As the Spring Festival approaches, the "tough battle" over the New Year's Eve dinner has officially begun.

However, the uncertainty of the epidemic and the advocacy of "celebrating the New Year on the spot" have made cheaper and more convenient pre-made dishes become the new favorite of young people for New Year's Eve dinner.

This track, which is driven by food delivery and emerged in the B-end market, and has expanded to the C-end market under the catalysis of the epidemic, is becoming a new outlet for entrepreneurship.

So, what is the origin of the popular prepared dishes?

Can it capture the stomachs of young people?

Nowadays, the pre-made meal packages that are popular on major e-commerce platforms have solved the headache of cooking for many young people.

The so-called prepared dishes are semi-finished dishes that have been prepared in advance.

The central kitchen for pre-prepared dishes uses washing machines, vegetable cutting machines, packaging machines and other equipment to form a production line to produce a large number of standardized, standardized and uniform-tasting pre-prepared dishes.

This kind of well-matched ingredients is put on the market after being frozen or vacuum packed. After consumers buy it, they can make delicious dishes in a short time by simply heating or cooking it.

In this case, even if a person's cooking skills are not that good, he can still cook "delicious food" that he cannot usually make with the help of pre-made dishes.

Especially the well-known and "technically difficult" holiday hard dishes, such as pickled fish, Buddha jumping over the wall, braised pork with pickled vegetables, fish head with chopped pepper and other categories.

The real rise in prepared meals can be attributed to the growth of chain restaurants and the emergence of the takeout industry.

Low prices and fast food delivery are the basic demands of takeaway merchants, and pre-made dishes can meet the merchants' needs to reduce costs and increase efficiency while maintaining stable food quality.

Pre-prepared dishes have greatly shortened the meal delivery time and the requirements for kitchen equipment, which further lowered the threshold for the catering industry.

Compared with cooking kits, which do not have a good reputation, the processing method of pre-made dishes is safer and the quality control is stricter.

As a result, a large number of B-end catering merchants began to use prepared dish products, driving the prepared dish industry’s compound growth rate from 2015 to 2020 to reach 31.2%.

An unconfirmed data is that 70% of the takeout orders placed by users on a daily basis come from pre-made dishes or cooking kits.

In recent years, the improvement of cold chain transportation capabilities and the establishment of front-end warehouses by new retail companies such as Dingdong Maicai have laid the foundation for the expansion of prepared dishes to C-end consumers.

After the epidemic in 2020, the convenience of pre-prepared dishes has met people's needs to a certain extent, and C-end consumers' demand for takeaways has gradually shifted to pre-prepared dishes.

Catering companies affected by the epidemic have also seized this opportunity and continued to explore new catering retail models. Some leading catering companies have launched pre-made dish products targeting ordinary consumers.

For example, Xibei launched the pre-made dish brand "Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine", and Haidilao launched the semi-finished dish brand "Let's Eat".

“Cleaner than restaurants outside, but more convenient and faster than cooking at home”, this just hits the mark for many young consumers in first- and second-tier cities.

For this group, the greater work intensity and faster pace of work force many young people to choose takeout, and the emergence of prepared dishes gives these young people more choices.

In addition, with the development of smaller households, the time consumers are willing to spend on cooking has become shorter. The emergence of the epidemic has also given rise to more young people cooking at home.

Of course, in addition to actual needs, the attempt to prepare prepared dishes also has the meaning of trying new things.

Driven by multiple factors, prefabricated dishes are out of the spotlight.

During Tmall’s Double 11 in 2020, the transaction volume of prepared dishes, including semi-finished dishes and instant dishes, nearly tripled year-on-year.

This year’s demand for pre-made meal packages for New Year’s Eve dinner on-site has pushed up the market’s expectations for the ceiling of the pre-made meal industry.

Searching for "pre-made dishes + New Year's Eve dinner" on Taobao, you can see that many brands provide various types of New Year's Eve dinner set meals. There are endless stores with monthly sales of 50, and the set prices mostly range from 300 to 1,500 yuan.

The rise of prepared dishes stems from the B-end catering industry’s ultimate need to reduce costs and increase efficiency, as well as the actual needs of C-end users to become busier and lazier.

According to Hema Xiansheng data, 54% of Hema consumers born after 1995 often buy their own ingredients for cooking, and semi-finished dishes are one of their favorite commodities, with the purchase proportion being twice that of those born after 65.

Recently, it was reported that Lu Zhengyao, who was deeply involved in a financial fraud scandal and finally escaped from the whirlpool of Luckin, is incubating a new pre-made dish project called "Tongue Workshop" and plans to expand significantly through a franchise model.

The hot track attracts more and more players.

Tianyancha data shows that in 2011, there were 1,796 registered companies engaged in prepared food-related businesses. In 2015, the number exceeded 4,000 for the first time, and in 2018, it exceeded 8,000. In 2020, there were 12,500 newly registered companies.

iiMedia Research predicts that in 2021, China’s prepared vegetable market will reach 345.9 billion yuan.