There are more and more hot pots, and less and less cooking. This trend is not driven by customers' preferences and tastes. You think customers like hot pot more and more, so the space of traditional Chinese food is compressed. In fact, on the contrary, because there are more and more hot pot restaurants, customers have less and less space to choose.

The food industry in China has gone from bad to worse for only one reason: capital is eating away at the whales in the catering industry, making it increasingly difficult for individual shops to survive. Capital pursues standardization and rapid replication. Apart from hot pot, few Chinese foods meet the standards of the capital.

There is another signal: the chef team lacks successors and faces the day of death.

Seven or eight years ago, when I was in the high-end catering industry, I already found these signs.

One of the reasons: capital pursues standardization and rapid replication.

Several requirements of capital for catering project investment are central kitchen, centralized distribution, semi-finished products and quantification. Specifically:

Central kitchen, centralized distribution: centralized processing, using scale to reduce costs and reduce the taste differences of each branch;

Semi-finished products: fast delivery;

Quantifiable: the dishes are easy to copy and migrate, and the taste and quality control are easy to quantify.

As soon as these requirements are listed, you will find that only hot pot meets the requirements.

The technical threshold of hot pot focuses on the bottom of pot and sauce, which can be completed through one-time product development or formula buyout. Then mass production is carried out through the central kitchen or central processing plant, and centralized distribution is made to all stores.

Of course, after Haidilao entered the market, the competition in the hot pot industry has extended from the bottom of the pot to the supply chain of ingredients.

The hot pot giant will extend its reach to the upstream of the industrial chain and establish a supply chain from the field to the table. Defeat individual hot pot restaurants with centralized procurement, low cost and cold chain distribution, and make the supply chain a new moat for hot pot enterprises.

All this ultimately points to the same goal: rapid replication.

Capital is not interested in being a small and beautiful food store, which is the ideal of literary petty bourgeoisie. Capital just wants to know how many branches you can open in three years, how much turnover you can achieve, whether you can gain a strong market share, whether you can go public in a few years, and whether I can get a 200-fold return on investment if I quit.

Only by standardization can we migrate and copy in batches without relying on the chef's personal skills and experience.

You are a master of state banquets, but you can only fry 50 dishes a day, entertain 3 tables of guests and create a turnover of 20,000 yuan. What do I need you to do?

Even if it is welcomed by customers, it is impossible to expand production capacity.

The promotion of the personal brand of state banquet masters will also form unstable factors for enterprises. This is intolerable to capital.

Such a state banquet master is a "unfavorable factor" to limit capital expansion.

Unless you drag him out of the kitchen and turn him into a mascot and spokesperson. That's another matter.

You can try to apply this theory to other subdivided catering markets, and you will find it universal.

For example, grilled fish, a variant of hot pot, does not depend on the chef's experience, but also on the quantitative processing flow and the food supply chain.

Another example is the takeaway platform. One day I brought a piece of chicken steamed with this tin foil. I didn't add any filter conditions.

Because this chicken conforms to standardization and rapid replication.

Marinate the chicken in a uniform seasoning bag, put it in a uniform special steamer, steam it at a uniform temperature and time, and take it out to obtain the steamed chicken with a uniform taste.

Then, with different names, different VI vision systems are designed, and different investment teams are found to do it, which will soon spread throughout the national market.

We used to have different flavors of local snacks in the streets. But now, Furong Street and Kuanhouli in Jinan, Kuanzhai Lane in Chengdu and Luodai Ancient Town, and Gonggu Lane in Beijing have long been occupied by stinky tofu, roast duck burritos, stove helmets and Hainan pineapple rice. They are all affiliated brands, and they are all boys who dropped out of high school at the age of eighteen or nineteen.

These snacks can be made as long as they have primary school culture, even if they used to be connected to sewers, as long as they follow this standard procedure, they can be made into a restaurant.

Of course, the taste is just as bad. After all, it is all made of sodium glutamate. It won't last long. This is why the snacks in the pedestrian street always change every once in a while.

This stuff is the same as milk tea in previous years.

Speaking of milk tea, does it also meet the standards of standardization, unified distribution of raw materials and rapid replication?

The above is what we call "one reason"-there is less cooking and more hot pot.