This track, driven by take-away, rising in the B-end market and expanding to the C-end under the catalysis of the epidemic, is becoming a new outlet for entrepreneurship. So, what is the origin of the explosion of pre-cooked dishes? Can it catch young people's stomachs?
Nowadays, the popular pre-cooked dish packages on major e-commerce platforms have solved the cooking problems that many young people have a headache.
The so-called prefabricated dishes are pre-made semi-finished dishes. The central kitchen of pre-cooked vegetables forms a production line through washing machines, vegetable cutters, packaging machines and other equipment, producing a large number of standardized, standardized and uniform pre-cooked vegetables. This well-matched food is put on the market after freezing or vacuum packaging. After buying, consumers can cook a series of delicious dishes in a short time by heating or cooking.
In this case, even if a person's cooking is not so good, he can use prefabricated dishes to fix the dishes that he usually can't cook. Especially the well-known holiday hard dishes with "technical difficulty", such as pickled fish, Buddha jumping wall, braised pork with plum vegetables, fish head with chopped pepper and so on.
The real rise of prefabricated dishes is attributed to the development of chain restaurants and the emergence of take-away industry. Low price and fast delivery are the basic demands of take-away merchants, while prefabricated dishes can meet the needs of merchants to reduce costs and increase efficiency and stabilize food quality. Prefabricated dishes greatly shorten the meal time and the requirements for kitchen equipment, further lowering the threshold of the catering industry. Compared with the cooking package with poor reputation, the processing method of prefabricated dishes is safer and the quality control is stricter.
As a result, a large number of B-end catering businesses began to use prefabricated food products, which promoted the compound growth rate of the prefabricated food industry from 2065438 to 2020 to 3 1.2%. An unconfirmed data is that 70% of the daily take-away orders placed by users come from pre-made dishes or cooking packages.
In recent years, the improvement of cold chain transportation capacity and the laying of pre-warehouses of new retail enterprises such as Ding Dong grocery shopping have laid a foundation for the expansion of prefabricated vegetables to C-end consumers.
After the epidemic in 2020, the convenience of prefabricated dishes met people's needs to a certain extent, and the demand of C-end consumers for foreign sales gradually shifted to prefabricated dishes. The catering enterprises affected by the epidemic have also seized this opportunity and constantly explored new catering retail models. Some head catering enterprises have introduced pre-made food for ordinary consumers. For example, the prefabricated dish brand "Jia Kung Fu Cuisine" was launched, and Haidilao launched the semi-finished dish brand "Dinner".
"It's cleaner than the restaurant outside, but it's more convenient and faster than making it yourself", which just hit the pain point of many young consumers in first-and second-tier cities. For this group, greater work intensity and faster work pace force many young people to choose take-away, and the appearance of prefabricated dishes gives these young people more choices.
In addition, with the development of family miniaturization, consumers are willing to spend less time cooking, and the emergence of the epidemic has also spawned more scenes of young people cooking at home. Of course, the attempt to pre-cook dishes, in addition to actual demand, also means early adopters.
Driven by multiple factors, prefabricated vegetables are out of the ring. In 2020, during the Tmall Double 1 1 period, the turnover of pre-cooked vegetables including semi-finished vegetables and fast food increased nearly three times year-on-year. The demand for this year's New Year's Eve pre-cooking package has pushed up the market's expectations for the ceiling of the pre-cooking industry.
A search on Taobao for "preparing dishes+New Year's Eve" shows that many brands offer various types of New Year's Eve dinner packages, and shops with monthly sales of 500+ emerge one after another, with package prices ranging from 300- 1500 yuan.
Behind the rise of prefabricated dishes, it stems from the extreme demand of B-end catering industry to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and the realistic demand that C-end users are getting busier and lazier. According to the data of Boxma Xiansheng, 54% post-90s boxma consumers often buy their own ingredients for cooking. Semi-finished dishes are one of their favorite commodities, and the purchase ratio is twice that of post-90s.
Recently, it was reported that Lu, who was deeply involved in the financial fraud scandal and finally got out of the whirlpool of Ruixing, was incubating a new prefabricated dish project called "Tip of the Tongue Workshop" and planned to expand it by joining.
The fiery track attracts more and more players. According to the survey data of Tianyan, the number of registered enterprises engaged in vegetable-related business in 20 1 1 year was 1.796, which exceeded 4,000 for the first time in 20 15, 8,000 in 20 18, and was newly registered in 2020/. According to the data of Ai Media Consulting, the market size of assembled vegetables in China will be 345.9 billion yuan in 20021year.
According to the data of Everbright Securities, from 20 19, the prefabricated vegetable industry will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26%. By 2025, the market size of prefabricated vegetables in China will exceed one trillion yuan. Generally speaking, prefabricated vegetables is a blue ocean market with rigid demand, but it may not be a low-threshold track that can break out in a short time.
Technology can make the food on the table more colorful and free people from kitchen work. However, in order to conquer China's fastidious stomach, businesses still need to constantly break through. The diversification and refinement of seasonings can accelerate the diversification of pre-cooked vegetables, but the technical problems of how to run through the processes of frying, boiling, steaming, frying, roasting, stewing and stewing still need to be overcome.
Although the prefabricated vegetable industry has formed a certain scale and consumption habits, it still faces some challenges.
On the one hand, compared with western food, Chinese food will encounter some problems in the process of quantification. Many western foods have a quantifiable and precise cooking system. As long as the temperature, heat, maturity and seasoning ratio are well controlled according to the recipe, it is not a problem to cook a delicious meal. However, the taste of Chinese food is closely related to the cooking process. The factory produces all the conditioning packages of products and then gives them to customers for processing. When it comes to cooking, taste can only be controlled by personal cooking, and taste recovery is a big problem.
Moreover, China people's long-term eating habit is to pursue freshness. The quantified Chinese food texture can't be compared with fried food, because the freshness has changed. Take the staple food as an example. Even the whole grains pay attention to "new rice and new noodles" Industrially produced frozen goods, stocks and prepared dishes are still rejected by some consumers.
On the other hand, the taste of Chinese food is very uncertain. Take simple scrambled eggs with tomatoes as an example, there is a difference between "sweet in the south and salty in the north". Even in the same area, the taste may be different. This diversity and uncertainty in taste may affect the large-scale expansion of enterprises.
Taking the first flavor of pre-cooked dishes as an example, its prospectus reveals concerns about product taste and iteration speed. At present, the company's product sales mainly cover Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Although it has been gradually laid out in Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan and other places, it is difficult to make rapid adjustments and changes to specific regions in a short time because of various factors such as eating habits and spending power of consumers in different regions to enter the markets in different regions.
In addition, prefabricated dishes need to maintain the freshness of dishes, which requires extremely high downstream cold chain transportation and channel expansion. In the initial stage of entering a new region, it is difficult to form competitive advantages such as logistics distribution and scale effect, and consumers in the new region also need to spend time trying and accepting new products.
At present, although there is still a long way to go to cultivate consumers' minds, the market demand for prefabricated vegetables does exist. The demand of catering businesses and people's fast-paced and "lazy house" lifestyle are supporting the development of this industry.
At present, the market has formed a traditional quick-frozen faction represented by Wan Chai Wharf and Utopia, a hotel faction dominated by Haidilao, a retail faction dominated by Box Horse and Tmall Supermarket, and a raw material faction dominated by upstream industrial chain companies such as Huang Fu Sanzhen and Shengnong. In the long run, based on their own advantages, everyone can find a certain living space in this market, and the industry will certainly produce giants.
Although there are many entrants, the domestic prefabricated vegetable market is still in a rough stage, with low market concentration and scattered competition pattern.
For the whole prefabricated course, the bigger challenge actually comes from the steady growth of user demand. Under the epidemic situation, the prefabricated vegetable industry has exploded, but this is not a long-term dividend for the industry. This kind of unknown will actually cast a shadow over the growth of the whole track.
Of all things in the world, only food can comfort ordinary people best. In the future, technology may be able to deal with China's fussy stomach, and the cooked food may become a regular item in young people's kitchens. But this is not a low threshold industry. Precast dishes need large-scale industrial cooperation, and it is not easy to become a national brand of prefabricated dishes.
References:
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