Pre-made dishes are popular, and the trillion-dollar catering market has regressed

China has always paid attention to “people take food as their heaven”. Everywhere in the world, every major cuisine has its own characteristics, sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty, and each dish has different flavors. However, the concept of pre-made dishes is rampant in the Chinese consumer market, and it has a great meaning to unify the taste of national food.

Some time ago, in the live broadcast room of Dongfang Selection, Wang Zhigang, founder of Zhigang Think Tank, chatted with Yu Minhong and Dong Yuhui, and said that he never eats pre-made dishes, and said that pre-made dishes are pig and dog food. As soon as this statement came out, the entry “experts said that pre-made dishes are like pig and dog food” rushed to the hot search, causing heated discussions. Some netizens said that “experts rarely say a word of conscience”, “pre-made dishes have a lot of preservatives, and the raw materials are not fresh and of poor quality”…

Of course, it is an exaggeration to say that it is “pig and dog food”. It is also an indisputable fact that pre-made dishes are sweeping various dining scenes, such as takeaway shops, catering stores in various shopping malls, and of course the homes of some C-end consumers.

With the help of capital, the prepared vegetable industry seems to be in full swing. Capital is wrapped in industrial technology, and pre-made dishes shouted the slogan of convenience and ready-to-eat in the C-end market; in the B-end catering stores, they played the banner of laying off chefs and achieving cost reduction and efficiency increase in one fell swoop.

But behind this, it deprives every “eater” of the right to eat fresh food and healthy food. In the final analysis, behind the hype of pre-made dishes is ultimately the opposite of the wishes of most consumers.

C-end market: Who will eat food additives all the time?

The concept of prepared dishes is not new, and many fast foods can also be classified as prepared dishes. However, before the concept of pre-made dishes became popular, everyone was familiar with fast food.

For example, instant noodles are the most familiar to the C-end market; for another example, before the pre-made dishes became popular, the self-heating small hot pot launched by Haidilao can actually be regarded as pre-made dishes, even more convenient than pre-made dishes. , and even the heating tools are ready, and you can eat it right away wherever you go.

Now in the C-end market, the more popular “star products”: pickled fish, dried plum and dried pork, fish-flavored shredded pork… In fact, it is not difficult to find that they have heavy taste, heavy salt, and heavy color.

The reason behind this is also very simple. It is necessary to use strong flavors to cover up the staleness of the food, and most of the prepared dishes cannot see green vegetables. Imagine opening a package of prepared dishes and there is a piece of green vegetables from a month or two ago.

Zinc Finance found that many prepared dishes have a shelf life of up to one year. For example, the Meicai buckle meat in this Meizhou Dongpo flagship store and the pickled fish in Ding Ding Lazy Cai have a shelf life of 12 months. Among them, food additives such as sodium toluate and potassium sorbate that play a role in preservatives contribute to the long shelf life of prefabricated vegetables.

For C-end users, pre-made dishes are very convenient, but if you want to make pre-made dishes a regular item on the daily table, and do not investigate the freshness of the food, it must be unhealthy to consume ingredients such as preservatives for a long time. of.

To put it more down to earth, before going out, “your mother made the meal ahead of time, and you can eat it when you get up.” These dishes prepared by your mother are also pre-made dishes for you. Of course, the taste of my mother’s cooking is of course better, because the ingredients are fresh and without any additives.

Because of the desire for convenience and long-term intake of food additives, such a consumption concept will obviously not become the choice of mainstream consumer groups.

B-end market: consumers who are kept in the dark

If it is said that the choice of whether or not to eat pre-made vegetables that are directly oriented to the C-end market is still in the hands of the majority of consumers, then many catering stores directly heat pre-made vegetables and serve them to consumers. To a large extent, they belong to “Cheating feelings”.

Data from many statistical agencies show that 70%-80% of pre-made vegetable products flow to B-end consumption scenarios. These B-side consumption scenarios are mainly dine-in doors and online takeaways.

Especially in the current environment, many uncertain factors have accelerated the introduction of pre-made dishes in many catering stores. For example, small stir-fried dishes like fish with pickled cabbage, braised pork, and sweet and sour pork loin require chefs to wash, kill, and cook in the traditional mode, which is not only complicated, but also bears huge labor costs. When there is low traffic, the chefs who are idle still need to be paid.

For catering stores, the emergence of pre-made dishes has solved this problem very well. As long as the back kitchen prepares the most basic manpower, it doesn’t even need a chef who knows big and hard dishes. Whatever the customer orders, the back kitchen can heat anything.

Pre-made dishes do save time, effort and cost for catering stores, but for customers, they are actually “deceived”. Most customers choose to dine in, and the default in their hearts is “the dishes I ordered are freshly made”. But obviously, most dine-in stores now do not indicate whether the dishes are pre-made dishes at the back of the menu.

This more or less violates the consumer’s right to know.

Moreover, it is also a matter of time before the stores that use pre-made dishes to “fudge” consumers for a long time will be backlashed. The taste is not good, it is not fresh, and “never come again next time” is also a matter for consumers to decide after a meal.

Second, there is the takeaway scene.

Many take-out users may have also encountered that they ordered a more complicated take-out, but the meal was delivered in less than 5 minutes. If this happens, then there is a high probability that it is a “pre-made dish”. It should be emphasized that the takeaway platform will not stipulate whether merchants can use pre-made dishes. Essentially, there is nothing illegal about using pre-cooked dishes.

In fact, the reason why takeaway stores use pre-made dishes is very similar to that of dine-in stores. Even in many cases, from the cost of the dishes themselves, the cost of using pre-made dishes is more expensive than purchasing them yourself, but in terms of comprehensive costs, it will be more expensive because the costs of labor, site, water, electricity and coal become lower. Low.

In terms of raw materials of food, the cost of most common ingredients is very low. For example, a serving of hot and sour shredded potatoes costs only a few cents, but after using prefabricated dishes, the cost of purchasing potatoes for prefabricated vegetable manufacturers is not much different from that of merchants. After adding the process, the cost to takeaway merchants is more expensive. .

But for takeaway merchants, after using pre-made dishes, it saves many costs such as shredding, cooking, loss during use, gas, etc., and the efficiency of ordering is higher, and more orders can be placed during peak periods. Generally speaking, it is still “cost reduction and efficiency increase”.

Whether it is a takeaway or a dine-in store, for the merchant, it has indeed achieved “cost reduction and efficiency increase” in a short period of time. Only customers who pay for it, without knowing it, eat it and do not know how many processing steps it has gone through. food.

Regressive dining levels

According to the big data of Red Meal, there are more than 40 financing projects in the field of prepared dishes from 2021 to the first half of 2022. Weizhixiang, the first listed company, was also born, which will be listed on the A-share market in April 2021, becoming the “first stock of professional pre-made dishes”.

This year, Lu Zhengyao’s new project, Tongue Technology, announced in March this year that it had completed a B round of investment of 1.6 billion yuan, becoming the pre-made vegetable company with the largest financing amount so far this year.

Pre-made dishes are on the rise, but there are very few items that can be made into pre-made dishes and have high market acceptance. Even if it is made, it lacks the soul of “Chinese cuisine”. Such dishes cannot satisfy the “Chinese stomach”, and are far from enough to shake the Chinese people’s dietary standards.

Secondly, in terms of production, food safety is the focus of consumers’ attention, and the quality of pre-made dishes is uneven.

According to a research report previously released by Essence Securities, there are currently many prefabricated and semi-finished vegetable manufacturers across the country, but more than 70% of prefabricated vegetable processing enterprises are workshop-style production, with poor quality and stability, making it difficult to fully guarantee food hygiene and safety.

Not talking about standardization or Chinese food culture, in fact, from a dialectical point of view, “more efficient, more convenient, more delicious and healthy” food is actually a contradiction in itself. Efficient means simple, and easy and difficult to achieve delicious.

Unable to standardize, single product, poor taste, food safety issues, small audience… Under each factor, the so-called “trillion-billion-yuan industry” and “100-billion-billion-yuan industrial cluster” are inevitably overstated.

In addition to meeting the needs of a small number of specific groups, the prevalence of pre-made dishes can be said to be a step backwards in the level of Chinese catering.

This article is reproduced from: http://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2022-10-13/doc-imqqsmrp2474991.shtml
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