Finance and Economics Focus ｜ Catering consumption accelerates in the beginning of the year, and market confidence gradually recovers.
Shoulder-to-shoulder queue, the booming catering industry … … With the optimization and adjustment of epidemic prevention and control policies, offline consumption scenes such as restaurants and restaurants have been restored in an orderly manner, driving related consumption to pick up. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics recently, from January to February 2023, the national catering revenue increased by 9.2% year-on-year.
Food and beverage consumption demand has been greatly released.
Recently, "one table is hard to find" has become a common feeling for many consumers to eat. At the Chaoshan beef shop in Beijing Road, Guangzhou, the "Chaofa" has a long queue, and there are dozens of tables waiting at 6 pm. By the weekend, the average daily number of this store is nearly 1,000 tables. The waiter trotted to serve food and shouted, "It seems that the guests can’t finish receiving it recently."
Passenger flow recovery promotes turnover growth. From January to February, 2023, the brands owned by Beijing Huatian increased by about 12% year-on-year. Among them, Tongheju Restaurant and Xinchuan Noodle Restaurant increased by more than 20% year-on-year. In particular, the sales of Tongheju Restaurant and Eryouju in February have exceeded 2019 and returned to normal levels.
In order to help the catering industry recover, from January to February, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hangzhou issued special coupons for catering, with obvious results. According to the data of Meituan, after Hangzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Dongguan and other cities issued coupons, the year-on-year growth rate of food consumption in restaurants reached double digits. In addition to issuing consumer vouchers, many local governments have also introduced policies to further optimize the business environment, including supporting outbound operations and launching "catering loan" financial products.
The "small" of catering reflects the "big" of development. According to the analysis of China Cuisine Association, from January to February, 2023, the growth rate of national catering revenue and catering revenue of units above designated size increased by 0.3 percentage points and 0.1 percentage points respectively compared with the same period of last year. From January to February this year, the national catering revenue accounted for 10.9% of the total retail sales of consumer goods, which was 5.7 percentage points higher than the total retail sales of consumer goods.
The relevant person in charge of the China Cuisine Association believes that from January to February, driven by the Spring Festival holiday and the policy of helping enterprises, the demand for catering consumption was greatly released, and the catering market rebounded significantly, which made a good start for the development of the whole year and played a "catalyst" role in boosting consumer confidence in 2023.
Customers dine in the Wuyi Hotel in Xi ‘an. Xinhua News Agency reporter Li Jiaxu photo
New kinetic energy "combustion-supporting" catering market
Potted vegetables and quick-frozen vegetables … … Guangzhou Restaurant accelerated the research and development of new prefabricated dishes and product upgrading, and the revenue of quick-frozen food was once the company’s second largest source of income. The White Paper on the Development of Prefabricated Vegetable Industry in China in 2022 shows that the scale of prefabricated vegetable market in China will reach 419.6 billion yuan in 2022, up by 21.3% year-on-year, and it is estimated that the market scale will exceed one trillion yuan in 2026.
Cheng Gang, secretary-general of Guangdong Food and Beverage Service Association, believes that due to the epidemic, people’s consumption behaviors and habits have changed, and many catering entities are "looking for opportunities in danger". Some actively adjust their business methods, including innovating catering products such as prefabricated vegetables, strengthening industrial cross-border integration, overlapping emerging consumption elements, expanding business space, optimizing brand experience and cognition, and finally enhancing consumer trust to activate the market, so as to achieve more stable, sustainable and virtuous development.
Including live broadcast, short video, digital channels and social sharing functions to help stimulate consumer demand, attract more passengers and stimulate catering consumption. "We enhance the brand’s popularity by planning videos such as the Fat Story Collection and the food recommendation official shop." Chai Biao, chairman of Feifei Shrimp Village, said that 70% to 80% of the passenger flow in some stores comes from the network platform.
More time-honored brands try cross-border innovation, combining eating and drinking with tourism, performance, entertainment, shopping and other formats, and enriching the consumption experience with diverse new scenes. In Shaanxi, there are more and more tourists in Yi Sushe Cultural District of Xi ‘an, which integrates Shaanxi opera performance, time-honored food and new retail of the country. Xi’ an restaurant head office lets customers immerse themselves in the local food culture through the Shaanxi cuisine culture experience museum; Time-honored enterprises turned into "convenience community canteens" and opened a new model of community chain.
Jin Wenping, secretary of the Party Committee and chairman of Xi ‘an Catering Co., Ltd. said that the opening of a new chapter of diversified development by time-honored brands is the epitome of the market-oriented reform and exploration of the catering industry with consumer demand as a breakthrough, which is conducive to promoting the development of the industry and enhancing the social and economic benefits of the brand.
New measures to stabilize industry confidence
"Give priority to restoring and expanding consumption", "Enhance consumption capacity, improve consumption conditions and innovate consumption scenarios" … … We will implement the requirements of the Central Economic Work Conference, and all localities will further clarify policies and stabilize expectations.
The policy of benefiting enterprises and benefiting the people continued to increase, boosting food and beverage consumption. For example, Beijing holds a variety of catering activities to promote consumption; Guangzhou has successively introduced catering support policies, with a maximum reward of 1 million yuan for transformed and upgraded catering enterprises and 2 million yuan for enterprises with increased turnover; Wenzhou has introduced ten measures to boost the confidence of catering industry development around reducing the institutional cost of catering industry access.
The main body of the catering industry is more confident and the investment layout is accelerated. Not long ago, at the China (Guangzhou) Catering Industry Development Conference and Investment and Financing Cooperation and Exchange Exhibition, hundreds of catering enterprises proposed nearly 1,000 brand catering investment projects, including Guangdong cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Shandong cuisine and other major domestic cuisines, as well as Japanese cuisine, Southeast Asian cuisine, Central Asian cuisine and other international flavors, with an investment of more than 3 billion yuan.
Zhang Yi, the person in charge of Ai Media Consulting, a third-party research institution, said that the expansion of the catering industry shows that confidence has gradually recovered, diversified and tends to middle and high-end projects. The catering industry pursues higher quality brand development and provides better services for consumers.
"From banquets, dinners, business receptions, prepared dishes and other aspects, we can see the signal of rapid recovery of the catering industry. New models, new channels and new technologies are constantly emerging, promoting the development of the catering industry to multiple formats and quality. " Chen Jianqi, vice president of Shaanxi Cooking and Catering Industry Association, said that it is also necessary to pay attention to the low threshold, intensified industry competition, low overall profit rate and increasing cost of raw materials and services. Therefore, it is necessary to make further efforts in specialization and industrialization to improve competitiveness.
Insiders said that in order to accelerate the comprehensive and steady recovery of the catering industry, it is necessary to continuously improve policy support and guidance, introduce policies to help and promote consumption that are more in line with enterprise needs and market expectations, guide the cultivation of leading enterprises and leading talents, and rationalize the industrial layout. At the same time, it is necessary to promote development and anti-waste, to innovate products and to keep the bottom line of food safety. (Reporter Ding Le, Ning Ji, Cai Xinyi, Li Jiaxu)