Spicy strips set off a "national tide" revolution

Some young people today may not know Luohe, but they must have tasted salty, sweet and spicy Wei Long spicy strips. Wei Long's position as a "bearer" can be described as unshakable in the spicy strip industry. Even in the marketing circle, Wei Long has also created a unique marketing phenomenon. It has worked closely with runaway comics and Weibo Duan Zi, and it can create a hot search in Weibo at regular intervals.

During the epidemic period, Wei Long announced through official micro that he would donate a batch of spicy strips and konjac cream to Wuhan and distribute them to front-line medical staff. Moreover, during the epidemic period, Wei Long announced an average salary increase of 31% for returning employees, and plans to recruit another 1,111 people to earn enough attention again.

What few people know is that the birthplace of Wei Long spicy strips is Luohe City. This is the main producing area of spicy strips in China, and the total annual output value of spicy strips in Luohe can reach one-seventh of the whole country.

In Luohe, if locals want to eat spicy strips, they don't buy them according to the bulk retail of supermarkets. They have to buy two or three pounds of spicy strips at a time, put them at home and eat them slowly. The way to eat is also flexible. Whether it is sesame seeds, eggs, steamed buns or pancake fruit, spicy strips must be indispensable. Everything can be eaten with spicy strips, which has spread in Luohe more than ten years ago.

If wine is indispensable for parties in other places, people in Luohe often have spicy strips on their dinner tables. On holidays, a box of spicy strips can be a gift for their relatives and friends.

The food culture of Luohe spicy strips has given Wei Long a growing soil. Wei Long spicy strips can be seen from the canteen near the school to the specialty store in the large Mall. This small food-spicy strips, which is popular all over the country, has become a "national snack" in the new era.

Photo/vision china

No one thought that this 51-cent street snack could also make the American luxury food list and become another representative of "domestic products" after Laoganma. In October, 2115, Wei Long spicy strips appeared on the Amazon website of the United States, and the unit price marked was as high as 14 US dollars, equivalent to more than 91 yuan.

Wei Long's internal staff attributed the success to the success in product taste. "There are more than 61 kinds of spicy food in Wei Long, but all of them are not too spicy. This is because our research found that except for Hunan and Sichuan, people's eating habits in more areas are not too spicy, so Wei Long has also reduced the spicy degree of the original spicy strips from spicy to sweet, which is more in line with the public's taste. "

Wei Long began to enrich condiment categories, not only in seasoning noodle products, but also extended spicy strips to bean products, konjac products, vegetarian products and meat products. However, with the continuous expansion of the product library, people also found that this previously spicy snack began to turn into a dessert.

"Guangdong is our largest sales area. Although they are closer to Hunan, Cantonese people have a light taste and don't like spicy food."

"Blue Ocean" changes to "Red Sea"

Walking in the streets and lanes of Luohe, you can hardly feel the unique atmosphere of Luohe as the hometown of spicy strips. Only in individual community supermarkets, shopping malls and shopping centers can you see those spicy strips with colorful packaging. Before the rise of Wei Long, the streets of Luohe City were full of vendors selling beef tendon noodles. Walking on the streets, the smell of handmade spicy strips made people have nowhere to hide.

The people of Luohe have long been nourished by spicy strips. Compared with the familiar fragrance in the streets and lanes, the hometown of spicy strips now presents more industrial flavor.

Wei Long headquarters, located in the private industrial park in the economic development zone east of Luohe, can see the conspicuous logo of Wei Long Food Industrial Park when entering the industrial park area. In August this year, the staff of Wei Long headquarters moved into a new park, and several production lines of Wei Long Food Phase II Industrial Park were put into production one after another, becoming the main food production base in Wei Long. In the original Wei Long Food Phase I Industrial Park, some buildings were labeled as "Wei Long College" and were only open to internal employees.

Compared with previous parks, the newly moved park building has more food production workshops, but in the view of Zhang Long, an internal employee, these outputs are not enough to support the long-term development of Wei Long. "We have a third-phase industrial park under construction with a total investment of 3 billion yuan". Luohe municipal government officials once said that the completion of the Weilong Phase III industrial park project bears the goal of "the annual output value will exceed 21 billion yuan and it will become the second food enterprise in the city with a level of over 11 billion yuan".

In fact, it is a key factor for the development of Wei Long to take advantage of the market downturn and constantly improve the production technology to expand the production capacity of spicy strips. For example, in 2114, spicy strips were labeled as "junk food" and sales were bleak. However, Liu Weiping, chairman of Wei Long, invested a lot of money in the supply chain and gradually changed the original semi-automatic operation into automation; In 2117, Weilong further built a research and development center, equipped with various professional testing instruments.

Figure/vision china (Spicy Strip Processing Factory)

A local person in Luohe commented that these operations were relatively advanced in the spicy strip industry and even local snack manufacturers at that time. It not only improves the production capacity, ensures the safety of food, but also consolidates the brand advantage to some extent.

Through a series of technical iterations, the output value of Wei Long spicy strips has increased year by year in the spicy strip market. But competitors are also coming. China food industry analyst Zhu Danpeng once said, "In 2118, the scale of spicy strips industry in China was 58 billion yuan, and the average gross profit margin of spicy strips was close to 51%. High gross profit naturally attracted capital to join." At present, online celebrity snack brands such as Three Squirrels, Liangpin Shop, Baicaowei Shop and Yanjin Shop all take spicy strips as a member of the product matrix.

Wei Long, aware of the competitive situation, has gradually changed its strategy towards dealers. According to Wei Long's internal staff, "there are three main requirements for dealers in Wei Long: first, it must be a distribution dealer with certain vehicle transportation capacity; Second, the dealer bears the risk of pressing the goods, such as the order volume of 1 million a year, and the dealer has to guarantee a certain coverage capacity and independently undertake the after-sales service; Third, if it exceeds a certain amount, other kinds of spicy food cannot be sold at the same time. "

As for the arrangement of channel layout, Wei Long has also made adjustments. Dealers can only do terminal sales as agents, and will not do wholesale in the future. "In the past, our company had wholesale, but at present, the company has been restructured and started to implement the partner model, so it will pay more attention to terminal stores."

This strategic adjustment has repelled the enthusiasm of some dealers. "Wei Long spicy strips have had a round of price increase after the epidemic this year, and it is too harsh for us, coupled with the inability to resell channels and certain sales category restrictions."

another local dealer in Luohe also expressed incomprehension, arguing that the characteristics of leisure snack products determine that its performance contribution pool is mainly offline, and online is mainly used as a platform. At present, nearly 91% of the sales performance of Wei Long spicy strips comes from offline terminal stores, and the remaining 11% comes from e-commerce.

Photo/Photographed by Li Dou

However, in the disorderly spicy strip market, some people are also willing to pay for its brand premium. A number of store sales staff told AI Finance and Economics that compared with other similar spicy food, the wholesale price of Wei Long spicy food is the most expensive, with an average purchase price of 3-5 cents more per packet of Weilong spicy food. "Although Wei Long spicy food has the highest price, it sells the fastest. Compared with similar spicy products, Wei Long spicy strips can sell 511 pieces a month, while others can only sell 51 pieces. "

Made in Luohe, waiting for a new life

Guangming Road, not far from Luohe Economic Development Industrial Zone, is a leisure street with wholesale properties such as department stores, supermarkets and food. Most of the customers who come here often come to buy in bulk, and Wei Long's food flagship store in Luohe, the only one in China, is here.

"I'm here because I want to get in touch with businesses that I haven't met before and provide them with some small-batch purchase services, so that business will be easier to talk about later." Chen Ying, the marketing staff of the flagship store in Wei Long, said. However, within half an hour, only one customer came to this store, bought 21 packages of different kinds of Wei Long spicy strips, and left quickly.

compared with other stores in the wholesale market, this achievement is optimistic. In the whole large wholesale market, only two or three pedestrians pass by occasionally.

in recent years, with the rising tide of food industry in various places, the food industry in Luohe, which is dominated by traditional leisure snacks such as spicy strips and ham sausages, is experiencing an impact. For example, county-level food industrial parks in agricultural provinces such as Hebei, Shandong and Fujian have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, gradually forming an obvious phenomenon of food industry agglomeration.

The rise of spicy strip industry once gave confidence to the development of Luohe. The maturity of the spicy strip supply chain has brought about the development of related upstream and downstream industries, such as pepper, pepper and rape in the upstream, food industry, packaging and printing, machinery manufacturing in the midstream, logistics, e-commerce and other industries in the downstream. More importantly, it also plays an important role in stimulating GDP. At the 2121 Partner Conference, Liu Weiping, Chairman of Wei Long, also revealed that in 2119, Wei Long's overall revenue was 4.919 billion yuan, contributing 411 million yuan in tax revenue a year.

Figure/vision china

Besides the spicy strip industry, the brightest food pearls in Luohe are Shuanghui and Nanjie Village.

another undeniable fact is that, as a famous food city, the annual output value of food industry in Luohe, Henan Province reaches 211 billion yuan, and there are more than 7,111 related enterprises, but most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises, with weak innovation and R&D ability and serious product homogeneity, which has become a bottleneck restricting the transformation and upgrading of food industry in Luohe.

According to the official news of Luohe City, the added value of the food industry above designated size increased by 7% in 2119, accounting for 47.3% of the industries above designated size. Although the food industry still accounts for half of the city's economy, compared with 2118, both the growth rate and the proportion decreased slightly.

Some people in Luohe food industry pointed out, "At the moment when the food industry is focusing on the healthy strategy, the products launched by local food enterprises in Luohe are still the same as they were more than ten years ago, and there is little change compared with many new foods."

"The food industry has changed from subsistence consumption to healthy and enjoyable consumption. Whoever opens up obvious differentiation will be able to break a new blue ocean. " Liu Zhi, executive vice president of China Food Industry Association, said in a speech at the Food Expo.

Due to the epidemic situation, the Luohe Food Expo originally scheduled for May was postponed to October this year. The upcoming 18th Food Expo bears the glory and dreams of this famous food city. Since the first food festival, Luohe City has regarded attracting investment as an important symbol to measure the success or failure of the festival. However, under the downward trend of the output value of the food industry, the task of attracting investment in 2121 will be more arduous than in previous years.