Click to read the original article for details.
The traditional retail industry's long-held principle of maximizing profits by lowering raw material costs is undergoing a conversion.
Recently, a subtle yet profound change has been occurring in the industry. Some attentive customers purchasing hot meals at Bianlifeng have noticed a note on their receipts: "Committed to making every meal with care." The most visible manifestation of this commitment is Bianlifeng's announcement that it has adopted Arawana non-GMO soybean oil in all its self-operated hot meals, making it the first chain convenience store in China to use Arawana oil for hot meals.
From a customer's perspective, the use of the same oil as upscale restaurants in convenience stores is already noteworthy; from an industry perspective, the fact that the cost of ingredients has increased while the prices of items on Bianlifeng's shelves remain unchanged is even more surprising.
For the same hot meal, the change in cooking oil undoubtedly improves quality, yet the price has not fluctuated with the change in value, making one wonder where Bianlifeng's confidence to "rewrite" economic principles comes from.
Ultimately, we find that Bianlifeng's "muscle-flexing" can only be attributed to its efficient use of data and technology. That is, while using premium ingredients, it keeps total costs unchanged by effectively controlling the latter.
A note on a shopping receipt about the change in cooking oil has thus become a precursor to the emergence of industry barriers.
Industry Threshold Raised by a Bottle of Cooking Oil
Not long ago, a joke-like news story went viral on social media: Lawton, one of Japan's three major convenience store chains alongside 7-Eleven and FamilyMart, had its president, Sadanobu Takezoe, complain half-seriously and half-jokingly in an interview that his son seemed to be in a rebellious phase—specifically praising FamilyMart's fried chicken in front of him and flaunting his FamilyMart points card.
Netizens laughed and shared the story, but then calmed down and realized that no matter how special the customer's relationship, they, like the market, will ultimately vote with their feet.
In China, a market much larger than Japan's, a third-party statistic recently showed that the "food and drink" business currently has a market size of $2 trillion. One-third is fresh produce, one-third is packaged food, and the remaining third is hot meals.
Hot meals, with a market size of $600 billion, are now standard in convenience stores alongside pre-packaged food and fresh produce. Contrary to public perception, this market has not seen any Matthew effect of the strong getting stronger; even KFC, a mature chain restaurant model, holds only a 1% market share.
This makes hot meals a tempting business opportunity with "vast prospects and great potential."
A veteran entrepreneur in this field once said publicly that for convenience stores to grow, they must offer meals; without meals, consumer visit frequency will not increase. The paradox is that once meals are offered, food safety issues arise. Convenience stores traditionally use a franchise model, which has weaker control compared to direct operation, increasing the risk of food safety problems. Therefore, a responsible convenience store brand typically expands slowly.
Moving forward cautiously in the meal sector has become the only choice for Bianlifeng, which insists on direct operation. The most direct competition naturally comes from the quality, taste, and hygiene of ingredients. Bianlifeng's approach is to use its own brands and production to ensure food quality and flavor.
For example, for traditional classic meals in convenience stores—such as bento boxes, hot meals, sushi, oden, fried items, and baked goods—Bianlifeng consistently chooses its own brands, treating them as the most direct differentiation, and has been sparing no cost to source locally, organizing the best local supply chains for service.
The supply chain is also one of the most important links in the new retail concept in recent years. Weng Yinuo, founder of Hongzhang Capital, who has investment experience in this field, believes that retail is essentially two businesses: one is grabbing traffic, and the other is the supply chain. Grabbing traffic, no matter how the form changes, is about meeting consumer needs. In the long run, the core competitiveness of most retail industries often lies in the supply chain.
The highlight of the supply chain is five-star ingredients and product extremism. The latter is a strategy whose leading effect determines the realization of the former.
Taking the already fiercely competitive Shanghai convenience store market as an example, Bianlifeng's approach is to first compare leading suppliers in East China, select a factory with the best hardware conditions, then make it a supplier through capital cooperation, and find complementary partners among other fresh food factories in East China to ensure its products are of the highest quality. Bianlifeng sees this as the most important foundation for gaining customer trust and repeat purchases.
Additionally, in certain categories, Bianlifeng does not exclude ordinary brand products replacing its own brands, which better meets customers' diverse preferences while indirectly shortening its supply chain. However, as a pursuit of perfection, Bianlifeng still insists on occasionally "reluctantly parting" with certain products, for example, requiring partners to first meet food safety requirements; if they cannot, even the most popular internet-famous foods will be resolutely rejected.
This not only became the basic value for Bianlifeng's choice of Arawana as its hot meal oil but also objectively raised the industry's competitive threshold, potentially marking an epoch-making leap in convenience store dining.
Ingredient Selection Under Industrial Standards
Oil is just a small entry point for Bianlifeng's quiet industry revolution; the ultimate selection of more ingredients is where its real strategy lies.
They conducted a meticulous R&D effort to change the public's ingrained impression that Chinese cuisine cannot be industrialized or quantified.
For example, Bianlifeng's laboratory is so meticulous that it has set up many industrial testing devices, repurposing equipment originally used for testing the hardness of metals and plastic blocks to measure the hardness of potatoes and the length of green beans. It is so meticulous that after physically quantifying ingredients, it continues to quantify soaking time and stir-frying time, achieving second-level quality control.
These are actually "efforts outside the poem." Take the basic hot dish "scrambled eggs with tomatoes" at Bianlifeng stores in Beijing as an example; the process involves far more than the concept and steps of a home-cooked dish.
First, the fresh food processing plant in the region purchases tomatoes grown in the outskirts of Beijing year-round, and defines the ingredients based on seasonal characteristics: In winter, tomatoes in the north are grown in greenhouses, with short sunlight exposure, low sugar content, and less flavor; in summer, tomatoes are naturally mature, with ample sunlight and high sugar content. Although they are all tomatoes, they are essentially two different ingredients.
Second, based on ingredient differences, the production process is differentiated. Even the fresh food processing plant develops the dish as a new product according to the season: developers study the sweetness and acidity of the seasonal fruit and supplement with varying amounts of ingredients.
For example, for winter scrambled eggs with tomatoes, the chef will add more sugar, and even some ketchup, to enhance the flavor; in summer, the amount of seasoning must be reduced to ensure appropriate taste.
That is, every season change, this dish is treated as a new dish, undergoing a process signed off by over ten people including the factory director and managers, and then sent to headquarters for a tasting evaluation alongside benchmark competitors. Finally, a 50-person team conducts a blind test; only if it passes the blind test score and ranks first among all benchmark products can it be sent to stores.
Just like Tencent's classic horse race mechanism, Bianlifeng also maintains two fresh food factories that develop the same dishes back-to-back, ultimately selecting the best. Although not achieving first place in R&D means wasted effort, from a brand perspective, Bianlifeng uses this method to ensure optimal food quality.
Looking further, consider Bianlifeng's use of beef from South America. Uruguay, known as the "Switzerland of South America," has grasslands covering over 80% of its territory, meaning each cow can enjoy pasture the size of a football field. Thus, Uruguayan beef, raised without any growth hormones, enters Bianlifeng's menu along with Chinese yellow potatoes to make the traditional hot dish "potato stewed beef."
For refrigerated or frozen foods, Bianlifeng uses a full cold chain delivery to stores, ensuring no prolonged temperature loss. Intelligent temperature control devices installed in warehouses and logistics vehicles are connected to a 24-hour real-time monitoring management backend, allowing temperature and location tracking throughout the logistics process; any anomaly is immediately detected. When ingredients arrive at the store, the first thing staff do is not unload but take temperature readings on site and record them strictly. Any anomaly leads to rejection of acceptance.
It is understood that in addition to establishing an internal source tracing mechanism and having staff regularly go deep into raw material production areas for testing, Bianlifeng's hot meal processing workshops employ professional chefs. Whether it's tomatoes from the outskirts of Beijing or beef from South America, they provide different seasoning ratios and cooking temperatures based on the texture of each batch, using professional measuring tools to test sugar and salt levels.
For a chain convenience store, it is clearly not difficult to achieve refinement in just one link today; but achieving refinement from ingredient source to finished product sale is not simple. Relying solely on manual labor can no longer achieve such efficiency.
Technology and data enter the scene.
An Arms Race in Cost Control
If the hot meal business among convenience stores is compared to a war, staying at the surface of penny-pinching price wars is at most a close-quarters brawl with little technical content.
But don't forget, this is the era of industrial internet and big data; players naturally need to equip themselves with advanced weapons to support future impactful strategies.
Bianlifeng's approach is, in addition to selecting quality ingredients, to control costs through large-scale strategic storage and ensure quality through technical supervision. The most direct approach, for example, if it anticipates a rise in the price of a cooking ingredient and must make a dish related to it, it will purchase large quantities from non-epidemic areas for strategic storage.
For categories that account for a large portion of convenience store sales and are complex to develop and produce, Bianlifeng directly invests in fresh food factories to control quality. The latter's main requirement is a complete, traceable safety production record. After investment, Bianlifeng sometimes continues to digitally transform the entire factory, such as coordinating the integration of a food QR code shelf-life tracking system and building a production process inspection system and a general inspection system to ensure compliance at various process checkpoints.
For raw materials, Bianlifeng's hot meals mainly source fresh meat and vegetables from first-class enterprises such as COFCO, Shunxin, and Fucheng Wufeng. In warehouse management, it has established independent temperature layers for ambient, refrigerated, and frozen storage, achieving electronic batch management for food items and an automated sorting system to ensure first-in, first-out.
Of course, the transportation process is equally important. Bianlifeng uses a full-temperature electronic temperature tracking and alarm system to prevent temperature loss risks during transportation. To ensure processed ingredients are safely delivered to stores, Bianlifeng installs GPS and Bluetooth thermometers on cold chain logistics vehicles, with the backend monitoring the vehicle temperature in real time. Any anomaly triggers an automatic alarm, and the ingredients are immediately discarded or rejected by the store.
For example, during cold chain transportation, if the driver turns off the air conditioning to save fuel, the backend system will alert to an abnormal environment.
Next, ingredients are delivered to the store. In the processing flow, Bianlifeng uses a full set of hot meal production lines purchased from Japan. For instance, the steam woks used for stir-frying not only ensure even temperature but also prevent food safety hazards from uneven heating in traditional woks.
The final step is storing these hot meals in warm water holding cabinets to maintain a constant temperature, ensuring that the first and last customers receive meals at the same temperature.
In this way, Bianlifeng has gradually achieved standardization of raw materials, procurement, logistics integration, and cooking, improving cost efficiency and minimizing waste while ensuring high-quality ingredients. Through data collection and analysis, the saturation of hot meal orders at each store has reached new highs.
It can be said that behind every bento box in the customer's hand is a set of precise production processes. It is worth mentioning that if processed hot meals are not sold within the optimal consumption time, Bianlifeng's self-developed freshness PAD will automatically alarm, prompting staff to discard them under camera surveillance.
It is precisely because of such a precise technical management and driving system that the service standards of over 700 Bianlifeng stores are highly consistent. For example, if a customer wants Bianlifeng's braised chicken with rice, no matter which store they go to, they will get exactly 4 pieces of chicken and 3 pieces of potato, no more, no less.
In light of this, the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration awarded Bianlifeng the first convenience store hot meal business license and, using Bianlifeng stores as a "blueprint," formulated administrative licensing guidance for the convenience store hot food sub-category. This is likely to become the hot meal supply standard for the entire Shanghai convenience store industry.
Looking back, we can also say that it is precisely because of the meticulous attention to detail by companies like Bianlifeng—from oil to cold chain, from five-star ingredients to technology—that today's retail industry is rewriting its past ills. These actions may seem clumsy, but sharpening the axe does not delay cutting wood. These changes not only bring market trust to Bianlifeng but also indirectly set increasingly standardized rules for the industry.
By breaking the conventional rules of the retail industry and polishing details with technology, Bianlifeng's product extremism will ultimately drive the industry's upgrade and transformation; and the ultimate beneficiaries will be consumers who were once anxious about food safety.
Source: Zhou Tian Finance (techfinsight), Author: Yinuo.