Catalogue of articles
First, the essence of prefabricated dishes: the inevitable result of the development of food industrialization, the product of the general trend.
Second, the core value of prefabricated dishes: B-end products are stable and cost-saving, while C-end products improve efficiency and experience better.
Third, the scale and development trend of prefabricated vegetable market: the market potential is trillions, the 2C market scale is hundreds of billions, and the concentration of quick-frozen vegetable market is higher.
4.2C Competition pattern of prefabricated vegetable market: All kinds of players enter the market, and the business model has yet to be verified on a large scale.
Five, the key factors of the long-term "winning" of the pre-cooked dish brand: early product assembly, middle and late efficiency.
6. Externality of prefabricated vegetable industry: it has greatly promoted sustainable development.
We are going through rounds of epidemic testing. On inconvenient days, how to solve three meals a day at home has become a problem that everyone must face every day. At this time, prefabricated vegetables become the best solution: compared with fresh products, prefabricated vegetables have a long storage time, are convenient and fast, and are more nutritious and have diverse tastes than traditional fast food products.
From the market point of view, the epidemic has indeed driven the growth of the prefabricated vegetable industry, and the education cost of C-end consumers has naturally decreased. In 2022, the sales volume of Ding Dong New Year's Eve prepared dishes increased by over 400%, the sales volume of box horse prepared new year's dishes increased by 345% compared with 20021Spring Festival, and the sales volume of "Tintin Lazy Dishes" served by Kapok Capital exceeded 50 million yuan in Tik Tok.
From the perspective of capital, the investment and financing of prefabricated vegetables are also very active. According to statistics, in 20021year, there were 23 investment and financing events in the prefabricated vegetable industry, and the financing amount exceeded 5 billion yuan. The prefabricated vegetable chain enterprise "Weizhixiang" also successfully landed in A shares on 202 1.
Is the prepared food a short-term outlet for funds and epidemics, or does it really have long-term opportunities and growth potential?
If you look at it for a long time, you will find that prefabricated vegetables have been a rapidly developing industry in recent years. According to the data of Huachuang Securities, the compound annual growth rate of China's prefabricated vegetable industry is about 20% from 2010 to 2020, and the market size of prefabricated vegetables has reached 23 10 billion yuan in 2020. According to the consulting data of Ai Media, the scale of prefabricated vegetable industry in China was 345.9 billion yuan in 20021year, and it is estimated that the market scale of prefabricated vegetables will reach 654.38+0072 billion yuan in 2026, and the prefabricated vegetable industry will become the next trillion market in the foreseeable future.
Main point
Prefabricated vegetables are the inevitable product of the development of food industrialization.
The change of society urges the family kitchen to change constantly, and consumers need better solutions for eating at home. With the progress of food industrialization, prefabricated dishes provide product solutions with higher efficiency, better taste, better nutrition and better safety.
Precast dishes are product-driven categories, and product-oriented companies will lead the industry.
Prefabricated vegetables have the characteristics of standardization, low loss and high turnover because of their remarkable industrialization characteristics. Product companies have excellent product research and development capabilities, sustained brand potential, omni-channel penetration capabilities and efficient supply chain integration capabilities, and will occupy a more important position in the eyes of users in the future, and have the opportunity to continue to lead the development of the industry.
The strategy of large single product is more effective and step by step.
In the initial stage, startups should adopt the strategy of "big single product" and choose products that cover the most pain points of users and can be broken through at a single point, which is more conducive to gathering resources at the marketing end and gaining scale advantages and R&D depth at the supply end faster.
Video e-commerce channels have accelerated the popularity of prefabricated dishes.
At this stage, both traditional channels and self-built channels have to pay high user education costs. Video e-commerce is the best platform to educate users of pre-cooked dishes, providing the most efficient expression and the most matching decision-making scenarios. Start-ups should quickly establish brand awareness in advantageous channels and complete the mental construction of users.
Scale effect is a long-term winner, and enterprises should lay out the upstream supply chain as soon as possible.
The cost-effective characteristics of prefabricated vegetables determine the limited premium space, so it is very important to build its own supply chain and extend it to the upstream of the industry. At present, the industry is in the introduction period, and its own high-quality production capacity will be in the first-Mover advantage position in the future competition.
First, the essence of prefabricated dishes: the inevitable result of the development of food industrialization, the product of the general trend.
The definition of "pre-cooked dishes" is the finished or semi-finished products made of raw materials such as agriculture, livestock, poultry and aquatic products, which are pretreated (such as cutting, stirring, pickling, rolling, shaping and seasoning) and auxiliary materials. The production of prefabricated dishes comes from two forces, one is the evolution of food processing industry, and the other is the continuous higher demand of catering industry for supply chain. As a collection of categories, prefabricated dishes have rapidly grown into a huge food processing industry. The core added value in the process lies in the industrialization of semi-finished vegetables through industrial sterilization, washing and cutting (clean vegetable export) and pickling and seasoning.
The industrial transformation promoted by the scientific and technological revolution is repeated in every basic category of human life. "Food, clothing, housing and transportation", as the just need of human life, has experienced a constant wave of upgrading in the long history. In the sixties and seventies of last century, sewing machines were "bulky" furniture necessary for every family. With the development of industrial clothing technology, consumers can buy extremely rich and affordable clothing products more conveniently. "Living" and "traveling" are also constantly upgrading, from bungalows to buildings, from manual decoration to assembly decoration, from walking to bicycles, from automobile popularization to aircraft high-speed rail and so on.
As far as "food" is concerned, the way people make and eat meals is constantly changing, and the functions of traditional family kitchens are constantly being deconstructed and upgraded:
The first time is the rise of eating out, and the penetration rate of catering has been increasing. With the rapid development in the past 20 years, the penetration rate of catering in the food consumption market has reached 40%. The second time is the rise of take-away based on information technology, which provides consumers with new choices besides cooking. /kloc-in the past 0/0 years, the penetration rate of take-away food relative to canteen food has reached more than 15%.
With the intensification of urbanization and the change of social structure, consumers need a better solution to eat at home, taking into account the needs of efficiency, taste, safety and nutrition. We believe that on the basis of the maturity of 2B prefabricated dishes, 2C prefabricated dishes will become the development direction of simplifying the process and upgrading the efficiency of family kitchens.
We can understand the pre-cooked food industry as the bottom food industrialization, and realize the optimal solution of efficiency on the basis of improving food safety. The added value lies in the decrease of taste, nutrition and consumer satisfaction. The process of food industrialization is unstoppable, and we believe that prefabricated vegetables will usher in huge market opportunities. Industrialized food is more standardized (such as liquor, condiments, dairy products, bean products and meat products). After industrial sterilization, it has the characteristics of long transportation distance, long shelf life and safety. Food enterprises can use standardized channel operation and brand investment to incite large-scale growth.
Second, the core value of prefabricated dishes: B-end products are stable and cost-saving, while C-end products improve efficiency and experience better.
Precast dishes have different calibers and definitions in different contexts. Generally speaking, it can be divided into three categories: normal temperature cooking package, refrigerated clean vegetables and frozen prepared food. Among them, the quick-frozen dishes, mainly pickled fish and streaky chicken, are growing rapidly, which is also the most common narrow classification of prefabricated dishes on the market at present.
The core value of prefabricated dishes can be seen from two aspects: B-end and C-end:
B-end: The core value of prefabricated dishes in catering enterprises lies in stable production and cost saving. The use of semi-finished dishes can reduce the number of kitchen staff and kitchen area for enterprises. Based on the advantages of centralized procurement and reduced consumption, it can effectively save costs and meet the needs of customers' taste, nutrition and dining experience.
C-end: The core value of prefabricated dishes for C-end consumers lies in providing a better dining plan, and being able to enjoy a relatively complicated dish efficiently, so as to meet the dining needs of consumers at the price of 20-45 yuan for 15-30 minutes, and provide a certain sense of pleasant experience while being highly convenient. The rise of C-end consumer demand conforms to the general trend of miniaturization of family size, increase of female labor participation rate and urbanization rate.
Third, the scale and development trend of prefabricated vegetable market: the market potential is trillions, the 2C market scale is hundreds of billions, and the concentration of quick-frozen vegetable market is higher.
According to the research report of Huachuang Securities, the market size of assembled vegetables in China has reached 23 1 billion yuan in 2020, and the compound growth rate from 20 10 to 2020 is as high as 20%, which is expected to reach nearly one trillion yuan in the next decade.
Compared with foreign mature markets, China's prefabricated vegetable market has great growth potential:
In 2020, the market size of the United States will be about 200 billion US dollars (1.2 trillion yuan), and that of Japan will be about 9.8 trillion yen (500 billion yuan). At present, the market size of China's prefabricated vegetable industry is about one sixth of that of the United States and one third of that of Japan.
Looking at the B-end and C-end separately, the ratio of B-end and C-end in China prefabricated vegetable market is about 8:2, and that in Japan is about 6: 4.
Due to the higher complexity of China cuisine and the abundance of SKUs, we believe that the market penetration rate of China's prefabricated dishes will surpass that of the developed markets such as the United States and Japan, especially in the C-end market.
According to the penetration rate 15%-20% of prefabricated vegetables in catering ingredients, the scale of 2C prefabricated vegetable market can reach hundreds of billions of RMB in five years. Referring to the quick-frozen permeability of the United States and Japan, based on the quick-frozen permeability of assembled vegetables in China in the future 10%- 15%, quick-frozen vegetables (narrow assembled vegetables) will also have a market space of 1000 billion. Eventually, trillions of fresh markets will be gradually replaced by prefabricated vegetables, and the prefabricated vegetable market itself will reach trillions of volumes, becoming the main solution for home cooking and restaurant chefs.
From the perspective of market concentration, we believe that the supply and demand structure of prefabricated vegetables industry will have a certain impact on the promotion of market concentration because of its timeliness of procurement, sudden demand and diversity of supply, and may be closer to leisure snacks, fresh food and other industries.
We believe that the concentration of quick-frozen prefabricated vegetable market with standardized and long-term preservation will be higher than that with non-standardized and short-term preservation. The core lies in the higher possibility of industrial scale and the cost advantage of development is better than that with short-term preservation. Due to the complex material composition and the difficulty of supply chain coordination, the development space of a single enterprise is limited. Because the taste requirements of different regions are quite different, and the transportation distance of short-term pickled prefabricated vegetables is limited, the distribution is more borne by store-type enterprises, so it is more likely that short-term pickled prefabricated vegetables will present final regional competition.
4.2C Competition pattern of prefabricated vegetable market: All kinds of players enter the market, and the business model has yet to be verified on a large scale.
1 and various 2C brands have their own advantages, and actively grasp the development trend of the industry.
At present, the brands of prefabricated dishes can be roughly divided into five categories: product type, channel type, raw material type and catering type.
Product type: representing the brand's taste, taste, lazy food, Mai Ma, etc. It started from the specialized production of various prefabricated dishes, without the thinking constraints of catering or supply chain. Brands can often grasp the user population and usage scenarios more accurately, and reshape product forms, specifications, pricing and other dimensions with users' thinking.
Channel type: representative brand Box Horse, Ding Dong grocery store, pot ring, etc. The advantage of channel brand lies in the high overlap of major consumers, the brand has a sense of trust at the client, and it is closer to users in terms of delivery time or physical space distance.
Frozen products: on behalf of the brand Anjing Food, the sub-brand "Mr. Frozen Products" was launched to give play to the synergistic effect of the original channels and the infrastructure capacity of the cold chain. There are 7 sub-warehouses and more than 65,438+0,000 dealers in China.
Type of raw materials: representing the brand New Hope and Guolian Aquatic Products, its advantages lie in the stable supply of ingredients and cost advantages, which are highlighted in industrialized single products, such as the beautiful crisp meat of New Hope. In 2002 1 year, the sales of single products exceeded1100 million yuan. For a wider range of dishes, product research and development needs to be transformed.
Catering category: representative brands include Jia Kung Fu Cuisine, Haidilao Cuisine and Wangjiadu in Dongpo of Meizhou. Prefabricated dishes can help the original brands to expand the home scenes of existing customers, and the advantage of catering brands lies in a high degree of flavor reduction. Observing its product ideas, we can see that its signature products and cuisines are basically extensions of restaurant cuisines, such as Jia's kung fu beef bones and braised pork on the east slope of Meizhou.
2. With diversified channels, Tik Tok has become the dominant channel for the spread of 2C prepared dishes.
At present, the purchase channels of fresh food are extremely convenient. Offline KA, farmers' market, online shelf e-commerce, video e-commerce and fresh e-commerce are all optional channels for pre-cooked dishes. So which channels should enterprises give priority to?
We believe that video e-commerce represented by Tik Tok is the best platform to educate cooked food brand users. Because users have not yet established a clear category awareness of prefabricated dishes, it is difficult for traditional shelf stores and shelf e-commerce companies to stimulate users' consumption needs. The advantage of video e-commerce is that it can quickly complete consumer education with content-oriented marketing. Pre-cooked dishes, such as pickled fish, crayfish, pork belly chicken, etc., are directly turned into sensible dishes through video presentation, which not only brings strong sensory stimulation to users, but also completes the category education of how users should use pre-cooked dishes. Pre-cooked dishes and video e-commerce have natural adaptability, and the consumption decision-making scenarios are highly matched.
For the brand of prefabricated vegetables, the best way to play at this stage is to use the "Dongfeng" of Tik Tok e-commerce. 202 1, 65438 1 September, the GMV of Tik Tok e-commerce increased by 7.9 times year-on-year, and 202 1 overall GMV was close to1trillion yuan. According to the massive engine data, the penetration rate of live e-commerce in China in 20021year is expected to be 14.3%, which means that the growth of Tik Tok e-commerce based on 650-700 million monthly activities is still in the early stage.
Taking "Ding Ding Lazy Dishes" as an example, based on the insight into the people and channels of pre-cooked dishes, the company chose the all in Tik Tok channel during its opening. At present, the monthly sales in Tik Tok has exceeded 50 million yuan. "Ding Ding Lazy Dishes" quickly established a compound growth path of self-broadcasting and talent matrix within half a year. On the one hand, the talent matrix is used as the growth lever to establish content assets that effectively resist the convergence of bidding models; On the other hand, self-broadcasting is the basic disk to complete closed-loop traffic harvesting.
Prefabricated vegetable market
3. Multi-SKU is the mainstream solution, but we think the big single product strategy is the best solution.
It is observed that players in the market generally adopt multi-SKU strategy to try to make a good table. For example, Wei Zhixiang SKU 200+, Mr. Frozen Product SKU 400+. Different from the product thinking of many enterprises, we believe that enterprises should concentrate on building a large single product matrix at the initial stage of listing, and do fine work at a single point.
From the demand side, large single products have the advantages of concentrated pain points for short-term users and large long-term market space. During the introduction period, due to the lack of domestic families' understanding of prefabricated dishes, the "hard dishes" of large single items effectively meet the pain points of young people's limited cooking skills. Users feel the convenience and high cost performance of prefabricated dishes with the help of large single items, and then the path to buy other prefabricated dishes is more reasonable.
Moreover, China has a vast domestic demand market, which is enough to support the development of a single product. Take pickled fish as an example. In 2022, the market scale of catering pickled fish in China exceeded 40 billion yuan, which was divided into leisure pickled fish, fast pickled fish and other sub-categories, and brands such as Taier pickled fish (202 1 revenue nearly 3 billion yuan) and Fish Companion You (with nearly 1 500 stores) were born. According to reasonable calculation, the market of prepackaged pickled fish will reach tens of billions of yuan in the future.
From the supply side, sports can effectively play the focus advantage of supply chain organization ability. China is rich in delicious food and limited in region, so it is difficult for a single brand to cover all tastes. If enterprises are involved in too many categories, it is difficult to form scale advantages, research and development depth and quality control on single products, and food safety problems are more likely to occur, and the taste is easy to become mediocre. "Ding Ding Lazy Cuisine" chooses the big single product route. The company chooses products from the characteristics of "full scene, full crowd". At present, a large single product matrix represented by pickled fish, shrimp cake and streaky chicken has been explored, and the monthly sales of pickled fish is close to 30 million yuan.
Five, the key factors of the long-term "winning" of the pre-cooked dish brand: early product assembly, middle and late efficiency.
R&D ability of products: R&D ability of pre-cooked vegetable enterprises is particularly important, which requires insight into user needs, highly reduced taste and standardized production, as well as nutrition and health requirements.
Omni-channel ability: Because of the high homogeneity of pre-cooked vegetable end products, channel ability is very important, which needs the support of service power, cost advantage and specific customer relationship.
Quickly establish scale advantage: the raw material cost of prefabricated vegetable enterprises is relatively high, and the cost advantage brought by scale will be obviously greater than that of catering industry.
Supply chain capacity: enterprises should try to control the production line as soon as possible and set up barriers at the production end to ensure production efficiency and taste stability. In addition, referring to the gross profit margin of listed companies of frozen food, we can see that the premium space of prefabricated vegetable brands is limited, and enterprises need to extend to the upstream of the industry to enhance the profit space. Japan's leading pre-cooked vegetable enterprises have been in the top two positions in Japan for a long time. Its 72 subsidiaries span the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, covering procurement, food processing, warehousing and logistics, and can give full play to industrial synergy.
We believe that in the early stage of the market, the core competitiveness of enterprises is product strength. We are optimistic about the idea of selecting products according to the user's thinking, designing large single products in line with the mainstream trend, taking into account the industrialization efficiency and the stability of the supply side, thus leading the development of prefabricated dishes. For example, Japan's pre-cooked vegetable company Rileng, in the 1990s, when microwave ovens were just popularized, introduced quick-frozen fried patties suitable for microwave cooking, which quickly gained great response and accelerated the popularity of pre-cooked vegetables in families.
When the market matures and the competition intensifies, the product taste difference between brands gradually narrows, and channel efficiency and supply chain efficiency will become the new moat of enterprises. For pre-cooked vegetable products brands, if they can achieve high brand potential, omni-channel penetration and efficient supply chain integration, they will occupy a more important position in the eyes of users in the future and are expected to win a bigger battlefield.
6. Externality of prefabricated vegetable industry: it has greatly promoted sustainable development.
As the general trend of food industry revolution, prefabricated dishes will not only meet people's needs for convenience, nutrition and health, but also have a huge positive impact on our society:
1. Low-carbon life and sustainable development: The family kitchen in the existing society is equivalent to a small processing factory, and every meal will produce a lot of carbon emissions and energy consumption. Prefabricated vegetable products externalize the scattered family kitchen processing into centralized industrial production, and consumers only need to perform simple heating and other operations, which is of great significance in carbon emission reduction.
2. Reduce waste and protect the environment: The high loss characteristics of fresh products bring huge loss and waste in the huge circulation process every year, and at the same time, it also leads to a series of environmental problems such as garbage disposal, which generates a lot of costs at the social level. The reform of prefabricated vegetables is expected to greatly reduce the additional losses and costs in these areas.
Original reference:
"Prefabricated dishes usher in the" golden age ",who can lead the next trillion market | the crown of kapok", Kapok Capital Chen Shiyi, 2022-04-116: 43.