Text | Professional catering network Liu Yan
Lanzhou ramen, together with yellow braised chicken and Shaxian snacks, is known as the "three giants" of national snacks, but it has been difficult to make a brand.
But recently, there has been a "new dark horse" in the Lanzhou ramen market, with the store turnover rate exceeding 16 times a day, and the queue is more than two hours!
It is the Old Bowl of Jincheng, co-founded by Zhao Quan, Wei Yongxiang and Zhang Qian.
In the end, what kind of innovations has Jincheng Old Bowl made, and then broke away from the fiercely competitive traditional Lanzhou ramen market? Recently, the professional catering network interviewed Wei Yongxiang and Zhang Qian, co-founders of Jincheng Old Bowl.
Suddenly increased thousands of beef noodle shops,
20-year-old brand is in danger of being eliminated!
In 2001, Zhao Quan opened a shop called Jincheng Lao Bowl at the Xiaoxihu Cultural Palace in Lanzhou and began to sell Lanzhou ramen (commonly known as beef noodles, hereinafter referred to as beef noodles).
Walking in any direction on the streets of Lanzhou, you can find a beef noodle shop in less than 10 minutes, and in the highly competitive market, Jincheng Old Bowl has been doing it for 16 years.
At first, the business has been very good, but in 2017, Lanzhou's beef noodle restaurants have grown exponentially, new brands have continued to emerge, and the store has gradually encountered a bottleneck in development. Even the employees' salaries could not be paid, and they were on the verge of bankruptcy.
Realizing that the store would not be able to open again without making changes, Zhao Quan began to think about upgrading the Old Bowl of Jincheng, and it was at this time that Wei Yongxiang and Zhang Qian joined the Old Bowl of Jincheng.
Four major differentiated innovations, a single store daily turnover of more than 30,000,
Get out of beef noodle base camp!
Today's Jincheng old bowl has been in the fierce competition in Lanzhou beef noodles "Jianghu" to kill a road, the turnover rate reached 16 times, the current open in Lanzhou 4 direct stores, but also to the field, the store opened to Guangzhou, Changzhi, Tianshui, Qingyang and other places.
How exactly does it do?
Differentiation Innovation 1:
Refine new blockbusters
In 2016, explosive thinking began to prevail in the catering industry, and the fast food industry also blew this wind. But fast food is different from other catering formats, it is a high-frequency and fixed consumer group of business, if customers go to a restaurant every day to eat the same meal, it is easy to get tired, so it needs a rich product.
Traditional beef noodle shops generally only promote beef noodles as a product, and it is difficult to make any innovation. So Wei Yongxiang began to look for new explosive products, but he found that beef noodles were difficult to subdivide.
Finally, he found that in Lanzhou, in addition to beef noodles, there is also a staple food product fried noodles that are available in restaurants large and small, and the order rate is particularly high. The product has never had a category representation, and he found it a great opportunity.
However, this has a new problem, and it is too risky to push fried noodles alone. In order to avoid this risk, Wei Yongxiang listed fried noodles and beef noodles as the explosives of Jincheng's old bowl.
He changed the name of Jincheng Old Bowl to "Jincheng Old Bowl Beef Noodles , Special Fried Noodles", and from the front of the door to the menu in the store, fried noodles were the main products alongside beef noodles.
This directly changed the business model of the original beef noodle shops in Lanzhou, because Lanzhou people only eat beef noodles in the morning and noon, so most of the traditional beef noodle shops close at two or three o'clock in the afternoon. But fried noodles are different, it is a product that locals eat three meals a day.
Jincheng Old Bowl's beef noodles are served from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., while fried noodles are served from 10 a.m. to the evening, and the two products are seamlessly connected, ensuring that the store has business all the time.
This repositioning has directly differentiated the Old Bowl of Jincheng among thousands of local beef noodle shops.
Differentiation and innovation two:
The first "cold dish 2 yuan optional"
The first store after the upgrading of Jincheng Old Bowl opened next to a beef noodle brand with a history of nearly 30 years.
"At that time, the old-fashioned company only sold beef noodles, no vegetables and eggs. We started from the differentiation of product management, added cold dishes, and pioneered the 'cold dishes 2 yuan self-selection'. 9 kinds of cold vegetables, 2 yuan casually clipped, the type is not limited, but can only be clipped once. ”
At that time, although the beef noodle shops in Lanzhou all sold cold vegetables, they were all put there, one by one, two dollars a piece, and the amount of one part was at most 2 or two.
Jincheng old bowl of "cold dishes 2 yuan self-selection" is at the same price, let customers choose themselves, cold dishes are more abundant, a time can clip how much also depends on the customer's skills, to give customers a sense of value.
"70% of our customers are locals, 30% are tourists, and most of them are young. The old shop next to it is just the opposite, mostly tourists, locals are in the minority and are all elderly."
And can "grab customers" from the hands of 30-year-old stores and gain a foothold in the "beef noodle base camp", Jincheng old bowl can rely on not only a trick "cold dish choice", but a comprehensive upgrade of the brand.
Differentiated Innovation 3:
Remove the traditional halal green, featuring a bluish-yellow hue
Lanzhou beef noodles as a bowl of noodles that the people just need, the dirty mess of street shops has represented the image of Lanzhou beef noodles for a long time.
At that time, the beef noodle shops on the street were either small shops that were completely undecorated, or they were old-fashioned brands with old-fashioned decorations. Up to now, it has completely failed to meet the needs of the main consumer groups of beef noodles, because their requirements for the environment are getting higher and higher.
To this end, Jincheng Old Bowl boldly removed the decoration style of the traditional beef noodle shop and changed the store to a blue and yellow tone, while the main color of the traditional beef noodle shop is green.
In addition, unlike the messy back kitchen of the traditional beef noodle shop, the old bowl shop in Jincheng is full of bright cooking stoves, and through the visual kitchen, customers can see every step of beef noodle making clearly and eat with confidence.
Differentiated Innovation 4:
Instead of "large material packs", "instruction manual" sub-packs are used
Jincheng old bowl is a chain, in order to achieve rapid replication of stores, it has made innovations in the material package.
Traditional beef noodle shops in the process of making beef noodles, from boiling soup, kneading noodles to feeding, are more dependent on experienced masters, masters are more dependent on feeling, in the material delivery often like to use a number, appropriate amount, a little such vague words to set standards, this kind of empiricist production method is difficult to spread and copy.
Many beef noodle shops that do chains realize this and start to use uniform ingredient packages, but most of them use comprehensive large ingredient packages, all the spices are fused together, only need to be put once, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in the taste of the soup base.
In order to ensure the taste of beef noodles and not to let the flavor between the spices, Jincheng Old Bowl specially made an instruction-style material package, each spice package is put separately, what is put first and then what is put, how many grams are put in each one, all have strict standards.
"The soup can't be made into a mixture, otherwise it will definitely taste good."
"What you put in the cooking first and then put it will affect the taste of a dish. Strictly follow the steps to put it, so that the products are more ingenious. ”
Not only beef noodles, but also other links in the Old Bowl Shop in Jincheng have their own standards. For example, the free morning tea given to customers in the store, because the speed of replacement is relatively fast, so how many grams of brown sugar, dates, rock sugar, and tea leaves are weighed in advance, and how much to add when supplementing has standards, so that employees can operate more easily.
Began to lay out the whole country, the first store in the field was located in Shanghai
At present, although Lanzhou beef noodles have blossomed all over the country, the cognition of outsiders on this category is not so clear. The whole market is mixed, many of which are small workshop-style operations, and a large part of the stores abuse the Lanzhou beef noodle signboard, which has ruined the reputation of this category.
In addition, many beef noodle brands that have done well in Lanzhou have died as soon as they leave Lanzhou, and there are very few Lanzhou brands in the beef noodle market.
After several years of precipitation, Jincheng Old Bowl began to lay out throughout the country, expanding outward with two models: direct sales stores and "city partners". At present, the first directly operated store in Shanghai is already in preparation.
Career Catering Network Summary:
At present, beef noodles have ushered in the category outlet and entered the outbreak period. Whether it is an old brand or a new player, if you want to make your business bigger against the wind, you must have a good model.
As a 20-year-old store, Jincheng Old Bowl has achieved iterative upgrading through differentiated innovation and regained its foothold in the fiercely competitive market. The key is that it dares to break the convention and directly hit the pain points of the industry.
This also makes us catering people understand that excellent enterprises must know how to take the initiative!