap.
Behind the expansion of the store, it not only brought about an increase in related expenditures and a decline in net profit, but also caused the overturning rate that Haidilao was once proud of to drop again and again.
Source: Investment Times
Direct operation brings a dilemma, and joining this "pull teammate" model may affect the expansion speed due to high franchise fees.
Zheng Kaikai's "Huofengxiang Fresh Hot Pot" is one of the representatives. According to the understanding of the new consumer planet, in order to open a Huofengxiang franchise store, the space is about 300 square meters, and then pay a franchise fee of 350,000 yuan, a security deposit of 50,000 yuan, and then sign a contract with the headquarters. Obviously, such a high franchise fee has also become a big mountain that hinders the expansion of the brand to a large extent.
And most of the celebrity hot pot shops are popular in the name of "stars", whether it is fans holding the mentality of supporting their own idols, or ordinary customers come to the hot pot shop with the good feeling of trusting stars, they are all "fresh" to this strand. After the freshness, it is difficult to maintain the high heat in the follow-up.
Third, in food safety, it has been rolled over one after another
Food safety has always been a standard that cannot be avoided in the catering industry, especially with the improvement of today's consumer food safety awareness, the safety requirements for emerging food brands will be higher.
But it is in this context, there are still many Internet red hot pot shops active in the first line of "being warned", behind the intensive opening of stores, the hot pot format has become the hardest hit area with frequent food safety incidents:
In August this year, the "Huofengxiang" hot pot, run by star Zheng Kai, was interviewed by the Zhejiang Provincial and Municipal Municipal Supervision Bureaus due to problems such as expired and spoiled ingredients and irregular operation of the back kitchen.
At the beginning of September, according to the Jiangsu public news channel "News Space Station", the Nanjing Municipal Market Supervision Bureau completed 2216 batches of food safety supervision and sampling tasks, of which 12 batches of unqualified samples, of which today's cooking beef hot pot, Dayu hot pot and other internet red hot pot shops were named because the sampling of catering utensils was not up to standard.
According to the data of enterprise investigation, the number of hot pot enterprises registered from January to mid-September 2021 reached 50,762. Correspondingly, in the first half of this year, problems such as expired ingredients in the hot pot category and irregular operation of the back kitchen were frequent, involving a number of brands such as Huofengxiang, Xianhezhuang, and Spicy Dou spicy, and the number of stores involved reached more than 20.
Food safety, which cannot be escaped, is the last bottom card to judge the quality of a hot pot brand. A hot pot brand is simple to fire with the help of internet celebrity marketing, but to really stand firm, it is still necessary to do a solid job in its own quality.
Fading the coat of internet celebrities, how should the hot pot upstarts develop?
The churning hot pot Red Sea has countless opportunities, but this wide track is also full of many variables.
The growing number of hot pot restaurants has gradually made this track "rolled up". Sichuan hot pot, squid hot pot, yellow throat hot pot to stir up trouble, the category ceiling is getting higher and higher; hot pot shops moved to parks, museums, "landscape-making" hot pot crowds rise together... At present, with the homogenization of hot pot, more and more hot pot brands need to pay more attention to innovation.
A successful hot pot brand, the outside world is not looking at the initial popularity, but or long-term steady development and better word-of-mouth effect in the market. How to do a good job is also a problem that many hot pot brands need to think about.
Capital is a double-edged sword, as Wang Hongtao, executive deputy secretary general of the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, said: For the catering industry, it is afraid that the track will be overheated, resulting in high valuations. And in this tumbling red soup, what really remains are those stable brands that can withstand the torture of time. And the hot pot upstarts who are now popular, what they really have to do is to rely on the accumulation of their own soft and hard strength, in order to shine in many competitors.
Source of this article: New Consumer Planet