A friend of mine is in the restaurant supply chain software business, and he just got his Series A financing this time. Yesterday, I had hot pot with him, and he told me a set of phenomena he found in the purchasing data from tens of thousands of hot pot restaurants, which surprised me.
What he found was that hot pot restaurants with more than 60% of their products frozen were basically doing worse business. The hot pot restaurant with high customer price, more than 80% of the dishes are fresh fresh products. (And even pills slip are not frozen products, are stores on the day of handmade) He believes that: hot pot stores business and food standardization is inversely proportional to the standardization of food for every high point stores business will drop a point. But do consumer research but not investigate the problem. This phenomenon does meet the current situation. But people with foresight know that the future is not only hot pot, and even the whole Chinese food must be to the development of industrial standardization of dishes. In recent years, the government also actively promote the industrial standardization of folk snacks. But now, the industrial standardization of dishes began not long ago, many restaurant owners have made a dilemma. Today, I combine some of my personal views, and we talk about hot pot dishes standardization. Dish standardization, there are benefits and disadvantages hot pot in all meals, is inherently the easiest to standardize the category. In recent years, standardization seems to have become a hot pot brand to do a chain of franchise withdrawal code.
The benefits of standardization are undeniable. The standardization of pot base, shabu-shabu dishes, and seasonings is conducive to the consistency of taste across stores, facilitates business management, and leverages the strengths of the supply chain. Most importantly, the standardization of hot pot dishes is conducive to rapid expansion. The bad side of standardization is equally deadly.
? Different people have different understandings of standardization, resulting in different trajectories of hot pot dish standardization. Some catering bosses, the understanding of standardization is to reduce the cost of ingredients; some catering bosses, the understanding of standardization is to stabilize the quality. The former is not tasty, the latter popularization, which is not a long-term solution. This one-meter beef cut with a slicer to achieve a high degree of standardization. It is true that it can bring popularity to the brand when it first becomes popular, but consumers will soon realize that it is not much different from other family's fatty beef rolls. Repurchase rate will soon fall down. In this case, 2 mistakes were made at the same time: average taste and similarity from store to store.
? Catering standardization purpose is: scale up Catering standardization purpose is: replication, scale. On to the production process measurement, refinement of the operation link; down to each piece of raw material cut into what kind of seasoning to add how much; in the end, are to facilitate business management, improve efficiency, reduce costs, for the replication of stores, rapid expansion and preparation. Starbucks, is this typical thinking. Starbucks founder moved back to Italy handmade coffee, their own research on how to use the factory unified standardized production of coffee powder. Future hot pot industry trends standardization + customization of the future hot pot giants, surely still standardization to do a pretty good job of business. But it must not be a wholesale acceptance of standardization, it is on the basis of the standard to add some custom things, so that people feel a little different, worth coming back.
? Especially with this aspect of the dishes. You wouldn't use grade B meat if you could use grade A meat. You wouldn't use frozen products if you could use fresh products. Milk tea industry from the beginning of the use of cream brewing, to the use of milk powder, and now use fresh milk. The quality of the industry as a whole is further up the ladder, and so is the hot pot industry. From the machine frozen meat rolls to artificial fresh cut meat, the overall quality of the hot pot industry in the improvement of signs, has been obvious.