When the order is sent to the printer of the merchant through the cell phone, the back kitchen rings not the sound of the stove fire, but the roar of the microwave oven turning. According to the order, the merchant will take out the plastic bags with the dishes from the cold storage, heated and then spread directly into the lunch box, it becomes the takeaway staff to your hands of lunch.
These bags of dishes are called dish bags. In China’s take-out restaurant industry, about 70% of the dishes are packaged.
In other words, 70% of the takeaway you eat now is made of this type of dish package.
You have long been surrounded by dish bags. Now, they are flooding into branded restaurants.
Dish packs are everywhere
These industrialized products, with shelf lives ranging from three months to six months, hold up the bottom of China’s take-out industry.
A reporter from Chengdu Business Daily had an unannounced visit to Grandma’s Lo Mein on Construction Road. The store, which is considered a high-volume Netflix in the local store, sells 23,455 pieces per month on the Meituan platform and 5,560 pieces per month on the Hungry. The small store is separated by a curtain, the front is crowded with riders, less than 10 square meters of the front room, responsible for receiving orders and meals, behind the curtain is the meal processing area.
The processing process is not complicated, according to the order from the freezer to take out the pre-made dish package, put in boiling water to heat up, pour on the rice, packaged and ready to hand to the rider. This is not an isolated case, in the four stores interviewed by Chengdu Business Daily, some stores rely entirely on dish packs for sales, while others use freshly fried dishes and dish packs with them.
The dish package will be so ubiquitous in the takeaway industry, inseparable from the industry’s morbid pursuit of cost compression and efficiency.
On Taobao, the price of commercial pre-made dish packs is 4-6 yuan per pack, and most of the businesses selling them are related to seasoning products and frozen products. If you leave online and go to the seasoning market in each city, the wholesale market of frozen products and agents, the price can be even cheaper.
Merchants have to desperately compress costs because the profit margin of takeaway is too thin under the platform squeeze. Rising rent, labor, and food prices are the costs that are visible on the surface, and the other huge expense that is not visible is the commission of the take-out platform.
According to data published by Meituan in 2019, more than 80% of merchants on the platform commission at 10%-20%, if not signed an exclusive agreement, the commission ratio is as high as 22%-26%. In addition to the fixed commission draw, the platform will also require merchants to subsidize promotional activities allowance, in the face of the platform’s requirements, it is difficult for merchants to refuse not to participate, they will fall behind in traffic.
Traffic, is the fundamental survival of the take-out business, and the speed of meals, is directly determined by the take-out business can get traffic. According to the rules of the American group, slow, missed meals, wrong meals and other abnormal orders caused by non-customer reasons, once the proportion of the total number of orders is too high, merchants will suffer a decline in ranking, resulting in serious damage to the flow, orders will naturally be reduced.
In order to pursue meal speed, some take-out businesses introduce stir-fry robots to replace human labor, some make their own pre-made dishes, stir-fry various meats in advance until they are half-cooked, and then process them according to the order, and others, choose to use dish kits directly.
We learned that the ordinary individual small restaurants, more than two hundred a day need to wash vegetables, cut vegetables, stir-fry from morning to night, while if you use two minutes can be out of the meal of the dish package, just use the steamer to steam the rice. The premise that the microwave oven is sufficient, as long as the rice is not constantly supplied, how many orders can be eaten.
The system trapped not only riders, but also merchants. In the industry-wide wave of stepping on each other and pursuing efficiency, the result of lagging behind is losing traffic and revenue. The use of pre-made dish packages is not, in a sense, a personal choice of merchants, but a collective choice of the industry.
There are also those who choose not to use such convenient products. Chen Jin, who has two small noodle stores on Taipingmenzhong Street and Zhongshanzhong Road in Hangzhou, has repeatedly turned down door-to-door sales agents for pre-made dish kits. The shelf life of ordinary ingredients in the refrigerator is only two or three days, while the shelf life of the dish package, often six months to a year.
In other words, you eat take-out, is likely to be half a year ago to do.
According to Chen Jin’s observation, the dish package has become the mainstream within the take-out industry, there are some large volume of peers, several have joined forces to establish a central kitchen, the production can be communal dish package.
Catalyzed by the epidemic, medium and large companies have also begun to enter the dish package industry, and dish packages have gone from the back kitchens of restaurants, directly to consumers.
In February 2020, the bottom of the sea began selling convenience dishes, in March Meizhou Dongpo open supermarket mini-store, to August, Xibei smashed 2 billion to sell Jia Guolong kung fu dishes, and then in October, KFC, Yoshinoya and other fast food brands collectively online retail products. Once hidden dish package, the epidemic pressure to the so-called family kitchen new incremental identity, bright into the public eye.
Live in the take-out era, three meals a day, may eat are dish package.
This industrial assembly line catering, is it safe?
So, is the dish package safe in the end?
Two years ago, the dish package manufacturer Hefei Kianganggang Xiang was exposed to the media for food safety problems, the reporter’s camera recorded that the staff on the assembly line directly stirred the sauce by hand, and the ribs in the pool were still in use after a year.
Soon after the news exposure, KANGANGXIANG was rectified, but more related manufacturers that were not exposed are still in operation. In the relevant legal practice, there are a lot of gaps that need to be looked at, such as the take-away store with the dish package, whether it should be regulated as an industrial product, or as a raw material purchase of the restaurant is regulated? The unclear regulatory body makes it difficult to eradicate safety problems.
In February 2020, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Supervision issued relevant guidance to allow online and offline sales of processed and prepared semi-finished dishes, and Xibei received the country’s first electronic food production license certificate, allowing the retail of semi-finished prepared dishes to the public. This means that the policy level has local government recognition of the reasonableness of the existence of such products, the relevant regulatory improvements may already be on the way.
Behind the popularity of take-out kits, in addition to the increased competition brought about by the efficiency of take-out, there is also the surging tide of industrialization of catering food.
In fact, we have long been in the chain of the food industry. The streets are full of KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and other imported products, is a part of the mature food industry chain, the national chain of restaurant brands, more than 70% have their own central kitchen.
Central kitchens do have advantages in saving raw material and labor costs and achieving standardization, but overcapacity, high idle costs and insufficient logistics utilization can lead to the encroachment of corporate profits. But this model is only suitable for large enough consumption, large enterprises with sufficient funds, not up to the central kitchen requirements of the procurement of small and medium-sized enterprises, to improve efficiency can only choose the dish package.
Frozen dish package, on the other hand, uses quick-freezing technology, allowing the product to reach a frozen state in an instant, and then placing the dish package in storage at -18 ℃, so that the dish package can not produce bacteria. This model uses instantaneous and rapid freezing, and the taste is close to that of freshly fried, so you can barely taste any significant difference.
However, it still takes time to accept this model. Xibei high hopes, used to save the scene of Jia Guolong Kung Fu dish, because the step is too big, resulting in word-of-mouth rollover.
Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine is a key step for Xibei to test the water of retailing, according to Xibei’s planning, this project is expected to exceed 1 billion yuan in annual revenue. As a retail project, Kung Fu Cuisine does not have a chef, kitchen, the dishes are semi-finished products, directly from the fresh cabinet and put on the Cass stove to heat, and then can be served.
Customers do not buy this model, on the review site, some people eat after the evaluation, per capita 100 eat something bad, but must eat heated food?
After the decline of Chinese cooking, the generalization of fast food, and the neutering of public taste, will the food become the exclusive aristocratic food of the upper class, and the majority of the society can only rely on the products produced by the assembly line to survive.
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