Chinese culinary food culture, pays attention to "food is not tired of fine, eat is not tired of fine".
Eating is not only a ritual of life, but also a science and technology, and it is also a beauty enjoyment.
Nowadays, the aging process is accelerating, the elderly are inconvenient to cook, and young people are reluctant to spend time in the kitchen. Coupled with the background of the epidemic, many families are increasingly favoring pre-made dishes, and cooking habits have undergone a series of changes.
Can pre-made dishes harmonize and satisfy thousands of tastes?
How will the pre-made dish track solve the problem of "tastes more delicious"?
Chinese cooking is difficult to make thousands of dishes blindly
"Zuo Zhuan: The Twenty Years of Emperor Zhao" records: Once, when the Marquis of Qi returned from hunting, Yan Ying, the minister of Qi, greeted him, and Liang Qiuqi, the favorite minister, also arrived.
Duke Jing asked Yan Zi: Can Liang Qiuqi and I be considered harmonious between ruler and minister?
Yanzi replied: "Harmony is like a scorpion. Water, fire, glutinous rice, salt and plum are used to cook fish and meat, and they are cooked for salary. The slaughter of the husband and the harmony of the taste, the relief of the lack of it, and the release of its faults." Seasoning, add a little if it is not enough, reduce a little if it is too much.
Although Yanzi's remarks are about the relationship between the ruler and the ministers, he cites cooking as an example, which also shows that it is difficult to achieve a thousand dishes with a single cooking ratio.
Cooking relies on human operation, and ingredients and condiments are organic substances with different properties, so there are bound to be many uncontrollable factors.
The same dish will taste different when cooked by different people. Even if the same person cooks it many times, different effects will appear each time.
Cooking is a human phenomenon and cannot be cookie-cutter.
This can be said to be a very distinctive tradition of Chinese cooking.
Standardized pre-cooked dishes to test your taste buds
Pre-prepared dishes are convenient dishes that can be eaten directly by heating or steaming after pre-preparing the ingredients of the dishes, simplifying the production steps, and packaging them in a hygienic and scientific manner.
In the 1980s, the original prepared dishes and cooking kits took Japan by storm.
In my country, from 2014 to the present, the food delivery industry has developed rapidly, driving the fast food package industry; in 2020, due to the epidemic, household consumption has increased sharply, and catering businesses have gradually changed their sales ideas.
"What we eat at restaurants outside is basically pre-made dishes." Xu Jianliang, deputy general manager of Shilin Food Co., Ltd., Lanxi Town, Heshan District, Yiyang, Hunan, took Banyuetan reporters to visit a warehouse of the company's pickled products. Hundreds of giant pickling jars about the same height as a person, each with a capacity of about 1,000 kilograms, containing pickled products such as chopped peppers, and the name of the customized enterprise is clearly marked on the tank.
He said that because of the rise of prepared dishes, some restaurants, especially chain catering companies, may not even hire professional chefs and only need to heat them.
According to iiMedia Research, the scale of China's prepared vegetable market is expected to maintain a growth rate of more than 20%, and is expected to exceed 510 billion yuan in 2023.
According to a report released by the China Business Industry Research Institute, my country's current market for pre-made vegetables is about 300 billion yuan, and it is expected to achieve more than 3 trillion yuan in the long run.
See the supply side at a glance.
Affected by the epidemic, the cost of catering companies continues to rise, and pre-made dishes can effectively help catering companies reduce costs.
The penetration rate of take-out continues to increase, and the delivery time of pre-made dishes is greatly shortened while ensuring the taste and health.
Data shows that more than 74% of domestic chain catering brands have built their own central kitchens to produce pre-made dishes to meet the needs of stores and third parties, and promote the further development of the pre-made food industry.
Second, look at the demand side.
The proportion of young and old living alone has increased.
Young people often work overtime, and the home economy and lazy economy promote the development of pre-made dishes.
Driven by the three-child policy, families with multiple births have emerged, and pre-made dishes can help reduce the pressure of parenting.
According to a survey, among the consumer groups of pre-made vegetables, 86% of users buy pre-made vegetables every week.
Three views on policy trends.
my country's rural revitalization to create "one village, one product" is likely to become one of the factors that change the pattern of the prepared vegetable industry in the future.
For example, Shandong Zhucheng is making every effort to develop the prefabricated vegetable industry and promote the integration of modern agriculture from planting, breeding and processing to catering terminals.
Walking into the exhibition hall of Shandong Huifa Food Co., Ltd. in Zhucheng, more than 300 kinds of pre-made dishes in China, such as spicy crayfish and lion head, are readily available.
Ding Ruiying, deputy director of Zhucheng Development and Reform Bureau, believes that the upstream of prefabricated vegetables is connected with rural revitalization, and the downstream is connected with consumption reform, which will become an effective breakthrough to promote the transformation and upgrading of local agriculture and food industries.
"Not enough fragrance" problem to be solved
The prefabricated food industry "looks beautiful", but the lack of industry standards and other issues has spawned many pain points and blockages that plague the development of the industry, making prefabricated dishes "not tasty enough".
During interviews with some food companies, a reporter from Banyuetan found that the industry does not clearly define the concept of pre-made dishes. For example, do simple meatballs and ham belong to pre-made dishes?
In addition, the product standards of pre-made dishes are not uniform, resulting in problems such as difficulty in guaranteeing the quality of dishes, inaccurate labels, large price differences, and inconsistency between pictures and texts.
For example, the same Buddha jumps over the wall, the price on the same e-commerce platform ranges from tens of yuan to several hundred yuan, and the difference is large.
At present, the entry threshold for the pre-prepared vegetable industry is relatively low, and many of them adopt the workshop-style production and processing mode, which makes it difficult to guarantee food safety and quality.
Zheng Simin, chairman of Delis Group Co., Ltd., suggested that leading enterprises should be strengthened and the industry concentration should be improved.
We should give full play to the key role of leading agricultural enterprises in the layout of the entire industrial chain of prepared vegetables, and create a professional park for prepared vegetables.
At the same time, strengthen research and development capabilities and brand building, improve product competitiveness.
In addition, the cost of developing prepared dishes is high, including raw material, labor and cold chain logistics costs.
Due to the need for freshness, the transportation and distribution process of some pre-made vegetables needs to be carried out in a low temperature environment, which requires convenient warehousing logistics and cold chain transportation system support.
The transportation cost of cold chain logistics is relatively high, which directly affects the business scope of enterprises.
In addition, the pre-prepared vegetable industry is a labor-intensive industry, with high labor intensity, difficulty in recruiting, long recruitment cycle, high turnover rate, and shortage of skilled workers, resulting in a large increase in labor costs.
Gao Mingqin, director of Shandong Yuandu Yinghe Law Firm, suggested that relevant state departments should formulate industry standards as soon as possible to standardize industry access conditions, and regulate the raw materials, processing technology, packaging, labeling, storage, cold chain transportation, microbial indicators, additives of prefabricated vegetables. Make unified regulations on indicators, pesticide residue indicators, etc., and guide the industry into the standardization track.
Source: "Ban Yue Tan Internal Edition" 2022 Issue No. 5 original title "Pre-made dishes are "really fragrant"?
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Banyuetan Reporter: Zheng Xuejing, Chen Guofeng, Zhou Mian