Casual snacks open up new consumption scenarios

Spicy strips, potato chips, myrisso.
.
.
Leisure snacks that once carried the childhood memories of a generation are now ushering in a broad market
.
According to the "2023-2027 China Leisure Food Industry Panorama Research and Development Strategy Research and Consulting Report" recently released by the Puhua Industrial Research Institute of China Research Institute, the scale of China's leisure food market will exceed 1.
4 trillion yuan in 2021, and the industry market will expand steadily and have a broad
space.
In the face of a trillion-level huge market, how to further expand the cake is an important problem
that the leisure snack industry must face.

The rise of the instant retail model in recent years has undoubtedly opened up a new track
for the development of the leisure snack industry.
As a new consumption format of "online ordering, 30-minute delivery", instant retail was first explicitly mentioned
in the "China Online Retail Market Development Report for the First Half of 2022" released by the Ministry of Commerce in September 2022.
In the eyes of industry insiders, instant retail is a new retail format
based on physical stores as the supply chain and the instant fulfillment and distribution system to provide consumers with more convenience and timeliness of home business, and meet consumers' emergency needs or immediate needs under normal conditions.

In the list of recommended products of many supermarkets and convenience stores on the Ele.
me platform, snacks such as potato chips, chocolate, and spicy strips have occupied half of the country, and some convenience stores have also launched designated product coupons
for leisure snacks.
A convenience store operator said that in the past three years, leisure snacks have become one of the main products of online retail in stores, and in order to improve delivery efficiency, he deliberately placed leisure snacks such as spicy strips on shelves near the door
.

The data released by Meituan also confirms that instant retail has increasingly become an important sales channel for leisure snacks: from January to October 2022, the number of takeaway orders for Weilong-related products increased by 35% compared with the same period in 2021, with an average of more than 70,000 takeaway orders sent out per day; The takeaway sales of good shops on the platform increased by 403%, and the number of offline stores of good shops on the online takeaway increased by 70
% year-on-year.

The "hit it off" between casual snacks and just-in-time retail is no accident
.
Meituan flash sale data and user research analysis show that at present, the consumer groups of new instant retail formats are mainly young people aged 20-35, and these consumer groups also happen to be the main consumer groups
of leisure snacks.

The pursuit of product delivery speed is one of
the distinctive characteristics of young consumers.
According to Accenture's "Focus on China's Post-95 Consumer Group" report, when shopping online, young Chinese consumers pay special attention to the speed of product delivery, more than 50% of post-95 consumers hope to receive goods on the day of order or even within half a day, and some post-95 consumers will even cancel orders
because e-commerce platforms cannot clarify the specific delivery time.

Compared with traditional e-commerce, instant retail relies on the instant delivery capability of takeaway platforms to quickly connect various local offline physical stores
near consumers.
From order to receipt, consumers often only need to wait for an hour or even half an hour
.
Compared with the average delivery time of 2-3 days on traditional e-commerce platforms, the instant retail model can "take the lead" in the leisure snack market and satisfy consumers' appetite in a timely manner
.

At the same time, the "night consumption scene" created by instant retail is more in line with the life routine of the younger generation at night, and also provides a 24-hour "snack freedom" guarantee for consumers who "forage" late at night
.
A delivery worker on a takeaway platform introduced that leisure snacks account for a large proportion of goods delivered at night, especially during the start of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, and orders for spicy strips, drinks and puffed food received at night have increased
significantly.

Feelings are also an important reason
for young consumers to buy leisure snacks.
In the eyes of many post-80s and post-90s consumers, leisure snacks represented by spicy strips are an indelible and important embellishment
in childhood memories.

Meituan data shows that the current penetration rate of Meituan flash sale in the leisure zero food category is 66%, the highest in the current instant retail platform, but Meituan flash sale snack food users only account for 10%
of Meituan takeaway users.
In this regard, the person in charge of Meituan flash sale said that 10% is a very low penetration rate, which shows that snack food has great potential in the field of instant retail
.

Although the potential is huge, how to release the potential still requires the serious layout
of leisure snack companies.
Industry insiders said that leisure snack companies should follow the pace of consumption to layout, think about how to combine online and offline, how to tap more categories with consumption potential on the subdivision track, and attach importance to and operate instant retail channels, which is one of
the keys to future stability and long-term.

(Hong Jianru)

China Food News(2023.
01.
10.
07)

(Responsible editor: Zhu Meiqiao)