Many entrepreneurs have taken the food market, which is worth more than a trillion dollars, as their first choice to make a mark. As a result, hungry, the United States Mission, point me bar, word-of-mouth takeaway ...... these food O2O continue to emerge, and continue to eat the food market this huge piece of cake. With the arrival of the capital winter, the development of many food O2O began to encounter unprecedented challenges, the end of the year to be able to deliver a satisfactory answer sheet has become every food O2O entrepreneurs must carefully consider the issue.
According to the latest data released by the Speedway Research Institute, the market size of the food industry is expected to exceed 2.8 trillion yuan in 2015. With the further fermentation of the lazy economy, the market size of the gourmet market will further expand, and it is expected that by 2016, the market size of China's gourmet industry is expected to exceed 4 trillion yuan, thus becoming a huge volume of the market. The huge volume of food market naturally won the favor of many keen sense of smell entrepreneurs, their understanding of the food industry with the help of the food industry continues to food for the depth of segmentation, thus giving rise to a lot of food O2O enterprises.
In addition to Baidu's Baidu Takeout, Tencent's Dianping, and Ali's Koubei Takeout, food O2Os such as Hungry, Meituan, and Point Me Bar have also entered the trillion-dollar food market in an attempt to get a piece of this huge market. The continuous entry of food O2O entrepreneurs has led to the food Internet market smoke and disputes.
BAT is not moving clever layout so that the seemingly calm food O2O market is surging, the merger of Meituan and Dianping is a strong proof. Not all of the dark battles in the food O2O market end in a perfect ending like the new Meituan's, and the competitive relationship between them is growing day by day, just like people's ever-growing demand for ordering food. Second-tier food O2O marketplaces such as Gusteau Shake, Jindou Late Night Takeaway, 8684 Takeaway, and Yi Taoshi are increasing their voice in this market with frantic geo-promotion and ever-increasing subsidies.
While BAT is using the power of capital to make the interests of the food market develop as much as possible in the direction of its own preconceived notions, this has not affected the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs for the food market to be segmented again. As a result, the food re-segmentation O2O represented by Forage, Kitchen, and Gourmet Jie began to appear in the download lists of major application markets. Different from the big and comprehensive of BAT and New America, these food apps focus on the re-segmentation of food.
Many people began to worry that so many food O2O enterprises will not appear overcapacity? And will there be market saturation with too many food O2O enterprises represented by specialty food? Such a worry is not unreasonable, because although the food market under the lazy economy model, despite the huge volume, the point of use of consumers will be concentrated. Just as people focus on Taobao and Jingdong for online shopping, people's consumption of food will also focus on a few well-known O2O enterprises.
This situation has led to a situation where consumers' usage is more concentrated in a few larger food apps, and for the other distinctive food O2Os, they will either use them occasionally in the form of tasting, or as a symbolic symbol to enhance their self-importance.
The polarization of users' choices has resulted in the polarization of food O2O companies' business performance. As a result, the following scene occurs at noon every day: the deliverymen of food O2O giants represented by BAT, HungryMall, and Xinmeida are busy, while some distinctive food APPs have no orders resulting in deliverymen loitering on the streets.
In this current market situation, the development of many food O2O companies is facing a never-before-seen predicament. Some food APPs lack a large platform such as BAT, resulting in fewer merchants moving in, and in order to expand the scale of the supply side it is difficult to do a rigorous audit of each resident merchant, which ultimately leads to difficulties in guaranteeing the quality of the food offered to users from their platforms. This situation leads to these food O2O enterprises to provide users with products are not able to get their satisfaction, end users vote with their feet, turn to BAT, hungry, new beauty as the representative of the food O2O giants.
The double shrinkage of the upstream market and downstream market of food O2O enterprises has led to the entrepreneurs in this industry to be under far more pressure than entrepreneurs in any other industry, and the development of their enterprises is even more difficult. Many gourmet O2O business entrepreneurs lament that from the outside looking at a thriving, huge volume of food market, wait until the real after entering but found that the death than any other industry are faster.
The entrepreneurs' pessimism about the food O2O market has caused people who were already skeptical about the food market to reinforce their concerns about overcapacity in the food market. According to a 2015 O2O death list provided by iHEMA, catering O2O is at the top of the death list. Many entrepreneurs who were originally confident in the food market began to be discouraged and turned to other industries. This makes people more convinced of the judgment that the capacity of the food market is saturated. However, is the trillion-dollar food market really so saturated? To BAT, hungry, new beauty as the representative of the food O2O giants can really divide such a huge food market? I don't think so.
The reason why there are so many deaths of food O2O enterprises in 2015 is mainly because the accumulated contradictions behind the super-boom in the early period have been concentrated. The frantic entry of capital, uncontrolled expansion of entrepreneurs, coupled with inefficient and useless marketing model made these enterprises start the process of internal depletion of their own strength while moving forward in a geometric progression. Cash subsidies as the representative of the so-called burning money marketing model so that these food O2O enterprises to obtain users in a single way and the lack of variability, once the capital tightened or the capital chain breaks, these food O2O enterprises will fall apart overnight, closure has become inevitable.
Many entrepreneurs entering the food market have the primary goal of expanding their user base in a short period of time, and compared to the big platforms of BAT, Hungry House, and New Meidai, these companies appear to be very powerless when it comes to expanding their user base. In order to be able to achieve short-term and effective large-scale user expansion, crazy subsidies, crazy money into the only way they can and can choose. By the time the users have accumulated to a certain scale, these food O2O enterprises have long been wounded, and it is difficult to produce the power to play a combination of punches. By the time the new user demand emerges, these food O2O enterprises have no power to fight, so death has become their only choice.
In fact, in the face of the trillion-dollar food market, entrepreneurs do not have to take the above approach to develop themselves. This is a huge market that must be plowed deep in order to truly understand the real needs of consumers in this market. Food market itself is a long ecological chain of markets, if you can find their own position in this market, and bend down to do a good job, can enjoy the trillion-dollar market to bring their own benefits. This requires entrepreneurs to enter the food market at the beginning of the precise positioning, to find their own position, the food market is subdivided into the upstream market, middle market, downstream market.
The upstream market usually refers to the supply side of our food market, which includes the supply of food ingredients, food processing and so on. The supply of raw materials for gourmet food has several major aspects including staple food, side dishes, seasoning, cooking and so on. And these big aspects can be subdivided again and again, really want to enter the industry entrepreneurs can find a smaller entry point from these constantly subdivided gourmet market to innovate the project.
The middle market is usually referred to as our gourmet logistics market, where the main task is to get the food to the consumer quickly and accurately. This market bears the heavy responsibility of connecting the upstream market and the downstream market, and if this industry is done well, it will generate hundreds of billions of dollars of production capacity. The logistics brands such as Mr. Wind and Dada, which are currently performing hotter in the middle market of gourmet O2O, are a very good example. According to Hexun.com, Mr. Wind has just completed a $13 million A+ round of financing, while Dada Distribution has just completed a $100 million C round of financing. Compared to the trillion-dollar food market, these logistics companies are obviously unable to meet the needs of the entire market. And this also gives our entrepreneurs a market gap that is not yet saturated.
In many people's concept, the downstream of the food market is the consumer. In fact, this is not the case. From the current development of the food market, the food market directly facing individual consumers is only a relatively low stage of development. The future food downstream market will include derivatives of individual consumers into a unit or cluster, and bring the further development of food market agglomeration.