(This article is excerpted from the "Research Report on the Retail Status of Prepackaged Food in Brand Catering Enterprises" jointly released by CCFA (China Chain Store and Franchise Association) and NCBD (Food Treasure Book), and the full text of the report is more than 30,000 words.) ）
The main shortcomings of catering enterprises in carrying out retail business are reflected in several aspects such as cognition, team, technology and category.
△ The disadvantages of catering enterprises to carry out retailing
For the vast majority of catering enterprises, the lack of professional retail talents and teams, existing talents, teams do not have retail experience, if you rely on the existing team - personnel within the restaurant company to carry out retail exploration, the difficulty will be very large.
Traditional catering enterprises, its organizational structure is mostly a pyramid structure, in this structure, can meet the normal management and operation of enterprises for traditional catering. However, this kind of architectural flexibility is insufficient, and there will be relatively large restrictions on some business development that requires rapid response and multi-departmental coordination. In addition, the traditional mindset of caterers may also limit their performance in the retail business.
In a sense, the retailing of catering enterprises also belongs to the category of "new retail", which emphasizes the integration of online and offline. If you want to make achievements in the field of new retail, you need a more flexible, more efficient, and more collaborative structure to lay out new retail.
Unlike catering, a key link in the retail business is the channel, including offline channels and online traffic, so the retail team must match the talents of these two aspects to carry out online and offline business. In addition, within the team, it is also necessary to provide professional chefs and R & D technicians to ensure the quality of retail products.
△ The figure is from the network
In the actual survey, it was found that all the catering enterprises that have done a very good job in retail are operated by professional retail teams without exception, and these teams have almost no catering employees, almost all of which are "0 catering genes, pure retail genes". Only in this way can the whole team avoid falling into the thinking of catering operations, and not be bound by the thinking of catering operations, and there may be a relatively large breakthrough.
Huang Chao, co-founder of Sichuan Xiaolongkan Holding Group & General Manager of Chengdu Xiaolongkan Food Co., Ltd., believes that catering retail requires a professional team to be successful. Wang Xiaolong, managing director of Hony Capital & Baifu Holdings, also said that catering companies "must have a professional talent team" to do retail.
"Professional people do professional things, professional teams can do things", has become a consensus. These teams have a high degree of autonomy, and many operate as independent companies.
For example, Xiaolongkan, whose retail business sector has now set up a professional and efficient team, adopts the business sector responsibility system, emphasizes communication and collaboration, has the characteristics of high execution, strong efficiency, keen response, etc., in line with the current requirements for the new retail team of the trader.
Donglaishun started the retail business in 2011 and started very early. In the early days, it was mainly internal personnel of catering enterprises, and later a professional team was formed to carry out market operations. "There are almost no catering industry personnel in the team, all of them are retail personnel", which is an important reason why Donglaishun can achieve outstanding performance in retail. Donglaishun has greater ambitions in retail, hoping to form a business layout of catering + retail two-wheel drive.
In addition, there is a team that relies on the internal catering enterprise, but adopts a more flexible concept of "working group", which is similar to the concept of "middle office" of Internet companies, rather than a department in the traditional sense. Through the establishment of a new retail working group that coordinates operations, a "big middle platform" such as a new retail coordination committee is established at the company level to unify management and coordinate the implementation of new retail by various departments of the company.
It should be added that in the early stage of the retailing of catering enterprises, it is possible to make full use of external forces to outsource some non-essential businesses and start quickly through outsourcing to avoid too bloated team structure and waste.
Finally, share a piece of data. In the report survey, we found that from the perspective of the size of the retail team, the smallest is only 4 people, and most of these companies with relatively small teams rely on the company's internal brand department or a separate project team to operate; the largest number of team members is more than 60 people, operating as an independent company. From the performance point of view, enterprises that were established earlier and already have a certain team size have more eye-catching retail performance and can achieve hundreds of millions of sales scale.