On the eve of the Spring Festival in 2022, the long-standing track of prefabricated dishes is completely on fire.
This year’s “New Year’s festival” is full of advertisements of major prefabricated dish brands – “one person can handle the reunion dinner”, “you can eat the reunion dinner at home without cooking”, “kitchen Xiaobai makes a good dish”… Which has become the slogan repeatedly shouted by merchants. Under the upsurge of “lazy economy” and “house economy”, entrepreneurs are also trying to meet the demands of “fried kitchen” groups for home cooking.
In fact, as a solution for the new generation of eating at home, prefabricated dishes are rapidly infiltrating from the b-end to the C-end. The fast pace of life, reduced cooking ability and willingness of generation Z, coupled with the catalysis of the epidemic, make prefabricated dishes popular rapidly and attract investors.
Today (January 18), the new Chinese prefabricated food brand “Zhenwei xiaomeiyuan” was revealed to have completed the B + round of financing, led by Baidu venture capital, followed by Dingxiang capital and zero one venture capital. In October 2021, this emerging brand just obtained tens of millions of yuan of round B financing, and the sum of the two rounds of financing has exceeded 100 million yuan.
traditional catering brands, fresh e-commerce and start-up companies
Public information shows that “Zhenwei xiaomeiyuan” was founded in 2019 and emphasizes the research and development of products with internet thinking. At present, it has four product lines: home cooked dishes series, special pasta series, online Red dishes series and family banquet dishes series, which aims to tap the value of prefabricated dishes in different dining scenes as much as possible. According to the founder Pu Wenming, “Zhenwei Xiaomei garden” focuses on the community scene because, as a living product, a considerable part of its consumer groups are family customers. In terms of channels, “Zhenwei xiaomeiyuan” Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co.Ltd(300959) has layout, but the focus is on offline channels. Pu Wenming believes that due to cold chain logistics and the peak traffic of Internet platforms, it is difficult for prefabricated food brands to grow online.
He said, “the frozen products industry is similar to the beverage industry. The big logic is channel distribution. The more points of offline stores, the better. The final battle must be offline”.
In fact, prefabricated dishes are not new, and the epidemic has exacerbated their popularity in the C-end market. In the past two years, this track has been very lively and attracted players from different backgrounds. In addition to the “Zhenwei xiaomeiyuan” that has frequently obtained financing in the past year, start-up brands such as “Yinshi” and “xunweishi” have also completed financing successively in 2021. The investors are well-known institutions such as source capital, Tiantu capital and Xianfeng evergreen. Lu Zhengyao, the former founder of Ruixing coffee, was also recently revealed to have entered the prefabricated vegetable market and is incubating a new project called “tip of the tongue workshop”. In addition, traditional catering brands have also made frequent moves, such as Haidilao launching the “dinner” series; Xibei’s “Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine” is highly expected. Its founder Jia Guolong said that “Kung Fu cuisine should reach 100 billion in 10 years”.
Another type of player in the field of prefabricated dishes is the fresh e-commerce represented by HEMA and dingdong. Compared with the above-mentioned enterprises, such enterprises have more channel and supply chain advantages. It is reported that fresh e-commerce focuses on prefabricated dishes, which are significantly higher than the gross profit of raw materials, which can directly boost the platform profit. Public reports show that after the epidemic in 2020, HEMA established the 3R business unit (i.e. hot ready to eat and cook), and made efforts to develop its own semi-finished product brand “HEMA workshop”. Dingdong also takes prefabricated dishes as an important business category. It hopes that prefabricated dishes can bear more than 10% of the sales scale.
for a long time, the heat is transferred from B to C
In fact, this is a “long planned” track for capital and entrepreneurs. As early as 2019, some investors said that prefabricated dishes would be the next outlet for new consumption. However, at that time, the vision of the venture capital circle was still mainly focused on the b-end products dominated by catering enterprises. In the catering industry, prefabricated dishes in the central kitchen have become the premise of industry standardization and scale; In recent years, it has become an important means to optimize the structure and expand the scale of catering in Dalian.
After the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, the national home model has further opened the imagination space of entrepreneurs and capital for the track.
Liu Zehui, founding partner of XingTuo capital, told reporters that the epidemic has changed the living habits of many people, and eating at home has become a regular option for consumers, “Especially for families with children, it is just necessary to cook at home in order to eat nutritious and healthy, but it is unrealistic for office workers to buy and cook every day. Therefore, prefabricated dishes have become the way to solve everyone’s daily cooking.”.
According to the development report of China’s Prefabricated vegetable industry from 2021 to 2022 released by ncbd, the scale of China’s Prefabricated vegetable market will exceed 300 billion yuan in 2021 and is expected to exceed 83 billion yuan by 2025.
At the beginning of 2021, prefabricated dishes began to pile up in major e-commerce live broadcasting rooms, appearing in front of consumers in a marketing way comparable to “bombing”. For example, Liu Yiguo, a brand of beef soup pot, is a frequent guest of Li Jiaqi’s live broadcasting room; Pig’s trotters head wave delicacy sliced beef in hot chili oil is tiktok, and Shen Wanshan’s pig hoof.
the next stage: PK of the strength and fineness of the supply chain
The gathering of various products in the e-commerce live broadcasting room also means that the racetrack players “get together” obviously. Then, what is the focus of inter brand competition?
In this regard, Liu Zehui pointed out that although the current track is crowded, in the long run, the capital is optimistic about the C-end consumer brand with strong supply chain management ability and brand premium ability, which is also the main reason why it chose to invest in “Zhenwei Xiaomei garden” after watching for more than a year.
In his view, quality, taste and supply chain are the core barriers of enterprises. “First of all, quality and taste are the premise to retain consumers, and people will vote for the brand with taste buds; second, product research and development, material health and safety, quick freezing technology and cold chain transportation management. I think there is still much room for breakthrough in these links, but it actually tests the overall control ability of enterprises over the supply chain. Although OEM mode is common in the field of prefabricated vegetables However, for the long-term development of brands, we must build our own factories or highlight the core supply chain capability of self-control. Only in this way can we achieve differentiated competition. “
The founder of a fast food chain brand in Beijing told reporters that the delicacy of the supply chain is also the focus of competition among major brands. His company is one of the catering brands that adopted the central kitchen model earlier in China.
The core of prefabricated dishes lies in the “restoration” of dishes. Different from the back kitchen of restaurants, consumers need simpler operation methods. “Chain catering can repeatedly train the kitchen staff to restore the pre-made products into fresh dishes by standard methods and heat, but consumers do not have such conditions at home, so how to make the kitchen white make good dishes under the simplest or even rough cooking method is something the brand needs to consider.” Said the founder.
Talking about the future market pattern, Liu Zehui said that prefabricated dishes are somewhat similar to Chinese food – dishes with diverse factions and rich categories. “For example, Sichuan spicy, Jiangsu and Zhejiang sweet and salty, some tastes are acceptable to the people all over the country, and some dishes have regional limitations. It is expected that several national brands and several regional players will compete on the same stage in the future.”.
