The air outlet of prefabricated dishes was preempted by Guangdong.
Not long ago, Guangdong issued the country’s first provincial prefabricated vegetable industry policy “ten measures to accelerate the high-quality development of Guangdong prefabricated vegetable industry”, which added another fire to the fanatical prefabricated vegetable market . According to the plan, nine cities from the Pearl River Delta and East and northwest Guangdong are included in the industrial development map. The supporting activity “Guangdong calls the world to eat prefabricated dishes”, with a simple and crude name – Guangdong is intended to create a new world catering labelP align = “center” Image Source: screenshot of web page
Guangdong cuisine never lacks labels. Cantonese cuisine has followed the Cantonese to Nanyang and to the world. So far, it is still the representative of Chinese food. The single cuisine guide launched for the first time since Michelin came out chose Cantonese cuisine. However, in Lao Guang’s mind, real Cantonese cuisine has exquisite ingredients and complicated processes, and has extremely high requirements for chefs , so it is difficult to realize the “Guangdong flavor” when it comes to Guangdong. Not suitable for “going out”, it was once the external cognition of Guangdong cuisine.
Guangdong cuisine is “Pianan corner”, while Sichuan cuisine is “attacking cities and land”.
In 2009, Guangdong Media asked: “why does Sichuan cuisine make great progress all over the country but Guangdong cuisine belonging to the same four major cuisines can’t get out of Guangdong?” Over the next ten years, Guangdong restaurants in Guangdong have followed suit, but hesitated. According to the data of 2017, among the eight major cuisines, the number of Sichuan restaurants in China topped the list with an overwhelming advantage. Although Guangdong cuisine followed, it was mostly concentrated in Guangdong and developed cities.
At present, the prefabricated vegetable market is like “yesterday’s recurrence”. It was pointed out that looking at the national market, the best selling prefabricated dishes also won with spicy food, and even the local prefabricated dish manufacturers in Guangdong failed to “avoid vulgarity”. The first difficulty of Guangdong prefabricated food is to break the bottleneck and add “Cantonese flavor” to the prefabricated food market.
But what Guangdong cuisine didn’t do, can prefabricated dishes do it?
Cantonese cuisine “not out of Guangdong”
In 2016, Tao taoju, a Cantonese restaurant with a history of more than 100 years, extended its tentacles to neighboring Fujian, taking a difficult step out of the province for Guangzhou’s time-honored catering brands.
Before that, there had been a lot of discussion about the “decline” of Cantonese cuisine. What attracted particular attention was that in 2009, the local media in Guangzhou had combed the list of China’s top 100 catering enterprises in 2008 and found that not only did not one catering enterprise in Guangzhou enter the top 10, but only two were among the middle reaches. At that time, the “little fat sheep” hot pot, which was in full swing, gave a “blow to the head” to Guangdong restaurants – the biggest obstacle to the development of Guangdong cuisine was the problem of going out of the province.
Even after 10 years, Cantonese cuisine has not completely broken the provincial “Curse”.
According to the report on the development of China’s Guangdong cuisine industry in 2017, as of October 2017, the total number of Guangdong cuisine stores in China has reached more than 90000, but half of the Guangdong cuisine stores are gathered in the birthplace of Guang East, with about 46000 stores, accounting for nearly 50%. Among them, Guangzhou has nearly 12000 Cantonese food stores, ranking first in the country, accounting for nearly one eighth of the country’s Cantonese food.
A catering practitioner once used the classic dilemma in Fortress Besieged to describe traditional Cantonese cuisine, “the outside can’t get in, and the inside can’t get out”. Except for local people in Guangdong, foreigners are not enthusiastic about Cantonese food; Conversely, Cantonese who are highly “loyal” to Cantonese cuisine do not care about other cuisines. Cantonese cuisine is particularly “lush” in Guangdong.
A small number of people who break the game are also easy to be questioned by people from all walks of life.
Tao taoju bears the brunt. When the “antique shop” taotaoju first entered the shopping mall and opened its first store in Zhengjia square, the landmark commercial center of Guangzhou, in 2015, Yin Jiangbo, a restaurant operator, faced a local old gentleman’s Criticism: the round table should not be turned into a square table, and the toilet as the “standard” of Guangdong restaurant should not be turned into a shopping mall public… The hat of “neither fish nor fowl” was buckled on taotaoju’s head.
The change of form is second, and the problem of “central kitchen” is to directly attack the psychological defense line of “Lao Guang”.
In media reports, many Cantonese restaurants are cautious about the expansion speed, which stems from their caution about the “central kitchen”. Abandoning the “central kitchen” means that the restaurant uses more manpower and is more difficult to achieve quality control, which will undoubtedly increase the cost of opening a new store.
An example that is hard to ignore is that Bingsheng, also a “time-honored brand” of catering, has caused controversy because of the opening of the central kitchen. Some people even think that it “lowers the quality and has no right to represent Guangzhou, the gourmet capital”.
breaking the “siege”
“Going out” is particularly difficult for Cantonese cuisine.
In 2009, when faced with the pressure of “little fat sheep”, the Guangdong cuisine industry discussed it. Lin Xingqi, then general manager of Guangzhou Restaurant Group Company Limited(603043) pointed out through analysis that Cantonese cuisine is “a hundred dishes and a hundred flavors”. An ordinary chicken can be made in dozens of ways , including white cut chicken, salt baked chicken, soy sauce chicken and steamed chicken. The taste of the same chicken is also very different in different stores. In contrast, “little fat sheep” does not have this problem, “hot pot is particularly easy to standardize, which can’t be compared with any Chinese food enterprise”.
Compared with Sichuan cuisine with complex seasoning and heavy seasoning, Cantonese cuisine is generally more light and focuses on highlighting the original flavor of ingredients. Gourmet Cai Lan once said that one of the quintessence of Guangdong cuisine is the art of less salt – Guangdong likes to use soy sauce. Beans are fermented and salted to enhance the new flavor, or small fire old soup replaces salt to enhance the flavor, so as to restore the authenticity of food.
But less is more. Less taste stimulating modification means more investment in ingredients and skills. Insiders pointed out that Cantonese cuisine is particularly sensitive to the quality of dishes, and the ingredients can’t even be used overnight . In this case, the emergence of “central kitchen” seems to bring its own “original sin”, “killing now” and “making now” have become the key standards to measure whether Cantonese cuisine is authentic.
Be highly sensitive to Cantonese cuisine. However, Guangdong, where it was difficult for foreign dishes to break through, has quietly changed.
In the Guangzhou City catering trend report released in 2018, although Cantonese cuisine is still the favorite cuisine of Guangzhou citizens, Sichuan Chongqing hot pot has become the fastest growing cuisine in Guangzhou catering market , with a year-on-year increase of more than 313%. One explanation is that the influx of outsiders in Guangzhou supports local spicy consumption.
But it is undeniable that the current Chinese catering is showing an unprecedented demand for spicy flavor. Sichuan cuisine has become more and more logical as a “national cuisine”, while Guangdong cuisine seems to have to re accept its identity as a “local cuisine”.
Now, new opportunities lie in front of Cantonese cuisine.
Industry experts pointed out that different from the older generation, generation Z consumers live under the influence of the Internet and have different perceptions of processed food. They will be interested in delicious and brand effective diet, rather than paying too much attention to handmade food and master production.
Coupled with the development of food science and technology, the attention to health after the epidemic and the demand for consumption upgrading, the market demand for prefabricated vegetables began to walk out of the rising curve.
AI media consulting data show that China’s Prefabricated vegetable market is expected to maintain a high-speed growth of about 20% in the next 6-7 years, which is expected to become the “Next Trillion catering market”.
on “standardization”
On the new track, Cantonese cuisine is also expected to usher in new rules. An important content is the standardization of Cantonese cuisine, which was previously regarded as a “forbidden area”.
In 2015, a discussion on whether Guangdong cuisine can be standardized was launched in Guangdong. Among the commonplace discussions, there are also voices looking forward to change. For example, Li Yongtai, who is known as the “head of Cantonese cuisine”, mentioned that “standardization of Cantonese cuisine” can be a kind of “standardization” of classified discussion. For those dishes that “have been handed down traditionally”, standardization should be published and those that do not meet the standards should be eliminated.
He noticed that the representative dish of Huaiyang cuisine “Yangzhou fried rice”, which has just introduced the new standard, requires that each fried rice needs three eggs, with meat and seafood. Sichuan cuisine once set a similar standard for fish flavored shredded meat: shredded meat should be 10cm long and 3mm wide.
According to this standard, the standardization of Cantonese cuisine is already on the way.
Guangdong cuisine is one of the earliest enterprises to explore standardization in the industry. Most Cantonese cuisine masters are very standard conscious. For example, for the sauce of fish head pot or rice pot, although the formula of each master is different, they are relatively standardized products. It is also the key to the inheritance of Cantonese cuisine.
Can industry standards be further incubated from the existing enterprise standards? Eyes were focused on the prepared dishes.
In the newly issued “ten prefabricated dishes” in Guangdong, a line is connected between Guangdong cuisine masters and Guangdong cuisine. On the one hand, by cultivating more Cantonese cuisine masters, we can turn “craft” into “craft”. On the other hand, we also take this opportunity to carry out the “pilot work of the construction of the whole industry chain standard system of prefabricated dishes of three major Cantonese cuisines”, and gradually formulate and improve the “series standards from field to table” of prefabricated dishes. In the development of Cantonese cuisine, the two things are one, two sides, both inside and outside.
The standardization of prefabricated dishes can also be further extended to the standardization of Guangdong cuisine industry. In fact, the prefab Kwai industry contains many aspects, including “ready to eat” canned food, instant hot dish, and “ready to cook” dish. For Guangdong cuisine, with the support of existing transportation conditions and cold chain technology, the possibility of “killing” and “making” prefabricated dishes cannot be ruled out.
Looking at the catering industry in Guangdong – the upper reaches, the raw materials have basically had large-scale production capacity, forming a series of large-scale supplies such as seafood industry breeding base, livestock breeding base and vegetable planting base; In the downstream, all links of large-scale food chain brands have formed professional industrialized operation. The catering industry is on the eve of reform, so it needs “standardization” to integrate the upstream and downstream.
It is also reasonable for Guangdong cuisine to start this innovation.
Cantonese food is not “born with a golden spoon”. There is a saying that although Guangfu lasted for thousands of years, the birth of Cantonese cuisine was only hundreds of years. Guangdong cuisine, once unknown, took advantage of opening-up in the late Qing Dynasty and widely absorbed the essence of cooking skills from various countries, which gradually brewed up the richness and diversity of today’s “100 dishes and 100 flavors”. Now, a new round of innovation and technological revolution is starting in Cantonese cuisine.
