Semi-finished products, the "sweet pastry" of online catering

The back chef of a hot pot restaurant in Chengdu, Sichuan Province prepares hot pot for takeaways that consumers place online

Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Hu Xu

An employee of a catering company in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, is packing takeaway orders

Photo by Hua Xuegen (People's Photo)

How hard is it to cook a table by yourself? The answer may be as simple as ordering takeout

From "meal for one person" to "feast for the whole family"

Zhang Fan, who lives in Beijing, told this reporter that pre-made dishes can make novice "Xiao Bai" experience the joy of being a chef

Zhang Fan's roommate Yiqing works for an Internet company

The portraits of consumers of pre-made dishes released by the online platform show that consumers between the ages of 22 and 31 account for more than 43%, and consumers in first- and second-tier cities account for more than 80%.

The high acceptance of pre-made dishes by young consumers has also quietly triggered new changes on the New Year's Eve dinner table

According to iiMedia Research, the scale of China's pre-made vegetables market in 2021 will be 345.

"Small farmers" connect with "big markets"

The popular prefabricated vegetables have opened up a new market space for agricultural products and promoted agriculture to catch up on the express train of industrialization

In Luoding, Guangdong, the epidemic once made it difficult to sell live chickens

Zhang Jianguo, general manager of Fudi Tempeh Chicken Industrial Park, believes that only by selling live chickens as deep-processed products can farmers increase their income and recover their losses

"The average price of a live chicken is about 120 yuan.

As a new form of deep processing of agricultural products, prefabricated vegetables have attracted the attention of many enterprises

The grilled fish with green peppercorns developed by Guolian Aquatic Products has now achieved mass production

Pre-made vegetables have built a bridge for "small farmers" to connect with "big markets", allowing consumers to eat fast and well, and can also accelerate the standardization and scale of agricultural product processing, increasing farmers' income

From "small and scattered" to "standardized"

Prepared dishes are not a new concept

At the same time, the "heating up" of pre-made dishes has also been accompanied by controversy
.
Some netizens commented that pre-made dishes can only be made into standardized single items.
Compared with Chinese food with diverse cuisines and different tastes, pre-made dishes cannot solve the problem of difficult adjustment
.

The reporter learned that although more than 74% of chain catering companies in China have built their own central kitchens and distribute pre-made dishes to stores for production, the proportion of leading companies such as Xibei, Zhen Kung Fu, Xiao Nan Guo, etc.
using pre-made dishes exceeds 80%.
However, nearly 70% of prefabricated vegetables in China are still small, weak and scattered, and there is a lack of unified standards for product safety and quality
.

Therefore, although the prepared vegetable industry contains unlimited business opportunities, it still needs to form a synergy on the supply side to achieve high-quality development
.
Fresh food e-commerce has a stable user base and mature cold chain logistics and distribution advantages.
The secret of launching "popular" pre-made dishes is to cooperate with high-quality enterprises and develop self-operated products
.

　　For the offline catering industry, it is necessary to realize that pre-made dishes have the attributes of both food and catering
.
The food industry sells products, and the catering industry sells services.
If offline stores blindly pursue efficiency and try to reduce labor costs with pre-made dishes, it will be difficult for consumers to buy it
.
On the premise of ensuring the taste and dining experience, the standardization of the production of dishes can be improved, so that the business of pre-made dishes can do better
.