Text | "Financial Weekly" reporter Li Yuxi Intern Luo Yubai Liu Yangnan
The rainstorm disaster in Henan province is serious, instant noodles have become important relief materials as before, but self-heating food, which has high hopes from capital, has not come in handy at this critical moment.
Self-heating food refers to prepackaged foods which is heated by its own heating bag without relying on electricity or fire. When in use, just put the special heating bag at the bottom of the food box and pour a cup of cold water to make steaming food.
In 2020, the epidemic broke out suddenly, and the self-heating food, which has been tepid, got a rare opportunity for development. New brands and products emerged one after another, and capital followed suit. Self-heating food was once thought to be expected to take over instant noodles as the next "national food".
However, with the national epidemic peak receding, the take-away and in-house food formats gradually returned to normal, and industries such as pre-made food rose, and the heat of self-heated food also dissipated. Single eating scene, high price, safety and other issues have all become obstacles for self-heating food to embark on the road of "national food".
With high hopes from capital and bets from many enterprises, self-heating food is facing a growth dilemma. Is it still expected to become the "next instant noodle"? What should we do next?
Is the self-heating food cold?
The founder of a well-known domestic catering brand told the reporter that self-heating food appeared in early 2000 and remained tepid until 2017. 2017 is a turning point. Without much marketing promotion, self-heating hot pot began to become popular, which is partly due to changes in the consumer market that have driven changes in the industry.
The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 has changed the development of self-heating food.
During the outbreak of the epidemic, the restaurant and take-out were blocked, and the demand for special home food brought about a spurt of self-heating food. Omni-channel sales have soared, major e-commerce platforms are out of stock quickly, and offline supermarkets are "in short supply". Self-heating food has become the first choice for many people to solve the problem of eating at home during the special period.
Tmall data shows that since February 2020, the overall sales volume of convenience foods has increased by 7 times year-on-year, among which self-heating foods have the fastest increase. During the Spring Festival, the online order volume of "Zi Hei Guo" exceeded 200%, and the shipment volume of "Shi Ren" increased by 30% year-on-year, and the turnover in March increased to 90 million yuan.
What followed was the follow-up of brands and capital. According to the incomplete statistics of the reporter of Caijing National Weekly, at present, there are more than 350 self-heating food brands on the market.
In the convenience food industry, after the unified introduction of self-heating food, Jinmailang, Master Kong, Baixiang, Zhengda and Keming followed suit. Outside the industry, Yang Guofu, who makes mala Tang, Haidilao and Xiaolongkan, who make hot pot, and even snack brands such as Three Squirrels and Liangpin Shop, as well as online celebrity, such as Li Ziqi, have all entered the market.
Capital with a keen sense of smell will naturally not let go of this fiery new field.
In May, 2020, in just one month, there were three tens of millions of financing in the field of fast food, namely "eater", "self-hi pot" and "Mo Xiaoxian". The investors included well-known investment institutions such as Gaoying Group, Jingwei China and Jinding Capital. Among them, as the "first brand" of self-heating food, the self-cooking pot has been established for more than three years, and it has already received five rounds of financing, of which the C++ round of financing has exceeded 100 million yuan.
However, the spring of self-heating food seems to be too short. After the domestic epidemic situation has been effectively controlled, take-away food, in-house food and other formats have returned, and self-heating food is no longer the main choice of consumers. In the second half of 2020, self-heating food will enter a downward channel.
A business manager who provides heating packages for self-heating food factories was deeply touched by this. He told reporters that since the second half of last year, the heat of self-heating food has dropped, and the orders for heating packages have dropped significantly. In the face of market changes, the factory has to adjust the product structure to avoid being more affected.
"A wave of people buy self-heating food for early adopters. After curiosity, the overall sales volume will inevitably decline." A person in charge of a self-heating food brand told reporters that since the beginning of this year, the overall sales volume of self-heating food has been slightly better than that of the same period in 2019, but it has declined compared with last year.
In the person in charge’s view, self-heating food broke out irrationally in 2020, but the reason why this kind of food can explode in 2020 also proves that it has a certain market demand, which is why the self-heating food category also achieved good growth in 2017-2019.
More people in the industry are pessimistic about the growth of self-heating food.
Zhu Danpeng, a food industry analyst in China, believes that self-heating food is not the outlet for the development of the food industry, but only a category that benefits from the special node of the epidemic. With the rapid development of take-away and pre-made products industry, the market space of self-heating food has been squeezed to some extent.
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"It costs money to eat hot pot, and it is terrible to eat self-heating hot pot." Compared with instant noodles with simple operation and high food safety, the operational safety of self-heating of heating package has always been a questioned risk point of self-heating food, and related food safety problems have occurred frequently.
Not long ago, the Shanghai Consumer Protection Committee conducted a comparative experiment on self-heating hot pot to further understand the current safety and quality status of self-heating instant hot pot. The results showed that 16 of the 20 samples had different degrees of deformation at the bottom of the cooking pot, and the bottom of the cooking pot of four samples named Kaka Shamo Xiaoxian, Shu Girl, Zhen Xin and Mu Ge had obvious deformation.
The main reason is that self-heating food is still a new industry in China, and has not yet formed a certain system scale. Most domestic self-heating food brands adopt OEM production, without their own production lines, and the product quality is difficult to control.
Zhu Danpeng said that from the policy point of view, at present, China has not yet issued a national standard for self-heating food, and the industries are mixed and the brands are mixed, which increases the danger of the industry.
The reporter visited a large supermarket in Beijing and found that the price of self-heating chafing dish with a net content of about 150g was higher than that of 30 yuan, and some products even approached 40 yuan, while the price of self-heating rice was generally higher than that of 20 yuan, which was a huge difference compared with instant noodles with a net content of less than 10 yuan per barrel.
People in the industry interviewed believe that self-heating food is mainly for "lazy people" or third-and fourth-tier consumer groups who are extremely sensitive to price, and the price of tens of dollars can only make them flinch.
"Not as a last resort, I won’t choose self-heating food. The price is too expensive, I can’t use so much money to order a takeaway, and the taste is better than self-heating food. " Xiao Yi, a standard "house girl" engaged in video editing, said.
The reporter learned from the survey that it is not without reason that self-heating food is priced like this.
The person in charge of the above-mentioned self-heating food brand told the reporter that the high price of self-heating food comes from high cost. A product of self-heating food should include package, heating package, container box, etc. Only the product cost price of higher quality products should exceed that of 10 yuan. Generally, the cost of self-heating food accounts for 50% of the retail price of the market, that is to say, under the gross profit margin of 50%, the enterprise has to cut 20%-30% of the channel expenses, and the final profit can only be controlled at about 20%.
In addition to the difficulty in forming the advantages of instant noodles in price, the single taste and usage scenarios of self-heating food also stop consumers who have the ability to buy.
An industry source told reporters that because most brands are OEM, the sources of raw materials are basically the same, and even some brand products are from the same manufacturer, it is not surprising that the tastes are not much different.
The person in charge of the above-mentioned self-heating food brand admits that the use scenario of the self-heating food industry does have certain limitations: "So the competition in the future industry will mainly focus on product taste. In order to improve food recovery, self-heating food enterprises have made great efforts and made great progress in meat production technology, constantly improving user experience and generating user stickiness. "
It’s a little far from the next "instant noodles"
In recent years, with the decline of instant noodle industry, there has been a brief outbreak of self-heating food, and there are endless discussions about whether self-heating food will become "another" national food after instant noodles. Now it seems that self-heating food is far from becoming the next "instant noodles".
"We can’t replace instant noodles. First of all, there is no way on the price, because the reason why a category has a national degree is that everyone needs to be able to afford it." The person in charge of the above-mentioned self-heating food brand is very calm about the positioning of the self-heating food industry.
Zhu Danpeng said that the possibility of self-heating food becoming "national food" is very small. On the one hand, it is limited by the lack of industry standards. On the other hand, the expansion of self-heating food categories is squeezed, which will hinder the development of the industry.
In addition to the category disadvantages, the distance between self-heating food mainly based on OEM and "national food" is still worse than the whole supply chain system and the channel system that goes deep into the capillary market.
Considering the operating cost of enterprises, most enterprises can greatly save the input cost by adopting OEM production, but the biggest problem in this form is the lack of quality control management, which leads to the inevitable product quality problems.
At the same time, because most enterprises in the self-heating food industry pattern are not from the food industry, they have insufficient experience in channel construction and food production management, and there is still a long way to go to really get familiar with this field.
"In fact, we are now very envious of those brands whose offline channels are very mature. From the perspective of channels, the whole industry is still in the trial and error stage." The person in charge of the above-mentioned self-heating food brand admits that the biggest obstacle at present is the construction of offline channels, which is different from online sales that can be created by marketing and platform power. The construction of offline channels is not achieved overnight, but it is always the offline channels that really determine the future of brand development.
At present, self-heating food industry enterprises can be divided into three types:
For a kind of catering enterprises such as Haidilao and Dalongyi, self-heating food is a choice for their business diversification. The advantage of this kind of enterprises lies in their high brand awareness and advantages in marketing, and two different types of production and management logic in catering industry and food industry are the problems that this kind of enterprises must solve.
The second category is the brand of the transformation terminal at the supply chain end. The advantage of this kind of brand is to rely on the advantages of the supply chain to optimize the product price, but it lacks brand power and is slightly weak in brand operation and marketing.
The third category, such as self-help pot, is a brand cultivated under Internet thinking. It is good at using Internet thinking and can rely on capital to make the brand bigger in a short time. However, the disadvantages of offline channels are bound to lay a hidden worry for its future development.
People in the industry interviewed believe that after a short period of explosive growth, the self-heating food industry, which is in a downward channel, is entering the stage of industry reshuffle. After many small and medium-sized brands make waves, resources are concentrated in several head brands, and the market pattern of self-heating hot pot is expected to take shape basically this year.
It can be judged that with the introduction of small and medium-sized brands, the self-heating food industry will change from barbaric growth to brand intensification. In the future, with the continuous growth of big brands, the industry will be more standardized and the future can be expected.
