Once criticized, pre-made dishes have unexpectedly become a popular choice for young people's New Year's Eve dinner this year. Even before the countdown to New Year's Eve began, topics about the New Year's Eve dinner had already trended on social media. As in previous years, reservations at famous restaurants across the country are extremely popular, with some even experiencing a "table shortage." At the same time, pre-made dishes that can be prepared at home have also become an option for many consumers. On Weibo, the topic "Pre-made dish consumption for New Year's Eve dinner, 70% are young people" has garnered 38.61 million reads and sparked over 20,000 discussions; "Would you choose pre-made dishes for New Year's Eve dinner?" has also received 31.94 million reads and 19,000 discussions. According to the "2023 China Spring Festival Gift Box Consumer Behavior Insight Report" released by iiMedia Research, pre-made dishes have for the first time become one of the top ten choices for Chinese consumers' Spring Festival gift boxes, with 26.91% of surveyed users choosing to purchase pre-made dishes as New Year goods. New Year dishes have now joined the ranks of "local specialties." In fact, as the post-80s and post-90s generations become the main consumers of household spending, they have gradually taken over the responsibility of preparing New Year goods and the New Year's Eve dinner, further contributing to the popularity of pre-made dishes for the New Year's Eve dinner.
Pre-made dishes sell out during Spring Festival According to the "Notice on Some Holiday Arrangements for 2024," there is no holiday on New Year's Eve this year, leaving many families without enough time to prepare the New Year's Eve dinner. This gives pre-made dishes more room to shine. Recently, an employee at the large supermarket chain Wumart told us that sales of pre-made dishes in stores have increased by 15% year-on-year compared to last week. Walking into a Wumart supermarket, we can see pre-made products such as sauerkraut fish, braised pork, Meicai Kou Rou (pork belly with preserved vegetables), and spicy crayfish, totaling over 10 varieties and nearly 20 brands. A salesperson revealed, "These pre-made dishes have been put on shelves recently. As Spring Festival approaches, stock levels have increased, and sales are gradually rising." In addition to Wumart, Hema launched its "New Year Goods Festival" in mid-January, with New Year dishes, eight-treasure rice, cherries, and other Spring Festival limited items now available. They have also introduced ready-made New Year dishes such as seafood platters, fried belt fish, and pork ribs. Dingdong Maicai, on the other hand, has launched tangyuan (glutinous rice balls) and dumplings tailored to the dietary differences between the north and south. The tangyuan are filled with osmanthus wine and Fuping persimmon, and come in gold ingot and cartoon dragon shapes; the dumplings use beet juice, pumpkin juice, spinach juice, and cuttlefish juice to create different colors. According to reports, within about three weeks of launch, sales of these dumplings have approached 15,000 portions. On e-commerce platforms like JD.com and Taobao, pre-made dish products related to the New Year's Eve dinner are running promotional campaigns. On Taobao, pre-made dish New Year gift boxes from brands such as Guangzhou Restaurant, Xinghualou, Songhelou, and Xibei have all entered the bestseller lists of their flagship stores. Searching for "New Year's Eve dinner pre-made dishes" on Taobao yields prices ranging from tens to thousands of yuan, with top-selling stores having over 2,000 confirmed orders. On JD.com, the highest-selling "New Year's Eve dinner" items have also exceeded 10,000 units. On emerging channels like Xiaohongshu Mall and Douyin Mall, pre-made dishes are also gaining consumer favor. Xiaohongshu Mall shows that a ready-to-eat meatball product called "Little Lion Head" has been purchased by 900 people, and Maladuo's pork belly chicken pre-made dish has sold 1,262 orders. On Douyin Mall, Dingding Lanren Cai's fresh and tender sauerkraut fish has topped its category, with cumulative sales of 2.35 million units. According to the "Tmall New Year Goods Festival 2024 New Year Trends," on Taobao, users born after 1995 account for more than half of those placing orders for New Year goods. The post-95s are becoming the decision-makers for family New Year goods, shifting from "avoiding the New Year" to "willing to participate" and even "leading the New Year's Eve dinner table." Shang Rui, a post-95s young woman, is passionate about cooking, but still finds it daunting to prepare a meal for five people alone on New Year's Eve. She said that she actually started trying pre-made dishes at the New Year's Eve dinner table a few years ago, but at that time there were few varieties, only fermented bean curd pork, four-joy meatballs, and a few others. With more varieties appearing in recent years, she plans to make a "pre-made dish feast" this year. She has already ordered a pre-made dish New Year's Eve dinner gift box, which includes 8 dishes: black pepper beef tenderloin, sweet and sour pork, plum-flavored chicken cutlet, sliced fish in fermented rice sauce, farmer's thousand-layer tofu wrap, crab meat fish gluten, pineapple duck slices, and blood glutinous rice eight-treasure rice. She believes that buying pre-made dishes "saves time and energy, and it is expected to complete a sumptuous meal in 30 minutes. With a good mix of meat and vegetables, it is both beautiful and practical." Many people, like Shang Rui, choose pre-made dishes for convenience. Qian Lina, a young woman living alone in Beijing, decided not to go home for the Spring Festival to avoid her family's matchmaking pressure, and this year she will spend New Year's Eve with her best friend. However, since both are "cooking novices" and have to work on New Year's Eve, they feared they wouldn't even be able to order takeout, so they purchased a "pre-made New Year's Eve dinner" on an e-commerce platform.
Supermarket chains also eye pre-made dishes
The past year of 2023 was a highlight for pre-made dishes. In February, the "Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Doing a Good Job in Comprehensively Promoting Rural Revitalization in 2023" was released, which mentioned "improving the standardization and normalization of industries such as clean vegetables and central kitchens, and cultivating and developing the pre-made dish industry." This was the first time pre-made dishes were written into the Central Document No. 1. Subsequently, various regions also intensively issued policies related to pre-made dishes. In January, Guangdong Province established the Guangdong Pre-made Dish Industry Fund system; in April, Sichuan Province issued the "Several Measures to Support the High-Quality Development of the Pre-made Dish Industry"; in May, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, issued the "Implementation Plan for Accelerating the Development of Hangzhou Cuisine and the High-Quality Development of the Pre-made Dish Industry (2023-2025)" and so on. The introduction of these policies has strongly promoted the development of the pre-made dish industry. Driven by both policy and market, pre-made dishes have attracted the attention of many giants and cross-industry players, including Lotus Health, Yihai Kerry, Fuling Zhacai, KFC, Nongfu Spring, Qiannainu, Gree, and Galanz. These companies are preparing to or have already made layouts in the pre-made dish field. Some large supermarket chains and convenience stores are also eyeing pre-made dishes. It is reported that some FamilyMart and Lawson convenience stores in Shanghai have begun to add pre-made dish freezer sections. Among them, FamilyMart began testing pre-made dishes as early as the end of 2021, selecting residential business district stores with high foot traffic. Since 2022, Hema's self-built central kitchens in Wuhan, Chengdu, and Shanghai have been put into production one after another. In April 2023, Hema established a pre-made dish department. In June of the same year, Walmart China launched a celebrity chef project, which plans to cooperate with Chinese time-honored brands and strong catering brands to launch restaurant-grade signature dishes, including cold dishes, soups, main courses, staples, desserts, and other multi-scenario product combinations. Huafu Securities predicts that in 2023, China's pre-made dish market will reach 516.5 billion yuan, with a CAGR of 26% from 2021 to 2025. The B-end market accounts for 80%, and the C-end accounts for 20%. Looking only at the C-end, under the impact of the epidemic, dine-in has continued to decrease, and catering companies have launched pre-made dish products, promoting consumer education on pre-made dishes. The emergence of demands such as "small portions" and "single-person meals" has driven the maturity of the pre-made dish market. At the same time, pre-made dishes have also gained favor from capital. Since 2021, many companies have received large-scale financing. Among them, Dingweitai, Leyaoju, and Wangjiadu Food have all received financing at the hundred-million-yuan level; Zhenwei Xiaomeiyuan, Sancan Youliao, Dongpin Matou, and Youyu Pre-made Dishes have also received financing at the ten-million-yuan level. Weizhixiang, a brand focused on pre-made dishes, successfully went public in 2021. Most of these companies do both B-end and C-end business. The big single products that have broken through in recent years, such as sauerkraut fish, pork belly chicken, and small crispy pork, are typical products that have shifted from B-end to C-end. Taking small crispy pork as an example, according to research data from Shangpu Consulting, from 2020 to 2022, sales of small crispy pork products increased from 139,000 tons to 431,000 tons, more than doubling. It is expected that by 2025, China's small crispy pork sales will exceed 1.2 million tons. Among them, Meihao small crispy pork has become a super single product in the pre-made dish field, with sales exceeding 1 billion yuan in 2022.
The biggest obstacle is a "trust crisis"
Currently, due to low product barriers and low brand premiums in China's pre-made dish market, participants face profitability pressure. Under converging social trends, Japan's consumption era changes have important implications for the development of China's pre-made dish industry. Japan's pre-made dish industry is a "long slope with thick snow" track. With the improvement of cold chain, the overall rhythm shows a B-end start and C-end relay. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Japan's catering service industry expanded rapidly, and industrial trends drove the accelerated penetration of B-end pre-made dishes, while the C-end was in its infancy. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, Japan's frozen food industry, under the double blow of B-end and C-end, grew much faster than the catering industry. After 2000, Japan's economy was sluggish, the B-end became weak, and the aging, low birth rate, and single-person population and family structure prompted the C-end pre-made dishes to take over and continue to expand. In this process, the pattern of Japan's pre-made dish industry went through rapid expansion, industry reshuffling, and increased concentration, eventually reaching maturity, with a high CR5 share and fierce oligopolistic competition. In 2016, the CR5 market share was nearly 80% (Maruha Nichiro, Nichirei, Kabushiki Kaisha, Ajinomoto, and Nippon Suisan). Although oligarchs firmly occupy the top five positions, the rankings among leading companies still change frequently. To further promote the popularization of pre-made dishes in the C-end, during the Tokyo Olympics, the Japanese government provided endorsement of the safety of pre-made dishes, and with the implementation of the "School Lunch Law," many Japanese students have been exposed to pre-made dishes since childhood, gradually improving C-end awareness. At present, Chinese C-end consumers' understanding of pre-made dishes is still mostly stuck on impressions such as takeout meal packs, more preservatives, cheap and unhealthy. How to resolve the "trust crisis" and make pre-made dishes truly "safe dishes" has become an urgent problem. On the other hand, if, like Japan, government endorsement can improve the C-end image of pre-made dishes, it is expected to stimulate a large amount of demand for pre-made dishes. Zhu Danpeng, vice president of the Guangdong Food Safety Guarantee Promotion Association and a food industry analyst in China, pointed out in a media interview that in 2024, the pre-made dish industry should improve in at least two aspects. First, the pre-made dish industry urgently needs to establish unified national standards. In terms of food safety, the pre-made dish industry has a low entry threshold, with many entrants, involving many industries and common OEM situations, but lacking unified national standards. Although since 2022, multiple group standards for pre-made dishes have been issued, and pre-made dish industry alliances have been established, from the current perspective, the standards formulated are at most industry standards, which may play a guiding role in the development of the pre-made dish industry, but they are not unique or mandatory. The formulation of unified national standards for the pre-made dish industry should be accelerated to solve the current situation of small, scattered, and chaotic pre-made dish industry, as well as potential food safety issues. From the industry perspective, national standards are the "anchor" for industry development. Second, protect consumers' right to know. Among the consumer rights protection public opinion hotspots in the third quarter of 2023 released by the China Consumers Association, there was "consumers' concerns about infringement due to the lack of transparency in pre-made dish sales." The China Consumers Association stated that related incidents reflect that some catering merchants or school cafeterias have failed to fully protect consumers' right to know and choose, and consumers have distrust in the food safety and green health of pre-made dishes. How to make consumers "buy with confidence and eat with peace of mind"? From the perspective of sustainable industry development, consumers should be informed whether products are pre-made dishes and whether they are "OEM" products, so as to further protect consumers' right to know. If pre-made dishes remain "veiled," consumers' resistance will be even greater.
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