In the first half of the year, another group of catering companies “killed”
Entering July, halfway through 2023, is your restaurant okay?
Maybe you are lucky, but unfortunately, a group of teammates who fought side by side with us were “killed”.
Among them, there are “new generation” Internet celebrity teammates who have just emerged, and there are also “time-honored” Changhong teammates who have served for many years, and there are many topical star teammates and high-tech teammates with “profound background” and “self-contained traffic”…
For example, Hui Liushan, a Hong Kong-style dessert, closed his last store in Hong Kong as early as the end of 2021. He was sued in court for rent arrears. Farewell; Xianhezhuang, a star restaurant that also began to decline in 2021, has closed all stores in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou successively since this year. From the 800 stores at the peak, only 200 remain today.
Take over the popularity of celebrity catering and become a new generation of top-tier. In 2022, the new Chinese-style baking will be held high and full of ostentation. Many brands under the category have also come to an end this year. 200 million yuan, which eventually became the “Limited Year of the Tiger”.
There are also some “old Internet celebrities”, such as Niujiao Village, which was established in 2015 and is called “passing by ten times and queuing up nine times” by netizens.
These “disappearing” restaurants
What cruel industry truths are implied?
These brands that used to have an “invincible aura” – leaders, benchmarks, unicorns, valuations of tens of billions, single store sales of millions, queuing for 7 hours… were defeated one by one. After reading the form, do you feel particularly sad?
In fact, in the first half of this year, catering professionals are in a new cycle, a new era, and a new environment where new opportunities and challenges coexist. The strongest feeling of many bosses is “involution”, which includes several levels-the decline in consumption power, the decline in revenue capacity, and the upgrade of the competition dimension.
In the “disappearing restaurants” in the first half of the year, you will find a lot of cruel truths about the industry:
1. The old-fashioned catering has not ushered in a “recovery”. It can be seen from the table that the average establishment time of the restaurants that disappeared in the first half of the year is not short. They can be regarded as the old brands that have “experienced the dining cycle”, but they are hard to beat the changes of the times, and eventually become the tears of the times.
Why are old-fashioned restaurants “unable to stand up”?
On the one hand, there are indeed problems in its own operation. For example, Niujiao Village is deeply trapped in the dilemma of “false propaganda”. Last year, it was even issued a warning and fine by the Market Supervision Bureau. The false propaganda included the number of stores, imported equipment, and imported ingredients. By 2022, Niujiao Village owes millions of yuan to franchise stores, and many stores will not accept stored-value card users, and will no longer wholesale croissant dough from the headquarters, and have actually operated independently;
On the other hand, in the face of fierce involution in the market and the entry of new brands, some “traffic” brands obviously lack stamina. In this regard, Xu Liushan is a typical representative. Hong Kong-style desserts are facing more powerful categories of cross-track competition, and the scarcity is being broken;
Third, the consumption power is weak, and some old-fashioned restaurants that were not cheap in the first place have ushered in the impact of “extreme cost performance”.
The cost of death. Angsi Cake is the largest cake shop in the world. It used to be famous in the industry with “renovation investment of 100 million yuan”. However, the high cost seems out of place in this era. When everyone is “shrinking” the strategy, this kind of rich and powerful local tyrant’s operation can hardly support the healthy operation of the store after all; Niujiao Village is also facing the same dilemma. The epidemic has been repeated, and the original “experience space” has also become a huge burden on rent costs.
In today’s cost-effective environment, efficiency is the ultimate arena for all chain brands. If you want to fight a “price war”, if you don’t have high supply chain efficiency, store operation efficiency, human efficiency, and floor efficiency support, you will be easily out of the game.
The “end of the era” of celebrity online celebrity shops. When it comes to celebrity catering, Xianhezhuang cannot escape the topic. A while ago, it was revealed that all the stores in Guangzhou were closed, and then all the stores in Beijing were reported to have been “killed”. Even the “source” Fuzhou, the “headquarters” Chengdu, and the “base camp” Shanghai were nowhere to be seen.
Xianhezhuang can be regarded as a “milestone” of star catering. With its fall, the story of star catering has gradually come to an “end”. It has to be said that celebrity catering represented by Xianhezhuang once opened a hole in the dimension of “flow” and tore it to the extreme. However, times have changed, and now catering is advocating “returning to the essence”. It is no longer something to show off with labels such as traffic and Internet celebrities. Xianhezhuang “killed” an era of celebrity catering with its own life cycle.
Baked desserts fall into the “closed shop puzzle”. Bakery products are very easy to fall into the quagmire of homogeneity. After the explosion, it is easy to have a large number of similar products in a short period of time. Observe that those brands that “rise and fall” quickly are often the kings of “content marketing” and “traffic marketing”. They have won the ultimate data in a short period of time, quickly attracted market attention, and occupied the throne of traffic. However, once the aura fades away, the product is the core. Internet celebrity bakers who focus on marketing and neglect products will eventually need to pay for their madness.
On a certain level, baking is a “slow” industry. Some brands expand too fast, the management level and support system cannot keep up, and the whole system is relatively fragile. In addition, high-end baking also faces practical problems such as narrow audience and low consumption frequency. Nowadays, the industry is being reshuffled and reshaped, and baking has entered a “cooling-off period” after the boom. There are still many entrants who are “in love” with this category, trying to use their own methods to break the “closed shop puzzle”.
Robots are no match for “hand-made fireworks”. In the first half of the year, topics about robots and unmanned people were frequently searched. In the past, there was a pancake robot in the Beijing subway station, but it “quietly retired” due to various reasons not long after it became an Internet celebrity; later, there was a unicorn that raised 5 billion US dollars (about 35 billion yuan) and used robots to make pizza delivery The restaurant Zume Pizza announced its closure and did not survive the “seven-year itch”.
The design of robots, which advocates efficient operation and de-cooking, is of course the future trend. However, in the era of returning to “productism” and advocating “temperature” and “handmade”, the high cost of use, high maintenance costs, poor machine stability, and lack of taste make it seem like unmanned The shackles of brand advancement. What link is “unmanned”, and how to do it effectively and in a controlled manner may become a new problem for restaurants to think about.
Some people close their shops, some people speed up
The road to recovery is tortuous, but there is always hope for the industry
In the past six months, although a group of “teammates” who had fought side by side with us chose to leave, but on the tortuous road to recovery, when someone was out, someone was in.
After three years of “latency”, by the first half of 2023, the cross-industry entrepreneurs who poured into the catering industry will suddenly usher in a blowout growth. The catering industry is facing a very obvious “talent crowding out effect”, and talents in other industries will be squeezed out Start a business in the catering industry. Industry insiders believe that this phenomenon may continue in the next 2-3 years.
On the one hand, cross-industry entrepreneurs can apply knowledge and experience in other fields to catering entrepreneurship. The “starting point” is different, and the creativity is also different; Operations often “do not take the usual path” but bring some “surprises”.
Obviously, the recent popular “price war” has forced many catering veterans to join in. For the entire industry, although the price war will accelerate the survival of the fittest, it will also reshape the cost structure of catering, forcing catering to improve supply chain efficiency and operational efficiency.
In addition, the speeding up of leading chain enterprises has also let everyone see a positive signal: hot pot rookies, old brands are not to be outdone, and the volume is everywhere; Ruixing Coffee breaks through the chain of 10,000 stores; Michelle Ice City opened 479 stores in the first quarter; The number of Di Coffee stores has reached 4,000, realizing the rapid speed of “opening 1,000 stores a month”!
Obviously, after the top chain brands have stronger brand potential, chain capabilities, and accumulation capabilities, they will get rid of efficiency constraints and usher in rapid expansion.
“The era of huge profits is over, industry involution and rational consumption go hand in hand.”
