Xibei has always had a dream of 10,000 stores!

This year, Xibei "seems" to be one step closer to its Wandian dream. In October 2020, the highly anticipated Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine opened its first restaurant in Beijing. As of the end of March this year, in just half a year, Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine has more than 200 stalls across the country.

Xibei Oatmeal Noodles, Maixiang Village, Super Roujia Mo, Xibei Yogurt House... Xibei has been defeated and fought repeatedly on the fast food track. This time, can Xibei use Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine to break the curse of "fighting and failing repeatedly", and can Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine continue to grow under the current huge controversy?

01, double expensive again

Conflict between price and category?

Expensive, once again becoming the biggest slot of Xibei's second deck!

The public rating of Jia Guolong Kungfu Cuisine Beijing Jinyuan is three and a half stars.

The reviews of Xibei Younian Village Beijing Branch are mostly five-star.

Known to have gathered nine major cuisines of "Chuan, Lu, Yue, Huai, Yang, Fujian, Zhejiang, Ting Hui, Mongolia", Jia Guolong Kungfu cuisine, which pays attention to "stupid kung fu" in cooking techniques, compares with his own Xibei Noodle Village, where is it "defeated" ? Consumers sum it up as "expensive". However, taking the Beijing Jinyuan store as an example, the per capita of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is 98 yuan, and the per capita of Xibei Noodle Village is 112 yuan.

The "expensive" of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is that people spend 98 yuan on a meal of "semi-finished" dishes. After all, the so-called "expensive" comes from the conflict between price and category. On some Daojia platforms and review sites, comments on Jia Guolong’s Kung Fu cuisine "Xiaogui" are not uncommon. Even if Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine repeatedly emphasizes the quality and taste of the food through "Kung Fu", the semi-finished product model makes it not qualified to compete with the freshly fried dishes.

With an average per capita of 100, how many people would choose to eat semi-finished products is a question. The price is too high, so that Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is equivalent to drifting back and forth between the semi-finished products and the freshly fried two major tracks, and there is no advantage anywhere. On the semi-finished track, Jia Guolong Kung Fu dishes are "expensive"! There is no such thing as Jia Guolong's Kung Fu cuisine at all on the spot-frying track.

02, advance into the shopping center

Vague positioning causes deviation in site selection?

Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine, focusing on "Homecoming" and "New Retail", is on the track of the current fire. "Xibei You Noodle Village's Catering Company Gene" + "Home and New Retail Outlet born in the post-epidemic era", Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is a good business no matter how you look at it. However, not only is consumer feedback mediocre, but even the media are more pessimistic about Jia Guolong's Kung Fu cuisine. Among them, the location of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine has been frequently complained by the media.

The two Beijing restaurants of Jia Guolong Kungfu Cuisine listed by Dianping are located in the shopping center. Among the more than 200 restaurants of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine, quite a few have followed in the footsteps of Xibei Noodle Village and walked into the shopping mall. However, it must be clear that Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine and Xibei You Noodle Village operate two completely different dining directions.

According to the Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine model, its advantages are mainly focused on "convenience", which is to bring "Kung Fu cuisine" comparable to dine-in food into the family dining scene, or to meet the needs of fast business dining. The main target of the former is in the community. Here, the latter’s main target crowd is in the CBD business center, while Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine chooses to grab traffic in shopping malls with other dinning stores, or even its own stores. Its own intention may be to grab both the retail crowd and the dine-in crowd. However, such “ambitions” have blurred the positioning of Jia Guolong’s kungfu cuisine as “home” and “new retail”, so that consumers will feel that eating semi-finished dishes in shopping malls is not enough for the experience; and ordering food at home is convenient and convenient. Not enough, on the contrary, both ends can't be grasped well.

03, experience gap

Didn't both sides fall well?

In dine-in, some consumers compare Jia Guolong Kungfu cuisine to "high-end box lunch", "airplane meal", "canned dinner"... However, after careful analysis of consumer reviews on Jia Guolong Kungfu cuisine, it is not difficult to find that Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is actually worthy of the word "Kung Fu". It is quite brilliant on the semi-finished cuisine track, both in terms of selection and taste. However, the psychological gap of consumers comes from putting the "big box lunch" in an elegant dinner environment and spending the price of the dinner to consume it, which is somewhat of a gap.

In the home business, many consumers find that Jia Guolong Kung Fu dishes are not very convenient to cook. They generally need to be heated for more than 20 minutes, and the reviews generally reflect that they are not as good as dine-in meals. The heating of a semi-finished dish actually needs to be heated, otherwise it will affect the taste. This wave of operation will greatly reduce the home experience of Jia Guolong's Kung Fu cuisine.

Gathering 9 major cuisines, each dish has been carefully polished from the selection of ingredients to the taste. Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is quite sincere in terms of products, but failed to receive the expected experience. Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine needs to use a more optimized model to weaken the contradiction between "experience of dine-in" and "convenience at home", in order to break the current situation of wanting to catch both ends, and it may not be good at both ends.

04. Channel polishing

There is still a lot of room for improvement online?

In October 2020, the Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine Super Central Kitchen Project was officially launched and is expected to be completed and put into production in the second half of this year, with an annual output value of about 5 billion yuan. Xibei said that the super central kitchen will support the annual sales of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine of 15 billion yuan, and the sales of Xibei Noodle Village in 2020 will be 5.5 billion, which means that Xibei’s expectation of Jia Guolong Kungfu cuisine is close to "3. Xibei You Noodle Village".

In the new retail business, online is a must-see high ground. If Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine wants to catch up with the sales of Xibei Noodle Village, online is also a must to break through. But for now, Xibei's online channels have not yet formed a certain advantage.

First, Xibei's private domain traffic needs further breakthroughs to support the sales of Jia Guolong Kung Fu dishes on its own e-commerce platform. Xibei is one of the catering companies that tested new retail earlier and built a platform from the cable. Its "Selection Mall" built in 2017 is Xibei’s main position for new retail. Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine was also launched as soon as possible. "Select Mall". In the future, the increase in membership of Xibei will also determine the increase in sales of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine to a certain extent. At present, Jia Guolong Kungfu cuisine's online position is mainly concentrated on its own "selection mall" and e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, and the cost of acquiring customers on public domain platforms is getting higher and higher. Regardless of whether it is private or public domain, to do online Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine, you need to do the homework of "drainage".

The second is whether Xibei’s traffic can be successfully converted into Jia Guolong’s Kung Fu dishes. The online sales of semi-finished products are mainly concentrated in young people, which does not completely overlap with the young and middle-aged consumers in Xibei Younian Village.

The third is that Jia Guolong's kungfu dishes are mostly frozen products, which means that his online home business needs cold chain logistics support, and the cost of cold chain transportation is relatively high. At present, Jia Guolong Kung Fu Food supports logistics and distribution by cooperating with SF cold chain.

05. Regardless of success or failure

Have taken the first step towards success

Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine is already Xibei’s seventh attack on the fast-food sector.

Public data shows that, except for 2020, which is affected by the epidemic, Xibei's revenue compound growth rate in recent years has exceeded 30%, but it is clear that Xibei is not satisfied with the current results. For the frequent attempts of fast food, Xibei is struggling to find the second growth curve. On the basis of continuing to strengthen the core business of Xibei Noodle Village, Xibei hopes to continue to strengthen and expand the company through horizontal expansion of the ecology.

This Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine has certainly caused a lot of controversy, but what is beyond reproach is Xibei's forward-looking vision, courage and ability to dare to try and make mistakes. Love to toss is actually the advantage of Xibei. Compared with some brands that live in the comfort zone, the tossing "Xibei" is the core force for the innovation and development of the industry.

Recently, like Xibei, there is another big catering brand, Daoxiangcun, a long-established restaurant that has caused controversy due to the launch of semi-finished products. Daoxiang Village tries to sell Daoxiang small lunches in some stores. The stores provide heating services, and customers can also take them away directly. The small box lunch business of Daoxiang Village also faces problems such as the mismatch between the location of the customer cluster and the original store location, and the low overlap rate between the new business user group and the brand's original user group. However, whether Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine or Daoxiang Village, its new business will obviously not stop at the present, the overall model and details will be further polished in the future. In the process of trial and error, error correction, and perfection, there is still progress expected by the industry and consumers.

Under the fierce battle, if you don't advance, you will retreat; if you advance, you need brave trial and error.

The "Xiaogui" of Xibei fast food sub-brand from one to the end can also be regarded as Xibei's persistence in exploring the survival way of high-end fast food. Regardless of the ultimate success of Jia Guolong Kung Fu cuisine, Xibei's persistence and innovation over the past few years are admirable.

As a catering person, we look forward to the success of Jia Guolong's Kung Fu cuisine, and look forward to the emergence of more new models, new forces, and new developments in the industry, and together present a dynamic and upward catering industry.