Click to read the original article for details ****Leisure snacks, a trillion-yuan market, but looking at the overall market environment, it presents a market pattern of "scattered, small, and weak." The store era represented by Lai Yifen, Baicaowei, and Bestore became the first wave of pioneers in snack branding; then in 2012, Three Squirrels innovatively branded the "nuts" category as snacks, and relying on the traffic dividend of Taobao and Tmall, quickly rose to become the beneficiaries of online gold rush. Bestore and Baicaowei also followed suit, entering the online space. But today, when the online traffic dividend is gone, the offline new retail store transformation has become unpredictable. What other dividends and innovation opportunities are there for leisure snack brands to rise? Recently, New Distribution interviewed Ms. Wen Jia, founder of the innovative snack brand "Egg Full," a food review self-media with millions of fans, who has surprisingly entered the snack brand arena, stunning everyone.
Three rounds of funding in two and a half years. Established in January 2016, it immediately received millions in angel funding from Pengpai Capital. In 2017, it received Pre-A funding from Yuanjing Venture Capital. In 2018, it received A-round funding, led by Silicon Valley Bank, with Pengpai Capital and Yuanjing Capital following.
Total followers across platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, JD.com, and Taobao exceed 8 million.
The "Nothing to Do Research Institute" community has over 30,000 senior food enthusiasts distributed across the country. In 2018, "Egg Full" achieved an overall repurchase rate of 40%, with the highest single-product repurchase rate exceeding 50%. Receiving recognition from the market and users has initially established "Egg Full"'s position in the leisure snack market. At the same time, more and more people are curious about Wen Jia, the founder of "Egg Full." Why, when she could easily monetize her fan traffic and earn money effortlessly, did she choose to take a different path and embark on the arduous journey of physical entrepreneurship? From Food Self-Media to Innovative Snack Brand ****** To understand Wen Jia's entrepreneurial journey, we need to rewind to 2015. Wen Jia, a graduate of Fudan University's journalism department, was a traditional media reporter. Because she loved eating, she began writing food review articles on her blog. With the rise of the WeChat platform, the "Egg Full" official account was born. Soon after, it attracted over 1 million followers, and daily posts often received over 100,000 reads. Many followers would use her articles to recommend food and find corresponding restaurants. This feedback made Wen Jia realize the influence and appeal of "Egg Full." Naturally restless, she thought about finding something to sell. What would people love to eat that the market hadn't fully satisfied? Then she discovered that the pecans available on the market at the time were not only difficult to crack and easily broken, but also contained chemical additives like creamer and MSG. So Wen Jia returned to her hometown of Hangzhou and collaborated with Zhejiang A&F University to create a pecan product using only salt and sugar, baked using traditional methods. Within a few days of launching on the official account, the product brought Wen Jia 1 million yuan in sales. This successful attempt gave Wen Jia the confidence to start a business. As for why she didn't take the old path of traffic monetization, Wen Jia told New Distribution that from the beginning she had two clear principles: first, no advertising or sponsored content; second, no influencer model. In short, Egg Full does not do content e-commerce. Although content dissemination is the team's innate strength, we want to be a food brand, and product development is our core competitiveness. "About food, I don't know more than you; I've just spent more wasted money than you." When Wen Jia wrote this introduction, she had already established the brand's philosophy: creating user value as the core. The experience of selling pecans made Wen Jia realize that thinking from the user's perspective, driven by user needs, and communicating directly with users might be the correct approach for an innovative brand. With increased product development experience, Egg Full has become more precise in grasping user needs. For example, when developing the double egg yolk pork zongzi, almost all zongzi factories added MSG, and the egg yolks were frozen. Wen Jia knew that such food would not impress users. So she developed a zongzi without MSG, with freshly dug egg yolks, and better taste, which immediately won over users. It is said that this practice also drove reforms in many zongzi factories. Wen Jia said that young consumers today have an increasingly thin impression of brands. When choosing snacks, they don't care whether it's a big brand; they only care whether it tastes good. As mentioned in the book "Blue Ocean Strategy," only by aiming to break through competition, starting from user value, redesigning the product value chain, and restructuring the cost structure can new consumer demand be created, ultimately moving from the red ocean of fierce competition, low profit margins, and lackluster growth to a vast, new blue ocean.** In the process of developing and selling traditional seasonal snacks such as zongzi, Longjing tea, hairy crabs, and mooncakes, Wen Jia discovered a gap in the traditional Chinese snack market and decided to create a traditional Chinese snack brand. Regarding the brand concept design, Wen Jia drew inspiration from Beijing TRB Hutong restaurant. To build a traditional snack brand, it is essential to place Chinese traditional culture at the core, expressed in a more fashionable, high-end way that aligns with young people's understanding of traditional culture. This is reflected in Egg Full's seasonal products and packaging design. For example, Egg Full collaborated with a rice wine brand to enter the young user market, designing the rice wine bottle as a flower vase shape, attracting a large number of artistic young people. Behind the Business Model Innovation: 30,000+ Community Members ****** The most typical feature of the second half of the internet is the shift from the era of goods finding people to the era of people finding goods. In a period of product surplus, the most preferred consumption method is not "you sell what I buy," but "you have everything I want to eat." Although everyone believes that content and communities are the fastest ways to reach target users, traditional brands are too large to transform easily, which gives innovative brands room to develop. This shift in brand thinking is the innovation premise of Egg Full. To understand Egg Full's business model innovation, one must first understand the "Nothing to Do Research Institute." Egg Full uses food content as a carrier, and by outputting good food content, it "circles" heavy food enthusiasts within its own community. These 30,000+ senior food enthusiasts are the brand's peripheral product research institute. Due to their love of food, these community users can participate in Egg Full's product development, iteration, and selling point discovery. In contrast, the traditional snack R&D design logic involves a few market personnel, comprehensive industry reports, consumer trends, online demand keyword analysis, and historical sales data analysis to decide what products to make and how. However, doing so only sees cold data and cold user profiles, unable to perceive users' true feelings. Take the beef jerky development as an example of the operation process of the Nothing to Do Research Institute. First, a topic form is initiated in the community: "What delicious beef jerky have you bought on Taobao?" Members fill it out based on their preferences. Each form is a complete and comprehensive competitive analysis. Finally, the team develops a strip-shaped small-packaged beef jerky that better preserves the beef flavor and is easier to chew. The first batch of 1,000 boxes quickly sold out.****** It can be seen that compared to the dedicated marketing departments of traditional FMCG companies, the Nothing to Do Research Institute is Egg Full's super brain. ** Why can the Nothing to Do Research Institute represent user needs? Because they are all senior food enthusiasts, as Wen Jia puts it, mature consumers. Here are some data points to illustrate. When the Nothing to Do Research Institute was first established, members had to pass a community admission exam. The initial 1,000 people had a pass rate of only 20%. Two years later, the community grew to 30,000 people. Food Snackification and Snack Foodification According to the China National Food Industry Association's "China Leisure Food Industry Development Research Report," by 2020, the overall leisure snack market size is expected to approach 2 trillion yuan. The "China Video Industry Development Report (2012-2017)" shows that the small, weak, and scattered pattern of the domestic food industry has not fundamentally changed. Among the 11.8 million licensed food production and operation enterprises nationwide, the vast majority have fewer than 10 employees, and small and micro enterprises and small workshops still account for over 90% of the industry. It can be seen that the current situation of the snack industry is that young foodies are driving the growth of the domestic snack market, but due to the vast geography and fragmented snack industry, consumers find it difficult to buy healthier, higher-quality snacks.******** Based on this industry and user situation, Wen Jia proposed the trend of food snackification and snack foodification, with the aim of helping everyone find more and better food, while upgrading shoddy snacks into snacks that meet user expectations.****** Wen Jia told New Distribution that there are many delicacies across the country that cannot be exported due to supply chain difficulties, but as long as they can be produced on a large scale, they can become snacks that go out. And many industrialized snack products can become truly delicious food with process improvements. Using food content to find users, using core users to find quality products, and letting heavy food enthusiasts check products is what Egg Full will do next. As everyone knows, snack competition ultimately leads to homogenized food. If you ask what makes Egg Full different, the answer is the snack philosophy. This differentiation is also reflected in category logic and product marketing. Wen Jia said that in terms of category logic, we lean more towards our users; they understand food, know how to eat, and love good food. We aim to provide them with professional solutions, finding the snacks and flavors they need from all over the country. Therefore, we are comprehensive and full-category. The Egg Full team believes that the characteristics of Chinese snacks are that ingredients emphasize origin, production emphasizes seasonality, and presentation evokes the natural flavor of good ingredients. Snacks should be naturally shared in daily life. So, Egg Full hopes to combine content capabilities, centered around Chinese traditional culture, to convey a more specific and fashionable brand image to consumers. At the same time, it adopts a scenario-based product development logic, designing scenarios that trigger consumers to take photos and watch. Use the way users like to trigger user self-propagation. For example, in the spring of 2017, Egg Full designed a "Spring Light Suddenly Appears" snack pack, aimed at office workers' desk drawers, but in scenario design, it focused on the spring outing scene everyone imagines. Also, designing colorful radio packaging and launching co-branded snacks with Zhihu are marketing attempts. When asked if Egg Full seems less playful compared to other internet-famous brands, Wen Jia said that the ultimate goal of "being very playful" is to let more consumers quickly understand your brand. Our understanding is that no gameplay can be separated from the product itself; deliciousness is the core value of food. It's not enough for online community members to think it's delicious; Egg Full also needs to go offline so that more consumers can see and buy it. To this end, after the Spring Festival this year, Mr. Chen Lihao, a former executive at Orion, joined Egg Full as a partner to fully promote Egg Full's entry into more offline channels. At the beginning of 2019, it began entering JD Super, Tmall Super, and convenience store channels in first-tier cities. Chen Lihao believes that the sale of snacks also follows the classic Pareto principle, where a small number of best-selling products provide most of the sales. But no matter how categories and products change, future business will definitely involve fans deeply participating in the entire product development process. Now, Egg Full has taken the first step of innovation! Written at the end: Frankly speaking, Egg Full's business logic is completely different from existing FMCG practices. Looking at existing FMCG companies, they all start from a certain category, build a brand through the category, and then extend categories through the brand. Currently, many innovative consumer brands follow a similar logic: start from a category, operate users, and build the brand through word-of-mouth. But Egg Full's logic is to gather a group of food users through understanding and outputting food content, interact with users to gain insights into consumer needs, and then launch a series of products. This is somewhat similar to the early "Xiaomi community" logic. In the past, we have always emphasized being consumer-centric and user-oriented. Although we have shouted many slogans, there seems to be no answer or practical path on how to do it. Egg Full provides a model for the industry. Of course, innovation also has a price, because there is no benchmark, no template, no path to imitate. The backend supply chain, frontend channel construction, and mid-platform brand marketing all require Egg Full to "take a different path" and forge its own way!