Author | Zhang Jilong

Source | All-weather Technology (ID: iawtmt)

When you go to a nice restaurant with friends and family and order five or six courses, the result may be that all the dishes are served in less than 11 minutes. Will you be a little curious: why can it be so fast?

When you order a piece of braised chicken rice in a roadside fast food restaurant, the waiter brings it up in less than two minutes. While feasting, will you have a little doubt: it takes half an hour to stew the braised chicken, how can you serve it so quickly?

If you ordered a pig's foot rice, it might be made like this: beat some rice in a bowl, add a little cooked potato shreds, then take out the hot cooking bag, cut the opening and pour it into the bowl, add some salted eggs and chopped green onion to decorate it, and a pig's foot rice will be ready.

the whole process takes only a few minutes, which is simple and fast.

in the process of making this pork knuckle rice, the cooking bag is a key element to speed up the meal.

for many years, restaurant operators have been thinking about how to serve meals quickly during the peak hours. In addition to speed, they are still thinking about how to reduce the waste of food stocking and how to standardize the taste while expanding rapidly.

cooking bags have become a popular solution in the catering industry.

With the rush of take-out in the US group and hungry take-out, cooking bags are widely used in the catering industry, so they are taken away. In fact, in addition to take-away, cooking bags are widely used in chain fast food restaurants, dinner shops, street shops and family dining tables, and quietly sneak into consumers' stomachs.

11 attack cooking bag

Simply put, cooking bag is the finished dishes produced by the factory in batches through industrial means. It is also called cooking bag, which can be preserved for a long time at low temperature and can be eaten directly after heating.

At present, cooking bags are mainly divided into normal temperature cooking bags and frozen cooking bags. According to industry sources, the biggest difference between them lies in the method of sterilization. Normal temperature cooking bag adopts pasteurization (high temperature sterilization), which kills the bacteria in meat products at a high temperature above 1.21 degrees, and then puts the food into a special cooking-resistant microwave PET bag and seals it tightly.

The frozen cooking bag makes the product reach the frozen state in an instant through various quick-freezing technologies, and then the cooking bag is stored at -18, so that the cooking bag cannot produce bacteria.

frozen cooking bag is regarded as a relatively perfect cooking bag product in the industry, because it adopts the method of instant rapid freezing, and when it is thawed, the water is absorbed by the food, so the juice and nutrition are not lost.

and in taste, the frozen cooking bag is better than the normal temperature cooking bag, the former tastes close to the fried food, while the latter tastes similar to the steamed food due to high temperature sterilization, such as the lack of chewiness of meat.

However, the cost of frozen cooking bags is higher, because it has certain requirements on transportation and packaging conditions. In order to ensure that water is not lost during transportation, it needs to be kept at a low temperature of -18 throughout the whole process, and merchants also need to have a refrigerator for storage. Therefore, chain restaurants usually use frozen cooking bags.

For most individuals, cooking bag is a strange word, but in reality, it has already entered many people's stomachs in large quantities, such as through take-out.

"About 71% of the food in take-out is made of cooking bags".

Zhang Shuang works in a cooking bag factory. For example, he said that three cups of chicken, sliced chicken with mushrooms and braised pork rice, which are common in take-away food, are all made from cooking bags.

in addition to take-out, cooking bags have also captured the in-house dishes in many restaurants.

According to Sharla Cheung, almost all the rice products of famous fast food brands use cooking bags; Chain fast food brands include Yoshinoya, Kungfu, Country Base, and street fast food restaurants such as braised chicken rice and old duck vermicelli soup, and a large part of them are buyers of cooking bags.

The popularity of cooking bags has also created a large number of factories, especially in southwestern provinces such as Sichuan. Zhang Shuang's factory is located in Sichuan, and their factory's current monthly sales are around 51 million yuan.

Wang Yifei is an executive in a cooking bag manufacturer. According to him, it is not a problem for their factory to pay 1 million yuan a day. Well-known customers are all over the country, such as "Simei Steamed Bun" in Wuhan and "Ruyi Wonton" in Suzhou, and their rice packages are all purchased from this factory.

Guangzhou Steamed Stewed Food Co., Ltd. is an enterprise specializing in the production of Chinese food packages. In their official website, there are many well-known companies such as Meituan, Shanghai Disney Resort, Costco and China Eastern Airlines.

with the increase of demand, the cooking bag manufacturers are also rising. According to "New Ingredients" magazine, the domestic cooking bag industry entered a period of rapid development in 2115, especially after 2115, many small manufacturers appeared rapidly. From 2116 to 2117, the market increased most sharply.

today, there is no authoritative data on how many cooking bag factories there are in China. If you search for enterprises that include "cooking packages" in the business scope, there will be 731 enterprises as a result.

Le Ding, an entrepreneur in the cooking bag industry, mentioned that the annual output value of domestic small cooking bag factories can reach 111 million yuan, while the annual income of several industry leaders exceeds 1 billion yuan, while the annual income of steaming and stewing has reached 1.7 billion yuan, but this figure has not been officially confirmed.

At present, some large domestic animal husbandry companies are also eyeing the market opportunities of cooking bags.

Take Shengnong Development (112299) as an example, which was originally a listed company focusing on broiler breeding, slaughtering, processing and sales. At the end of 2118, they entered the cooking bag market, and launched 24 cooking bag products, including mushroom slippery chicken, Sichuan spicy chicken, three cups of chicken, pickled chicken offal and curry potato chicken nuggets.

Shengnong said at that time that 61% of the production capacity should be converted into mature food.

Moreover, Shengnong has also established a special factory for Chinese cuisine with a design capacity of 31,111 tons. The main products are Chinese cuisine solutions and group meal products of 24 kinds of cooking packages. Besides the products on sale, there are as many as 117 products in reserve.

The synchronous development of cooked food and raw food hyperbola has become a long-term strategy of Shengnong. As of the end of the third quarter of this year, the income of cooked food sector has accounted for 32.18% of its main business income, while the company's operating income in the first three quarters of this year reached 9.95 billion yuan.

According to the Feasibility Study Report of China Cuisine Package Market in 2121-2124 issued by Xinsijie Industry Research Center, and referring to the growth rate of take-away industry that drives the growth of the catering package market, it is estimated that the scale of China's catering package market is expected to maintain more than 11% growth in the future.

12 Why did the cooking bag catch fire

Cooking bag is not a new thing recently. It originated in Japan and entered Chinese mainland in the 1991s. It has been widely used in airports, railway stations, cafes and other scenes, and has become the mainstream of cremation catering.

however, in the field of mass catering consumption, cooking bags have not opened the market for a long time, and it was not until the last five years that the situation was reversed.

why are cooking packages suddenly accepted by the catering industry in recent years? People in the industry attribute it to the popularity of take-away.

According to Insights into the Ultra-digital Practice of Catering Merchants in China 2121 published by Analysys, in 2119, the scale of Internet catering take-out transactions exceeded 727.4 billion yuan.

According to the data of Meituan Research Institute, by the end of 2119, the number of take-away consumers in China was about 461 million, an increase of 12.7% compared with the end of 2118, accounting for about 51.7% of the 911 million netizens, and the take-away consumers accounted for 53.9% of the urban resident population in China.

From the financial report of Meituan today, the enthusiasm of merchants and consumers for take-out is increasing, and it is growing rapidly.

"In the fast-paced life environment, the demand for social catering is expanding, and fast food, take-away food, group meals and other catering types that can quickly solve the problem of eating have ushered in a period of rapid development." A research report of Western Securities believes that in the face of this consumption trend, it is an irreversible trend to break through the bottleneck of production capacity and meet the diversification of Chinese food types and standardization of production.

for take-away merchants, one of the major pain points of take-away is fast requirements. The conflicts between couriers and restaurants, couriers and users, and take-away couriers trapped in the system are all caused by "speed".

the cooking bag can be called a rescue for speed. Because almost all finished cooking packages can be served in 2-3 minutes by means of boiling, frying pan, microwave oven, etc., and merchants only need to prepare staple foods such as hot rice or noodles.

It used to take 11 minutes to cook a meal, but now it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.

in addition to serving meals quickly, cooking bags also greatly reduce the raw materials and labor costs of food and beverage take-away merchants.

in the case of large-scale production in factories, the price of cooking bags can be kept low enough.

The wholesale price list provided by Wang Yifei, an executive of the above-mentioned cooking bag manufacturer, shows that the unit price of most cooking bags is below 11 yuan, even below 5 yuan. For example, the ex-factory prices of 211g/ bag of diced chicken curry and kung pao chicken are 3.9 yuan and 4.5 yuan respectively.

However, the retail price of terminal catering businesses can reach 21-31 yuan/serving after processing. According to this calculation, the cost of ingredients is mostly within 31%.

the product price of a cooking bag factory

A catering industry practitioner said that this price is normal. Due to the take-away platform and the cost of labor and rent, the cost of ingredients for most catering businesses should be controlled below 31%. In other words, a 21-yuan fast food costs less than 6 yuan, and only in this way can we make money.

Cooking bag can also help businesses reduce labor costs: it not only saves washing vegetables and other links, but more importantly, with cooking bag, businesses can hire less or even no chefs. After all, the simple processing method of cooking bag determines that it has almost no requirements for cooking.

"You don't have a shop, a kitchen team, and a chef. You can't cook. You can also open a takeaway shop, which is hot, as long as you can heat the dishes in a pot."

in some advertising copy, these have become the selling points of the cooking bag manufacturers.

For chain restaurants, the use of cooking bags has another very important advantage, which is to ensure the uniformity of tastes.

Zhang Shuang, the manufacturer of the above-mentioned cooking bag, thinks that the most concern of chain restaurants is not whether the taste can be the ultimate, but whether the taste can be unified. Only in this way can they be copied in batches and expanded on a large scale.

Facing the demand of catering standardization, cooking bag is a perfect solution.

From this perspective, the catering package industry is like riding the east wind of Chinese food standardization and industrialization.

"Chinese food can't escape industrialization." Wang Yifei thinks that compared with KFC, McDonald's and other western foods, Chinese food has a big disadvantage that it is difficult to achieve standardization, and the basic skills of chefs, cooking time and seasoning level will all affect the taste. Therefore, Chinese food has always been exploring standardized means.

standardization is not only the demand of fast food restaurants, but also for well-known catering brands.

a person in the catering industry said that many well-known catering brands will also cooperate with catering bag factories, but these enterprises adopt a highly customized approach.

The food packages highly customized and supervised by catering brands are obviously different from those of ordinary restaurants, even different from each other.

In order to prevent the leakage of customized products, large catering enterprises usually have two methods. One is that the formula is not told to the factory, and their people go into the ingredient room to make it themselves. The other is that they ask the factory to make the formula until it is adjusted to their satisfaction, and the formula is sent to the catering enterprise as a condition, and the factory has to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Some demanding factories even prepare their own raw materials, and the cooking bag factory is only responsible for production.

In addition to using external cooking bag factories, some large catering brands, such as Xibei Youmian Village and Haidilao, also build their own central kitchens to produce cooking bags. 61%-71% of the national chain catering package brands have self-built central kitchens.

In the past, according to people's cognition, the central kitchen was mainly used to process some ingredients, such as washing vegetables in advance, curing meat in advance, blending seasonings, etc., and making some semi-finished products.

At present, the central kitchen has been able to complete the processing and distribution of half-baked and finished products, and the finished products are delivered to stores, which can serve meals after heating.

13 Cooking bags enter the family

In recent years, cooking bags not only enter the B-end catering businesses, but also gradually enter the family.

Cooking bags are coming into the sight of more and more ordinary users, and some even turned into online celebrity, attracting more users and capital stores.

on October 28th, the self-heating food brand "Zihaiguo" announced that it had completed the Series C financing with a valuation of $511 million. This round of financing was led by CICC Capital, and the old shareholder Jingwei China continued to follow suit. Pushing forward five months, they have just completed the B round of financing, and the A round of financing has just passed less than a year.

the reason why capital bets on the pot is that it is popular among mass users and its ability to ship.

according to public information, in the first half of 2121, the sales performance of zihi pot reached 611 million yuan. In addition, in this year's Tmall Double 11, since the pot sales exceeded 111 million, it became the sales champion of hot pot category. The sales target of Zigui Pot in 2121 is to reach 1 billion, and this year's target has been completed ahead of schedule by Double 11.

Another fast food brand in online celebrity, Lamian Noodles said that the GMV in 2119 exceeded 251 million yuan.

According to Le-CHO, an entrepreneur in the cooking bag industry, fast food is also a kind of cooking bag, but compared with the fast food brand that focuses on To-C, the cooking bag that focuses on B-end is relatively low-key.

but they are also pushing the C-end.

taking shengnong development as an example, it not only supplies B-end customers such as KFC, McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Yonghui, but also opens up e-commerce retail channels such as JD.COM, and directly provides cooking package products to C-end users.

In the next step, Shengnong will actively expand the cooked food sector, and greatly increase the brand promotion of C-end, so as to let the cooking package products enter the bowls of more consumers.

After the Spring Festival in 2121, Haidilao, Xiaonanguo, Xibei and Boxma also sold cooking bags on the e-commerce retail platform.

xiaonanguo has launched Yangchun noodles, lion's head, sweet and sour pork chops and other products in its flagship store in JD.COM. According to reports, these products and