Author | Zhang Jilong

Source | iawtmt (ID: iawtmt)

When you and your friends and family go to a decent restaurant, you order five or six dishes, and then it takes less than 10 minutes for the dishes to be served. Wouldn't you be a bit curious: how can it be so fast?

When you order a cassoulet at a roadside fast food restaurant, it takes less than two minutes for the waiter to bring the meal up. At the same time, you will not have a trace of doubt: cassoulet requires half an hour to stew, how can the rice be so fast?

If you order a pig's foot rice, it may be made like this: beat some rice in a bowl, add a bit of boiled shredded potatoes, and then take out the hot cooking bag, cut the opening and pour it into the bowl, then add a bit of marinated egg and green onion to garnish, a pig's foot rice is ready.

The whole process takes just a few minutes and is easy and quick.

In the making of this pork feet rice, the cooking bag is a key element in speeding up the meal.

For years, restaurateurs have been thinking about how to get food out quickly at peak times. In addition to speed, they are also thinking about how to reduce waste in meal preparation and how to standardize flavors while expanding rapidly.

Cooking kits have become a popular solution in the restaurant industry.

With the runaway success of Meituan Takeout and HungryMoney Takeout, cooking kits have been widely used in the restaurant industry and have been taken flying as a result. In fact, in addition to takeout, cooking kits are making their way into a wide range of fast food chains, formal restaurants, dine-in offerings at street-side stores, and family tables, quietly sneaking into consumers' stomachs.

01 Attack of the cooking package

Simply put, the cooking package is the factory through industrialized means, batch production out of the finished product, which is also called the dish package, can be preserved for a long time at low temperatures, and can be eaten directly after heating.

At present, the cooking package is mainly divided into room temperature cooking package, frozen cooking package. Industry sources said that the biggest difference between the two is the method of sterilization. Room temperature cooking packages using bar type sterilization (high temperature sterilization), in the 121 degrees above the high temperature of the meat products within the bacterial kill, and then put the food into the special boil-resistant, microwave PET bags sealed sealed.

Frozen packets are made through a variety of quick-freezing techniques, allowing the product to reach a frozen state in an instant, and then placing the packet under -18 for storage, so that the packet can not produce bacteria.

Frozen packets are regarded by the industry as the relative perfection of the packet product, because it uses instantaneous rapid freezing, and when thawed, the water is absorbed by the food, so there is no loss of juice, nutrients.

And in terms of taste, frozen cooking packets are better than room temperature cooking packets, the former taste close to fried, while the latter due to high temperature sterilization, the taste is similar to steamed dishes, such as meat lack of chewiness.

However, the cost of frozen food packages to be higher, because it is on the transportation and packaging conditions have certain requirements, the transportation process to ensure that the moisture is not lost, the need for the whole process of low-temperature -18, the business also need to have a freezer refrigerator for storage. This is why chain restaurants usually use frozen food packages.

For most individuals, the package is an unfamiliar word, but the reality is that it has already made its way into many people's stomachs in large quantities, for example, through takeout.

"About 70% of meals inside takeout are made with cooking packets."

Zhang Shuang, who works in a cooking-package factory, cited three-cup chicken, shiitake-sliders, and lo mein rice, which are common in takeout, as examples of meals that are made with cooking packets.

In addition to takeout, cooking bags have also taken over many restaurant dine-in dishes.

According to Min Zhang, almost all well-known fast food brands use cooking packets for their rice-based products; fast food chains including Yoshinoya, Zenkungfu, and Countryside Key, as well as street-side fast food restaurants such as cassoulet and duck vermicelli soup, a large portion of them are purchasers of cooking packets.

The popularity of cookware has also created a large number of factories that are thriving, especially in southwestern provinces such as Sichuan. Zhang Shuang's factory is in Sichuan, and their sales are currently around 50 million yuan a month.

Wang Yifei in a cooking bag manufacturer as an executive. According to him, their factory a day out of 1 million single not a problem, well-known customers all over the country, such as Wuhan's "four beautiful buns", Suzhou's "Ruyi wontons", etc., their rice packages are purchased from the factory.

Guangzhou's Steam Chowder (hereinafter referred to as Steam Chowder) Food Co., Ltd. is a company specializing in the production of Chinese food packages. On their official website, there is no shortage of partners such as Meituan, Shanghai Disney Resort, Xisto, Eastern Airlines and other well-known companies.

As the demand grows, so do the manufacturers of cooking bags. According to "New Ingredients" magazine reported that in 2015, the domestic cooking bag industry entered a period of rapid development, especially after 2015 quickly appeared a large number of small manufacturers; 2016 ~ 2017, the market increment is the most dramatic.

Today, as for how many domestic cooking bag factories, there is no authoritative data. If you search for companies that include "cooking bag" in their business scope in Enterprise Search, the result will be 730 companies.

Cooking bag industry entrepreneurs Ledong mentioned that the annual output value of small cooking bag factories in China can be hundreds of millions of yuan, while several industry leaders have annual revenue of more than 1 billion yuan, and the annual revenue of the steam boiler has reached 1.7 billion yuan, but this figure has not been officially confirmed.

At present, some large companies in the domestic animal husbandry industry are also eyeing the market opportunity of cooking packages.

Take Shengnong Development (002299) as an example, this is a listed company that originally focused on broiler breeding, slaughtering, processing and sales, and at the end of 2018, they entered the cooking bag market, launching 24 cooking bag products such as Shiitake Mushroom Slider Chicken, Sichuan Spicy Chicken, Three Cups of Chicken, Sour Vegetable Chicken Miscellaneous and Curry Potato Chicken Nuggets.

Shengnong said at the time that it wanted to convert 60% of its capacity into ready-to-eat meals.

Not only that, Shengnong also established a special factory for Chinese cuisine, designed capacity of 30,000 tons, the main products for 24 cooking package products for Chinese cuisine solutions and group meals, in addition to the products on sale, the reserve development of up to 107 products.

Cooked food + raw food double-curve synchronized development has become the long-term strategy of Shengnong. As of the end of the third quarter of this year, cooked food segment revenue has accounted for 32.08% of its main business income, while the first three quarters of this year, the company's operating income amounted to 9.95 billion yuan.

According to the "2020-2024 China Cooking Packet Market Feasibility Study Report" released by Xinxin Industry Research Center, with reference to the growth rate of the takeaway industry that drives the growth of the cooking packet market, it is expected that the size of China's cooking packet market is expected to maintain a growth of more than 10% in the future.

02 Why Cooking Bags Are Hot

Cooking Bags are not a recent novelty, it originated in Japan, and began to enter mainland China in the 1990s, and is widely used in airports, stations, cafes and other scenarios, and has become the mainstay of fire-free dining.

But in the field of mass catering consumption, the cooking bag has been slow to open the market, and only in the last five years has the situation been reversed.

Why has the cooking bag suddenly been accepted by the catering industry in the past few years? Industry insiders attribute it to the popularity of takeout.

According to Analysys eWatch's China Catering Superstore Digital Practice Insight 2020, the Internet catering takeaway transaction scale exceeded 727.4 billion yuan in the full year of 2019.

Data from Meituan Research Institute shows that by the end of 2019, the scale of Chinese takeaway consumers was about 460 million people, an increase of 12.7% compared with the end of 2018, accounting for about 50.7% of the 900 million Internet users, and the takeaway consumers accounted for 53.9% of the number of China's urban resident population.

Today, from the Meituan financial report, the enthusiasm of merchants and consumers for takeout is unabated and growing rapidly.

"In the fast-paced life environment, socialized catering demand is expanding, fast food, takeout, group meals and other types of food and beverage that can quickly solve the problem of eating ushered in a period of rapid development." Western Securities, a research report that, in the face of this consumer trend, can break through the bottleneck of production capacity to meet the diversification of Chinese food types, the production of standardized cooking packages has become an irreversible trend.

For takeout merchants, one of the major pain points of takeout is the requirement of fast, the network from time to time is hotly debated on the courier and restaurant conflict, the courier and the user conflict, as well as by the system of trapped takeout courier, behind the "speed" of the trouble.

Cooking pouches are the savior of speed. Because almost all of the finished food packages can be cooked in 2-3 minutes in a boiler, wok, or microwave oven, and the only thing a business needs to prepare is hot rice or noodles and other staples.

The original 10 minutes to make a meal, now 2 or 3 minutes can be done.

In addition to the fast food, the package also greatly reduces the cost of raw materials and labor of the catering takeaway business.

In the case of large-scale factory production, the price of the cooking bag can be low enough.

The wholesale price list provided by Wang Yifei, an executive of the aforementioned cooking bag manufacturer, shows that most of the unit price of the cooking bag is less than 10 yuan, or even less than 5 yuan, for example, 200g / bag of curry chicken, Kung Pao chicken, the factory price of 3.9 yuan and 4.5 yuan respectively.

However, the end of the catering business after processing meals, the retail price can reach 20-30 yuan / copies. According to this calculation, the cost of ingredients accounted for most of the 30% or less.

Price of the product of a cooking bag factory

A catering industry practitioner said that this price is normal. Due to the takeout platform draw and labor, rent and other costs under the vast majority of restaurant businessmen to control the cost of ingredients in less than 30%. In other words, a 20 yuan fast food, ingredients cost less than 6 dollars, only so that you can make money.

Cooking kit can also help businesses reduce labor costs: it not only eliminates the need to wash vegetables, but more importantly, with cooking kit, businesses can hire fewer or even no chef, after all, the simple processing of the cooking kit determines that it is virtually no requirement for cooking skills.

"You don't have a store, you don't have a back-of-the-house team, you don't have a chef, you don't know how to stir-fry on your own, and you can open up a takeaway store with a hot single volume, as long as you can heat up the food with a wok."

In some ad copy, these have become the selling points of the cooking bag manufacturers.

For restaurant chains, there is another very important benefit of using cooking kits, which is to ensure uniformity of taste.

The aforementioned package manufacturer Zhang Shuang believes that the chain of restaurants is most concerned about the flavor can not be the ultimate, but the taste can not be unified, only then can be copied in bulk, for large-scale expansion.

In the face of the demand for standardization of catering, the cooking bag is simply the perfect solution.

From this point of view, the cooking bag industry is like riding on the east wind of Chinese food standardization and industrialization.

"Chinese food certainly can not escape industrialization" Wang Yifei believes that, has been, relative to KFC, McDonald's and other Western food, Chinese food exists in a great disadvantage is difficult to achieve standardization, the chef's basic skills, fire, seasoning level will affect the taste. Therefore, Chinese food has been exploring the means of standardization.

Towards standardization is not just a need for fast food restaurants, but also for well-known restaurant brands.

A person in the bag industry said that there are a lot of well-known restaurant brands will also cooperate with the bag factory, but these companies use a highly customized approach.

Catering brands highly customized and regulated cooking bag, and the ordinary catering restaurant cooking bag has a clear difference, and even the difference between the clouds.

In order to prevent the leakage of customized products, large catering companies usually have two methods, one is the recipe does not tell the factory, their people into the ingredient room with their own, there is also a request for them to let the factory out of the recipe to their satisfaction until the taste, the recipe as a condition to the catering company and the factory to sign a confidentiality agreement.

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

In addition to the use of external cooking bag factory, some large restaurant brands such as Xibei Avena Village, Haidilao, etc. also built their own central kitchen, the production of cooking bags. In the national chain of restaurant cooking bag brand, 60% -70% have their own central kitchen.

In the past, in people's perception, the central kitchen is mainly to do part of the processing of ingredients, such as the advance cleaning of vegetables, meat marinated in advance, seasoning mixing, etc., to do some semi-finished products.

Now the central kitchen has been able to complete the processing and distribution of semi-finished and finished products, and the finished products are delivered to the stores, which are heated and ready to serve.

03 Cooking Kits Entering the Home

In recent years, cooking kits have been entering the home in addition to the B-end restaurant business.

Cooking kits are coming into the view of more and more ordinary users, and some of them are even turning into online celebrities, attracting more users and capital stores.

On October 28, the self-heating food brand "self-heating pot" announced the completion of more than 50 million U.S. dollars in Series C financing, valued at 500 million U.S. dollars. This round of financing was led by CICC, and the old shareholder Matrix Partners China continued to follow the investment. Five months ago, they just completed the B round of financing, and the A round of financing just less than a year ago.

The reason why capital is betting on the self-high pot, valuing its popularity among the public users and the ability to ship.

According to public information, in the first half of 2020, the sales performance of the self hi pot reached 600 million yuan. In addition, in this year's Tmall Double 11, the self hi pot became the sales champion of the hot pot category with sales of more than 100 million dollars. The sales target of Self-Hi Pot in 2020 is to reach 1 billion, and as of Double 11 has completed this year's target ahead of schedule.

Another net red instant food brand "Ramen said" 2019 GMV is more than 250 million yuan.

According to the cooking bag industry entrepreneur LeDing, fast food is also a kind of cooking bag, but compared to the fast food brand that focuses on to C, the cooking bag that focuses on the B end is more low-key.

But they are also making a push into the C-suite.

In the case of Shengnong Development, for example, in addition to supplying B-side customers such as KFC, McDonald's, Walmart, Yonghui, etc., it has also opened up e-commerce retail channels such as Jingdong to provide cooking bag products directly to C-side users.

The next step, Shengnong also want to actively expand the deli plate, and significantly increase the C-end of the brand publicity efforts, in order to its let cooking bag products into the bowl of more consumers.

After the Spring Festival of 2020, due to the impact of the epidemic, Haidilao, Xiao Nanguo, Xibei, Box Ma, etc. have also been selling cooking packs on e-commerce retail platforms.

Xiao Nan Guo has launched products such as Yangchun noodles, lion's head and sweet and sour chops in its Jingdong flagship store. Overall sales of these products have reportedly increased by more than 100 times compared to the same period in 2019, with many products emptying in seconds once they go live.

Haidilao launched the "open rice" semi-finished cooking packages, and the box horse workshop under the box horse also launched semi-finished vegetable packages.

Now it seems that this kind of self-help during the epidemic is becoming a normalized business.

In August of this year, Xibei Oat Village launched "Jia Guolong Kung Fu dishes" series of instant food packages. The dishes include sour soup oat noodles fish fish, Xibei hand-steak meat, Mongolian beef bones, etc., in the Xibei kung fu dishes small program, Xibei selection, box horse APP, Jingdong, Tmall and other platforms and Beijing Shilibao box horse stores selling, prices in tens of yuan to one hundred yuan ranging.

The clerk will be these expensive single portion of convenient instant food cooking package with induction cooker or microwave oven heating, with a "tin box" directly to the front of the diners.

In the user reviews, some users mentioned that some of the dishes tasted the same as what they would have tasted at Xibei, except for the aesthetics of the plate.

Cooking kits are seen as an inevitable trend by many in the industry.

In Japan, people's busy work schedules and the increase in the number of single-person households have fueled the rapid growth of convenience foods.

A study by Oriental Securities shows that with the socialization of women, the decline of rural self-sufficiency and the increase in the number of singles, the sales of frozen convenience foods are rising rapidly, and because of its convenience and speed, frozen convenience foods are favored by Japanese consumers.

The production of frozen foods increased from 355,000 tons in 1975 to 1,499,000 tons in 2000, a 4.2-fold increase, with the most popular being noodle and rice foods.

In China, in addition to its own ToC convenience food brands, restaurant brands, even pure ToB cooking bag factories are launching ToC products, began to go to home customers, in Jingdong, Tmall, Jinduo and other e-commerce channels to sell directly.

LeDing also started his own business this year, working with factories to customize cooking packages pushed toward home packaging, mainly through short video platforms for marketing, and he said sales were pretty good.

There are a lot of cooking bags for sale on Taobao

But for cooking bag factories, there are still some obstacles for existing cooking bags to go to the home - they're not very good at marketing and sales.

04 "quality and safety" of this hurdle

Although the cooking bag has been into the people's daily meals, but the mention of the cooking bag, the average person's first reaction is still far away. The biggest reason for the poor impression of people for the cooking bag is still the quality and safety concerns.

In fact, in recent years, there have been repeated image crises in the food packet industry.

In November 2018, a video of "the secret of cheap takeaway instant packets: the production process is disgusting, selling 400,000 copies a day" circulated online.

The video shows that Anhui Kanggangxiang Food Science and Technology Company Limited's instant food packages use cheap pork ribs as raw materials, injecting soy protein into beef, and the production conditions are dirty and poor.

After the incident, "kanggangxiang flagship store" products in Taobao shelves, the hungry platform also synchronized to carry out emergency investigation, will have to use the brand products of all merchants offline. Subsequently, the company publicly apologized, stopped production and business.

At the beginning of 2019, 1818 Golden Eye reported that a boss in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, broke the news that he joined a soybean milk store, in which the takeaway products are mostly processed by instant cooking packets, and questioned with a plastic bag directly in the boiling water heating cooking packets will cause cancer.

Although the market regulators have since investigated the quality of cooking packet production factory products and no problem, the manufacturer also responded to the restaurant owner broke the news in order to refund the franchise fee, but for the cooking packet industry, the company produced in Anhui Kanggangxiang, "the problem" cooking packet windstorm, the incident once again reduced the cooking packet in the user's mind trustworthiness. The company has a lot of people who are interested in the company's products and services.

In the view of some industry insiders, compared to the traditional restaurant store cooking, food factory production of cooking packets easier to regulate.

Generally speaking, the regular cooking bag factory in the production process control, food safety risk control have strict control, not all of those "unbearable" production environment.

Kexin Food and Nutrition Information Exchange Center, deputy director of food safety, Dr. Zhong Kai has written that the central kitchen model of catering has the advantage of intensive production and supervision, as long as it is standardized production, fast food packages (cooking packets) food safety risk is much smaller than the risk of the store site to produce dishes.

According to a report in New Ingredients, a source in the FDA said that the regulator is also supportive of centralized kitchens for cooking-package factories, because centralized production is easier to manage on a daily basis.

But in general, before the C-suite consumers can look at cooking bag products more rationally, it will take a process for cooking bags to enter the family widely.

(In the article, Zhang Shuang, Wang Yifei, and Le Machi are pseudonyms)