The homogenization of the hot pot industry is self-evident, and the era of white-hot competition has arrived. People are looking for ways to differentiate.
However, differentiation should not only be a "superficial effort", but a difference from the root cause.
Restaurant owner Neikan Sun Yu | wen
In half a year, there are more than 30,000 hot pot enterprises
The homogenization problem needs to be broken
According to enterprise investigation data, at the end of 2020, there were 419,000 hot pot-related enterprises in China; in the first half of 2021, there were more than 30,000 newly registered hotpot enterprises.
In fact, since 2010, the number of registrations of hot pot-related enterprises has increased year by year. The continuous influx of brand players has not only made the market lively, but also brought about serious homogenization. Therefore, the hot pot industry is facing many "dilemmas" that need to be solved urgently.
Product homogenization. The hot pot category has high standardization characteristics, and nearly one-third of the market is occupied by Sichuan-Chongqing hot pot, and the traditional pot bottom and shabu-shabu dishes and meat products are basically the same, such as yellow throat, hairy belly, blood Wang, duck intestine, beef and mutton, etc. are common dishes, and the choice is not much different. As a result, hot pot brands are very prone to homogenization in products.
Scene homogenization. In the past two years, the popular style of hot pot stores has the Republican style, or to create the nostalgic style of the city in the 1970s and 1980s, but these innovations and changes on the surface, the first may become an Internet red shop, a brand store, but this scene is also easy to be copied, so there have been many similar style stores. For example, it was recently revealed that Hu Haiquan's Haoxi pot was accused of plagiarizing the Chongqing hot pot factory.
The bottom of the pot is homogenized. In the public review review, almost every one will involve a comment on the bottom of the pot. After all, the bottom of the pot is an important factor in judging whether the hot pot is delicious, which greatly affects whether consumers choose to repeat the consumption of the store. When it comes to eating what pot bottom, everyone still thinks of the spicy butter bottom, tomato pot bottom, mushroom soup pot bottom, etc., most of the hot pot shops of the pot bottom is similar, in the customer's lack of clear cognition of the bottom of the pot, just by the taste to judge the bottom of the pot is good or bad, it is difficult to form a recognition and specificity of the hot pot brand.
Therefore, with the continuous influx of new players in the hot pot market, many hot pot brands are looking to start from various dimensions such as products, scenes, brands, services, marketing, etc., and strive to create differentiation through innovation. For example, taking advantage of the power of stars, star hot pot brands have appeared one after another, and they are rising with the trend; for example, some brands have once exploded from social platforms, and they have obtained hundreds of numbers in daily queues.
Of course, the brand's long-term retention of heat and deep admiration by consumers is not a day's work, the key is the customer's emphasis on dishes and the bottom of the pot, delicious is the key. So, cutting innovation from the bottom of the pot, or making it easier to differentiate.
Cayenne pepper fermentation with enzymatic butter group CP
Old hot pot makes a new flavor
Recently, Neisanjun came into contact with a "2.0 fermentation" new type of butter pot bottom, boiling pot bottom, surging aroma, fiery red pepper... Compared to the traditional butter spicy pot bottom, this new fermented butter pot bottom is very different. As soon as the bottom of the pot was launched, it received widespread attention in the industry, attracting consultation and understanding from hot pot merchants, and also ushered in a group of merchants competing for procurement and booking.
"Fermentation" here refers to the optimization of the core ingredients of the pot bottom: the pepper is fermented first, and then the fermented rice chili pepper is combined with the enzymatic butter to form a more innovative bottom.
It can be said that "it is indeed very fragrant, the meat is full of flavor and layered" and "spicy but not dry, more in line with the dietary needs of modern urban people"... All of the above are what guests have to say about the bottom of the pot. The reason why it is "fragrant enough" is because of the basis of "fermentation", such as the common winemaking in life, Pixian bean paste, soy sauce, kimchi, etc. are traditional fermented foods, and they are all delicious foods.
In the view of the director of R&D of Sen state butter, the emergence of fermented hot pot is accidental and inevitable, and it is the demand and call of the market. The birth of this new product is also in line with the new needs of contemporary customers under the upgrading of consumption.
1, "heavy spicy" is outdated, spicy but not dry at the right time
The core ingredients of chili peppers are capsaicin and capsaicin, one is the embodiment of spiciness, and the other is the embodiment of pigment. These two ingredients are essential for the presentation of the bottom of the hot pot. The pepper is fermented, which is equivalent to breaking its biological wall. After the cell wall of the pepper is broken by the biological enzymatic lysis technology, the capsaicin and capsicum red pigment dissolved in the cells can be more fully dissolved in the butter, which ultimately makes the color of the bottom of the pot look better and the utilization rate of the functional components of the pepper will be higher.
In this way, the amount of pepper used in the preparation of the base can be reduced, and the cost of ingredients can be saved to a certain extent. In other words, through fermentation technology, it is relatively possible to reduce costs. At the same time, it is spicy but not dry, and the taste is better. Spicy because more spicy ingredients are dissolved in it. Not dry because during the fermentation process capsaicin is micro-metabolized, structural changes occur, greatly reducing the spicy stimulation of pepper, while fermentation of other umami, taste ingredients can effectively neutralize the spicy feeling; with the delicate smooth attributes of enzymatic butter, after the customer eats, whether it is the mouth, intestine or the entire digestive system will not have a burning feeling.
2, hot pot should also "eat fresh and healthy"
Dried chili peppers mainly contain 50% carbohydrates, 15% protein and about 9% oil. In the past, the high-temperature stir-frying process caused the denaturation of pepper protein to lose its value, and the fermentation process at room temperature can decompose this part of the protein into polypeptides and amino acids, thereby stimulating the endogenous flavor of pepper. According to the inspection and analysis of third-party authoritative testing institutions, the amino acid nitrogen in fermented fin pepper can be as high as 300mg/100g.
In the same principle, the butter after enzymatic digestion makes full use of the proteins in the bovine fat tissue, connective tissue and beef protein tissue, and will also produce amino acids, polypeptides and other small molecule degradation products, and the two are strongly combined to achieve the effect of umami blooming. Compared with the later stage in order to improve freshness, ingredients such as seasoning powder and beef paste will be added during the production process, which can only enhance the surface umami taste and not fundamentally change.
3, the "meat aroma" at the bottom of the pot is very plus
Butter in the bottom of the pot the use of the highest proportion of the most extensive, sen state butter after more than two years of research and development, through enzymatic butter to achieve a new exploration, enzymatic butter can emit a burst of meat aroma and roasted aroma, this is because the butter bovine fat tissue in the beef protein into small molecules, after high temperature heating after a class of aroma. Therefore, the butter is enzymatically combined with the fermented base to produce a more fresh taste.
Just as a plate of pot meat is delicious, its main flavor is derived from the aroma of the meat itself after being heated, accompanied by the sichuan cuisine of the soul of the watercress sauce, the two are mixed together and heated, and finally the unique taste of the pot meat is generated. The aroma of enzymatic butter combined with the aroma of fermented rice chili peppers instantly collides with the unique flavor style of fermented hot pot.
Stable supply chain production
Sen state butter breaks the bottleneck of the industry
With the rapid development of the hot pot market and the upgrading of hot pot consumption, the hot pot industry has put forward higher requirements for butter. The controllability of food safety, quality, flavor and supply stability needs to be improved urgently, which also requires the power of suppliers.
1. Food safety and quality are stable and controllable
Quality and food safety are the entry thresholds for every family to make food and catering, and safety is the basic element of good butter. In the past, the butter processing market was relatively chaotic, the production was simple, the technical requirements were not high, the health was poor, the butter processing process was uncontrollable, the lack of standardization and quality assurance, and the phenomenon of rancidity, soup and blistering often occurred, and there were hidden dangers in food safety.
Compared with the small and micro butter processing plant, Sen State Butter has the first fully automatic enzymatic butter production line in the field of butter processing, high-quality production conditions, through the automated control system, to ensure the standardization of the entire production operation, to provide a guarantee for the stability of product quality.
By formulating food safety indicators, such as plasticizer indicators need to be strictly controlled, butter products are easily contaminated by plasticizers, and it is necessary to detect each batch of products online in real time, before leaving the factory and before entering the next process, it is necessary to detect and analyze whether the plasticizer content exceeds the standard.
And some smaller butter factories, enterprises do not have this condition, especially the funds are not sufficient, lack of professional technical personnel, can not support him to purchase valuable equipment for testing and analysis, so most of the time there is no way to ensure that some quality indicators of online testing online control.
2. The flavor is stable and controllable
From the perspective of flavor, the butter industry is still in a relatively chaotic market. First of all, different butter factories, butter production process, raw materials are different, butter product flavor quality is different, there is instability. Therefore, buying butter products from two different producers at will in the market has a great difference in flavor, which is the norm in the market at present.
In addition, the market has not yet recognized the real pure taste of butter, which butter taste is healthier, the taste is more pure, consumers, hot pot seasoning masters, etc. are almost difficult to distinguish, or there is no standard, just by feeling that a taste is more fragrant and more intense is good.
Therefore, Sen state butter is also actively promoting industry research and promoting the formulation of butter standards, as a joint drafting unit of the national standard of "edible butter" and the group standard of "hot pot oil", Sen State has shown an admirable industry responsibility.
3. Stable and controllable supply
The supply of butter products is stable, and the core pain points are reflected in the scarcity of upstream raw materials, and now the entire butter raw materials are in a relatively scarce resource. In addition, young consumer groups like to try new and peculiar and fresh things, which also promotes the rich taste of hot pot brands on the bottom of the pot. For chain hot pot brands, it is extremely important to find relatively stable suppliers, mainly to ensure the stability of back-end supply.
For example, in the hot pot peak season, all the stores of some large chain hot pot brands are processed by their unified central factory to process the hot pot base, basically consuming nearly 200 tons of butter per day, which is unable to meet the supply of small factories, which is easy to affect the stability of the supply chain, and if the operation is not good, there will be a break in the capital chain, and there will also be a supply fault.
Therefore, it is particularly important to ensure the controllability of the supply chain, especially for large-scale hot pot restaurant chains, in addition to the supply to keep up, but also need to be absolutely guaranteed product quality, because once there is a problem, it is easy to affect the brand.
To this end, Sen state butter continues to strengthen supply chain management, strictly control from raw materials, establish three major production bases in Northeast China, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, use raw materials from the four major pastures in Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai and Inner Mongolia, and ensure the controllable and sustainable supply chain by working closely with five major meat supply organizations such as Isai and Dachang.
brief summary
Butter is the soul of Sichuan-Chongqing hot pot. Good butter is a further sublimation of the bottom of the hot pot. The emergence of fermented hot pot is more novel and more innovative in the market, and it fundamentally solves the differentiation of the bottom of the hot pot.
It can also be said that its emergence is subverting the homogenization of the entire hot pot bottom, and "fermentation" is more like proposing a better way or way to achieve differentiation for the industry and the market. In the past, the difference between the bottom of the pot was nothing more than changing the proportion of the recipe, adding several spices, etc., and fermentation is a technology that can be used in the industry, and different fermentations will also innovate different flavors.
Multi-flavor, high-quality butter not only meets the personalized needs of hot pot brands, helps brands achieve product differentiation, but also brings new energy and new changes to the industry, promotes the vigorous development of the hot pot industry, and is bound to make Chinese hot pot and fragrant world!