Source | All-weather Technology (ID: iawtmt)
When you and your friends and family go to a good restaurant and order five or six courses, the result may be that all the dishes are served in less than 10 minutes. Will you be a little curious: why can it be so fast?
Ordered a braised chicken rice in a roadside fast food restaurant, and the waiter served it in less than two minutes. While feasting your eyes, do you have any doubts: braised chicken takes half an hour to stew, how can it be served so quickly?
If you order a pig's foot rice, it may be like this: beat some rice in a bowl, add some cooked potato shreds, then take out the hot rice bag, cut it 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 only takes a few minutes, which is simple and quick.
In the process of making this pork knuckle rice, the cooking bag is the key element to speed up the meal.
For years, restaurant operators have been thinking about how to serve food quickly during rush 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 rise of take-away and hungry take-away, cooking bags are widely used in the catering industry, so they are taken away. In fact, in addition to take-away, cooking bags are also widely used in chain fast food restaurants, dinner shops, street shops and family dining tables, and quietly sneak into consumers' stomachs.
0 1 Attack Cooking Package
To put it simply, the cooking bag is the finished dish produced in batches by the factory through industrial means. Also called cooking bag, it can be stored 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 insiders, the biggest difference between them lies in the method of sterilization. The cooking bag at room temperature adopts pasteurization (high temperature sterilization), which kills the bacteria in the meat products at a high temperature above 12 1 degree, and then the food is put into a special cooking-resistant and microwave-resistant PET bag and sealed tightly.
Frozen retort pouch is to make the product reach the frozen state instantly through various quick-freezing technologies, and then store retort pouch in-18, so that retort pouch will not produce bacteria.
Frozen cooking bag is a relatively perfect cooking bag product in the industry, because it adopts the method of instant quick freezing, and the water is absorbed by the food during thawing, 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 fried food, and the latter tastes similar to steamed food because of high temperature sterilization, such as the meat is not chewy.
But the cost of frozen cooking bag is higher, because it has certain requirements for transportation and packaging conditions. In order to ensure no water loss during transportation, it needs a low temperature of-18, and the merchant also needs a freezer to store it. Therefore, chain restaurants usually use frozen cooking bags.
For most individuals, cooking bag is a strange word, but in reality it has entered many people's stomachs in large quantities, such as through take-away.
About 70% of the meals in take-out are made of cooking bags.
Zhang Shuang works in a cooking bag factory. He said, for example, three cups of chicken, mushroom chicken and braised pork rice, which are common for take-away, are all made of cooking bags.
In addition to take-away, the cooking bag also grabbed many restaurant dishes.
According to Sharla Cheung, almost all rice products of well-known 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 current monthly sales are around 50 million yuan.
Faye is an executive of a cooking bag manufacturer. According to him, it is not a problem for their factory to spend 6.5438+0 million yuan a day. Well-known customers are all over the country, such as "Simei Steamed Bun" in Wuhan and "Ruyi Wonton" in Suzhou. Their rice bags are all purchased from this factory.
Guangzhou Steamed Food Co., Ltd. is an enterprise specializing in the production of Chinese meal packages. In their official website, there are many well-known enterprises such as Meituan, Shanghai Disney Resort, Costco and China Eastern Airlines.
With the increasing demand, the manufacturers of cooking bags are also on the rise. According to "New Ingredients" magazine, the domestic cooking bag industry entered a period of rapid development in 20 15 years, especially after 20 15 years, many small manufacturers appeared rapidly. From 20 16 to 20 17, the market rose the most.
Up to now, there is no authoritative data on how many cooking bag factories there are in China. If you search for companies whose business scope includes "cooking packages", there will be 730 companies as a result.
Le-CHO, an entrepreneur in the cooking bag industry, mentioned that the annual output value of domestic small cooking bag factories can reach 1 100 million yuan, while the annual income of several industry leaders exceeds 654.38+0 billion yuan, while the annual income of steamed cooking reaches 654.38+0.7 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 (002299) as an example. This is a listed company that originally focused on broiler breeding, slaughtering, processing and sales. At the end of 20 18, they entered the cooking bag market and launched 24 kinds of 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 60% of the production capacity would be converted into mature grain.
Not only that, Shengnong has also established a special factory for Chinese food with a design capacity of 30,000 tons. The main products are Chinese food solutions and group meals with 24 cooking packages. In addition to the products on sale, there are as many as 107 products in reserve.
The simultaneous 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 32.08% 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 Catering Package Market in 2020-2024 issued by Xinsijie Industry Research Center, and referring to the growth rate of take-away industry that drives the growth of catering package market, it is estimated that the scale of catering package market in China is expected to maintain a growth rate of more than 10% in the future.
Why did the cooking bag catch fire?
Cooking bags are not new things that have only recently appeared. It originated in Japan and entered Chinese mainland in 1990s. 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 did not open the market until the last five years.
Why are cooking packages suddenly accepted by the catering industry in recent years? Industry insiders attribute it to the popularity of take-away.
According to "Insight into the Ultra-digital Practice of Catering Merchants in China in 2020" released by Analysys, the scale of Internet catering take-out transactions exceeded 727.4 billion yuan in 20 19.
According to the data of Meituan Research Institute, by the end of 20 19, the number of take-away consumers in China was about 460 million, an increase of 12.7% compared with the end of 20 18, accounting for 50.7% of 900 million netizens, and take-away consumers accounted for 53.9% of the permanent population in China.
Judging from the financial report of Meituan today, the enthusiasm of merchants and consumers for selling abroad is increasing and growing rapidly.
"In the fast-paced living environment, the demand for socialized catering is constantly expanding, and fast food, takeaway, group meals and other catering types that can quickly solve the problem of eating have ushered in a period of rapid development." According to a research report of Western Securities, it is an irreversible trend to break through the bottleneck of production capacity and meet the diversification of food types and standardization of production in China.
For take-away merchants, a big pain point of take-away is quick requirements. The contradiction between couriers and restaurants, couriers and users, and delivery couriers trapped by the system is all caused by "speed".
Cooking bags are the salvation of speed. Because almost all finished cooking packages can be served in 2-3 minutes by cooking, frying pan, microwave oven, etc. And merchants only need to prepare staple foods such as hot rice or noodles.
It used to take 10 minutes to cook a meal, but now it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.
In addition to fast food, cooking bags also greatly reduce the raw materials and labor costs of food and beverage takeaway merchants.
In the case of mass production in factories, the price of cooking bags can be kept low enough.
The wholesale price list provided by Faye, an executive of the cooking bag manufacturing enterprise, shows that the unit price of most cooking bags is below 10 yuan, even lower than that of 5 yuan. For example, the ex-factory prices of 200g/ 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 after processing can reach 20-30 yuan/serving. According to this calculation, the cost of ingredients is mostly within 30%.
Product price of a cooking bag factory
A catering industry practitioner said that this price is normal. Due to the take-away platform, labor, rent and other costs, the cost of ingredients for most catering businesses should be controlled below 30%. In other words, a fast food in 20 yuan costs less than that in 6 yuan, and only in this way can we make money.
Cooking bags can also help businesses reduce labor costs: not only do they save washing vegetables, but more importantly, with cooking bags, businesses can hire fewer or even no chefs. After all, the simple processing method of the cooking bag determines that it has almost no requirements for cooking.
"You don't have a shop, a kitchen team or 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 cooking bag manufacturers.
For chain restaurants, the use of cooking bags also has a very important advantage, that is, to ensure the unity of taste.
Zhang Shuang, the manufacturer of the aforementioned 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 uniform. Only in this way can we replicate in batches and expand on a large scale.
Facing the demand of catering standardization, cooking bag is a perfect solution.
From this perspective, the catering packaging industry is like riding the east wind of standardization and industrialization of Chinese food.
"Chinese food can't escape industrialization." Faye believes that compared with western food such as KFC and McDonald's, Chinese food has a great disadvantage that it is difficult to standardize, and the basic skills of chefs, cooking time and seasoning level will all affect the taste. Therefore, Chinese food has been exploring standardized means.
Standardization is not only the demand of fast food restaurants, but also the demand of well-known catering brands.
A person in the cooking bag industry said that many well-known catering brands will also cooperate with cooking bag factories, but these enterprises adopt a highly customized approach.
The highly customized and supervised packages of catering brands are obviously different from ordinary restaurants, or 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 a recipe until they are satisfied with the taste, and the recipe 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, have also set up their own central kitchens to produce cooking bags. 60%-70% of the national chain catering package brands have their own central kitchens.
In the past, in people's cognition, the central kitchen mainly processed some ingredients, such as washing vegetables in advance, curing meat in advance, and mixing seasonings. And made some semi-finished products.
Now the central kitchen can complete the processing and distribution of semi-finished products and finished products, and the finished products are sent to stores, which can be eaten after heating.
Cooking bags enter the home.
In recent years, in addition to entering B-end catering businesses, cooking bags have gradually entered the family.
Cooking bags are coming into the sight of more and more ordinary users, and some even become network celebrities, attracting more users and capital stores.
10 year 10 On October 28th, the self-heating food brand "Purple Black Fruit" announced that it had completed the C-round financing with a valuation of $500 million. This round of financing was led by CICC Capital, and the old shareholder Jingwei China continued to follow up. Pushing forward five months, they have just completed the B round of financing, and the A round of financing has just been less than a year.
The reason why capital bets on itself is because of the popularity and shipping ability of mass users.
According to public information, in the first half of 2020, the sales performance of self-contained pots reached 600 million yuan. In addition, in this year's Tmall Double 1 1, the self-contained pot has become the sales champion of the hot pot category with a sales record of over 100 million. The sales target of Zigui pot in 2020 is 65.438+0 billion, and this year's target has been achieved ahead of schedule.
Lamian Noodles Shuo, another online celebrity fast food brand, has sold more than 250 million yuan (20 19) in GMV.
In the view of 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.
However, 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 develops e-commerce retail channels such as JD.COM to directly provide cooking packages to C-end users.
In the next step, Shengnong will actively expand the cooked food sector, greatly increase the brand promotion of C-end, and let the cooking package products enter the bowls of more consumers.
After the Spring Festival in 2020, affected by the epidemic, Haidilao, Xiaonanguo, Xibei and Boxma also sold cooking bags on the e-commerce retail platform.
Xiaonanguo launched Yangchun noodles, lion's head, sweet and sour pork chops and other products in its flagship store in JD.COM. According to reports, compared with the same period of 20 19, the overall sales volume of these products increased by more than 100 times, and many products were empty as soon as they went online.
Haidilao launched a semi-finished cooking bag for "opening meals", and Box Horse Workshop under Box Horse also launched a semi-finished cooking bag.
Now it seems that self-help measures during this epidemic are becoming a normal business.
In August this year, Youmian Village launched the "Jia Kung Fu Cuisine" series of fast food packages. Dishes include sour soup, oat noodle fish, scallop braised pork, Mongolian beef bones and so on. , which are sold on platforms such as Xibei Kung Fu Gourmet applet, Xibei Select, Box Horse APP, JD.COM, Tmall, and Beijing Shilibao Box Horse Store, with prices ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan.
The clerk will heat these expensive single-serving ready-to-eat food packages with an induction cooker or microwave oven and send them directly to the diners with "iron boxes".
In the user comments, some users mentioned that some dishes taste the same as those in Xibeitang, but the aesthetics are worse.
Cooking bags home is regarded as an inevitable trend by many people in the industry.
In Japan, people's busy work and the increase of single families have become the boosters for the rapid growth of convenience food.
According to a research data from orient securities, with the socialization of women, the self-sufficiency rate in rural areas has decreased and singles have increased, and the sales of quick-frozen convenience foods have increased rapidly. Frozen convenience food is favored by Japanese consumers because of its convenience and quickness.
The output of frozen food increased from 654.38+355,000 tons in 0975 to14.99 million tons in 2000, an increase of 4.2 times, among which noodles and rice were the most popular foods.
In China, in addition to its own convenience food brands and catering brands, even ToB's exclusive cooking package factory is also launching ToC products, which are beginning to reach home customers and directly sold in JD.COM, Tmall, Pinduoduo and other e-commerce channels.
Le-CHO also started a business this year, and cooperated with the factory to customize the family-packaged cooking bags, mainly through the short video platform for marketing. He said sales were good.
There are many cooking packages for sale on Taobao.
However, for the package factory, there are still some obstacles for the existing packages to go home-they are not good at marketing and sales.
04 "Quality and Safety"
Although cooking bags have entered people's daily catering, the first reaction of ordinary people is to stay away. The biggest reason why people have a bad impression on cooking bags is their concern about quality and safety.
In fact, in recent years, the image crisis has appeared frequently in the catering and packaging industry.
20 18, 1 1, a video of "The secret of cheap take-away fast food package: the making process is disgusting, and 400,000 copies are sold a day" is circulated on the Internet.
The video shows that the fast food package of Anhui Bangbangxiang Food Technology Co., Ltd. uses cheap ribs as raw materials and injects soy protein into beef, which makes the conditions messy.
After the incident, the products of "Ganggangxiang Flagship Store" were removed from Taobao. If you are hungry, the platform will also launch an emergency investigation at the same time, and all merchants who use the brand products will go offline. Subsequently, the company publicly apologized and stopped production and business.
At the beginning of 20 19, 18 18 golden eye reported that a boss in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province broke the news that he had joined a soybean milk shop, and most of the take-away products were processed from instant cooking bags, and questioned that cooking bags heated directly in boiling water with plastic bags would cause cancer.
Although the product quality of the cooking bag factory is no problem after investigation by the market supervision department, and the manufacturer also responded to the news that the restaurant owner refunded the franchise fee, for the cooking bag industry, after Anhui Bangbangxiang Company produced the "problem" cooking bag, the incident once again reduced the trust of the cooking bag in the eyes of users.
In the eyes of some people in the industry, it is more convenient for food factories to produce cooking packages than traditional store cooking.
Generally speaking, the formal package factory is very strict with the production process control and food safety risk control, which are not all "unsightly" production environments.
Kai Zhong, deputy director of Kexin Food and Nutrition Information Exchange Center and doctor of food safety, once wrote that the central kitchen mode of catering has the advantages of intensive production and supervision. As long as it is standardized, the food safety risk of fast food package (cooking package) is far less than that of on-site cooking in stores.
According to the "New Ingredients" report, some people from the Food and Drug Administration said that the regulatory authorities also supported the central kitchen-style cooking and packaging factory of the enterprise, because centralized production is more convenient for daily management.
But on the whole, before C-end consumers can look at cooking bag products more rationally, it will take a process for cooking bags to enter the family widely.
(Zhang Shuang, Faye and Lok-CHO are pseudonyms in the text)