"Sweet and sour pork, sautéed fish slices,扁尖老鸭煲..." In just one hour, a nine-dish meal with soup can be served. Nowadays, pre-made dish sets popular on major e-commerce platforms solve the cooking problems that trouble many young people.
Pre-made dishes are pre-prepared semi-finished dishes. Manufacturers process the dishes in advance in central kitchens, then freeze or vacuum-pack them for sale. After purchasing, consumers only need to heat or simply cook them.
In other words, even if one's cooking skills are not great, they can still make dishes they normally couldn't with the help of pre-made dishes.
In the past, pre-made dishes were mainly for catering businesses. However, after the 2020 pandemic, the "lazy and homebound economy" boomed, and pre-made dishes met people's demand for "delicious and convenient."
Catering companies affected by the pandemic also seized this lifeline to upgrade their business models. Leading catering companies such as Haidilao, Yunhaiyao, Meizhou Dongpo, and Xibei have launched pre-made dish products for ordinary consumers.
According to Qichacha data, there are currently 71,900 pre-made dish-related enterprises in China, with 12,500 newly registered in 2020 alone. In April this year, "the first stock in the pre-made dish industry," Weizhixiang, went public, and its stock price rose over 300% in just over a month.
According to Guosen Securities estimates, the current pre-made dish market in China is about 300 billion yuan, and in the next six to seven years, the market size is expected to reach 1 trillion yuan. In the long run, it could even exceed 3 trillion yuan.
With capital chasing and players flooding in, can pre-made dishes under the trend win over young people's stomachs?
Pre-made dishes ≠ Cooking packs
When mentioning "pre-made dishes," many people first think of the cooking packs used in the fast-food industry.
Yu Ting, who has worked at several fast-food restaurants, told Baobian that the noodle shops and rice bowl restaurants she worked at almost all used cooking packs.
"The store only had two pots: one rice cooker for cooking rice, and another pot for boiling water to heat the cooking packs. Pour the heated pack over the cooked rice, and a rice bowl dish is done." Yu Ting took the part-time job because she loved the rice bowl dishes at that restaurant, but after witnessing the entire process, she never ate them again.
Yu Ting said: "The cooking packs for fish-flavored shredded pork and kung pao chicken cost only 5-6 yuan, but a rice bowl dish sells for 16-20 yuan." According to her, the shelf life of these packs ranges from one year to over one and a half years.
Searching for "cooking pack" wholesale online, you can find fish-flavored shredded pork, mushroom chicken, meicai pork, etc., with prices concentrated between 3-10 yuan.
Lin Hua, who has experience with cooking packs, told Baobian that she used to be too lazy to cook and didn't want to order takeout, so she bought a "10-dish tasting combo" of cooking packs online for 50 yuan, but the experience was not good.
"A bit disappointing. Most of each pack was sauce, and it was too oily and salty, not to my taste."
In fact, pre-made dishes are diverse and mainly fall into four categories:
One is ready-to-eat food, which can be eaten after opening, such as pickled pepper chicken feet; one is ready-to-heat food, which can be eaten after heating; another is ready-to-cook food, which refers to semi-finished ingredients that have been relatively deeply processed and stored refrigerated or at room temperature, and can be directly cooked with seasonings; the last is ready-to-prepare food, which is cut and cleaned meat or vegetables.
Baobian learned from a pre-made dish manufacturer that the processing method is one of the differences between pre-made dishes and cooking packs. Pre-made dishes use low-temperature freezing to ensure freshness, while some cooking packs stored at room temperature may contain preservatives.
Additionally, pre-made dishes are sold immediately after production, and in principle, they reach consumers within a month or a few days. In terms of cooking methods, most pre-made dishes require simple stir-frying, while cooking packs can be eaten after simple heating.
The poor reputation of cooking packs is related to a video publicly released online in 2018. In the video titled "The Secret of Cheap Takeout Instant Food Packs," a videographer went undercover at a cooking factory in Hefei.
This company mainly engaged in the production, research, and sales of frozen cooking packs, covering more than 20 provinces. However, this large cooking pack manufacturer had food safety issues. In the video, a worker was using a shovel to scoop out pork ribs that had been stored for nearly a year.
After this incident was exposed, the reputation of cooking packs plummeted.
Compared to cooking packs with a "not-so-good reputation," the processing method of pre-made dishes is safer. The central kitchen of pre-made dishes uses production lines composed of pre-made dish processing equipment such as washing machines, vegetable cutters, and packaging machines, producing a large number of standardized, normalized, and uniform-tasting pre-made dishes for the market.
Although the price of pre-made dishes is generally higher than cooking packs, they are also stricter in quality control.
300 billion yuan a year, who is consuming?
Song Jia, a post-90s white-collar worker living alone, learned about pre-made dishes through short video platforms. Once, Song Jia wanted to invite friends over, and since she wasn't good at cooking, she thought of pre-made dishes. She decided to try them and ordered a pre-made dish home banquet set online.
In less than an hour, a table of dishes was ready, and the taste surprised her. "I instantly felt like a chef. Even West Lake vinegar fish and lion's head meatballs were made by my hands. It gave me a great sense of achievement." Since then, Song Jia has become a loyal fan of pre-made dishes.
Under the "lazy and homebound economy," the rapid development of channels such as supermarkets, communities, new retail, and convenience stores has brought pre-made dishes closer to public life.
According to 2020 Tmall data, sales of pre-made dishes increased by 111% year-on-year, and sales of new convenient instant foods like self-heating hot pot grew by over 50% on Tmall, showing a rapid growth trend in demand for pre-made dishes. During this year's Spring Festival, because many people stayed put for the holiday, sales of pre-made dishes on Tmall increased 16 times compared to last year.
At the same time, with more catering companies entering the market, people have a richer choice of pre-made dish brands.
During the 2020 National Day holiday, Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine opened, mainly selling eight major cuisines and Northwestern cuisine. Haidilao also launched pre-made dishes such as spicy diced chicken and tomato potato beef stew in 2020. Meanwhile, new retail companies like Hema Fresh and Miss Fresh are also laying out the pre-made dish industry. Hema Fresh and Yonghui Superstores now have pre-made dish sections.
(Photo of seafood pre-made dish sales area at Hema Fresh supermarket) __
Compared to ordinary people's consumption of pre-made dishes, the larger market demand comes from catering companies.
For catering companies, costs such as labor, rent, and ingredients are rising. Pre-made dishes and cooking packs can reduce labor costs and improve efficiency. Especially for chain restaurants, using pre-made dishes allows for unified taste, making batch replication and large-scale expansion possible.
According to a research report by Guosen Securities, the current ratio of B-end to C-end in China's pre-made dish market is about 8:2.
According to data disclosed by the listed pre-made dish company Weizhixiang, as of December 31, 2020, Weizhixiang had 1,117 franchise stores with sales of 320 million yuan. Franchise store sales accounted for 52.06% of total sales, indicating that half of the revenue comes from B-end large customers.
For B-end customers, pre-made dish suppliers are mainly divided into two categories: one is food factories represented by Weizhixiang and Haodelai, and the other is third-party central kitchens represented by Haidilao Shuhai, Greentown Supply Chain, and Sanxuan Supply Chain.
For food factories to achieve more profits, they rely on economies of scale, covering as many dispersed downstream customers as possible to minimize the production cost of a single SKU.
From Weizhixiang's prospectus, expanding market scale is an important development strategy. Currently, Weizhixiang's product sales mainly cover Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, and it has gradually expanded to Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, and other places.
Similarly, third-party central kitchens also pursue maximum economies of scale. However, for third-party central kitchens, finding a track to deeply cultivate vertically may be a better choice.
Taking Sanxuan Supply Chain as an example, this company chose to deeply cultivate in the fields of skewers and hot pot ingredients, cooperating with traditional food factories to help them reduce processing steps such as skewering and marinating.
The mystery of "wok hei" and the challenge of taste
Although the pre-made dish industry has formed a certain scale and consumption habits, it still faces some challenges.
On one hand, compared with Western food, Chinese food encounters some problems in quantification. Many Western dishes have a quantifiable and precise cooking system. As long as you control temperature, time, doneness, and seasoning ratios according to the recipe, cooking a delicious meal is not a problem.
However, the texture of quantified Chinese food cannot be compared to freshly stir-fried, because the freshness changes.
Chinese people have long had a dietary habit of pursuing "freshness." Take staple foods as an example; even for grains, they emphasize "new rice, new flour." Frozen goods, stored goods, and industrially produced pre-made dishes are still rejected by some consumers.
Moreover, Chinese people also value "wok hei" when eating. This concept, born in the kitchen, invisible and intangible, has always existed in the hearts of Chinese people.
Although Song Jia is already a loyal consumer of pre-made dishes, when asked "How is the taste of pre-made dishes?" she still said: "The lion's head meatballs and West Lake vinegar fish taste good, but I always feel something is missing—the 'wok hei.' Maybe it's just my imagination."
On the other hand, the taste of Chinese food is extremely uncertain. Take simple tomato scrambled eggs as an example; there is a difference between "sweet in the south and salty in the north." Even in the same region, tastes may differ. Li Jiang from Sichuan told Baobian: "Fish-flavored shredded pork has its own characteristics in the east, west, south, north, and center of Sichuan."
This diversity and uncertainty in taste may affect the scale expansion of enterprises.
In its prospectus, Weizhixiang expressed concerns about product taste and iteration speed. Currently, the company's product sales mainly cover Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, although it has gradually expanded to Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, and other places.
However, because entering different regional markets requires considering various factors such as dietary habits and consumption capacity of consumers in different regions, Weizhixiang admits that it is difficult to quickly adjust and change for specific regions in a short time.
In addition, in the initial stage of entering new regions, Weizhixiang finds it difficult to form competitive advantages such as logistics distribution and economies of scale, and consumers in new regions also need time to try and accept new products.
For now, although pre-made dishes still have a long way to go in cultivating consumer awareness, the demand behind their rise does exist. The need for catering businesses to reduce costs and increase efficiency, as well as people's fast-paced and "lazy and homebound" lifestyles, all support the development of this industry. In the future, pre-made dishes are likely to become a staple in young people's kitchens.
Source: Baobian (ID: baobiannews) Author: Liu Xia
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