Recently, according to a report by Red Meal.com, as of October 2023, 12 new stores have been added to the bread baking track20,000 stores, 12 closed010,000, with a net increase of 1,874 stores. Overall, the growth rate of the total number of bakery stores in the country in 2023 will only be 1%, and the registration revocation ratio will fluctuate and decline. Among Meituan's top 100 bakeries in 2019, 39 will no longer be open in 2023, and 32 will reduce the number of stores. The old store Christine will be closed in 2023, the cutting-edge stores Hutou Bureau, Momo Dim Sum Bureau, and Dianjinshi will continue to shrink, high-end baked Angsi cakes, Len Tre Renaud French pastries, etc. will be closed, and countless lesser-known bakeries will gradually fade out of people's field of vision.
Many people in the industry sighed: "If you want to succeed in opening a bakery, either you have very strong funds and can lose money; Either you have a strong ability to lay out the bakery, make products, and have a strong marketing ability. ”
Why do bakeries die so easily? How do bakeries find their way out? Shangyin interviewed a number of bakery industry practitioners to try to find answers to these questions.
Author |Three eachEdited by HaoranThis article is the original article of Shangyin Society, **Please contact the background
Why do bakeries die so easily?
Around 2008, animal butter was just popular in China, and many people had never eaten animal butter, so they opened a bakery at that time, and they could make it with some good raw materials, and whoever made it made money. Xiao Nan, a practitioner who has been deeply involved in the baking industry for more than ten years, sighed.
Before 2020, many stores will "move" products from abroad to form their own differentiated products.
Xiao Nan got a wave of dividends in this way: there was no Japanese bread in China at that time, and after investigation, she decided to make this category.
At that time, she made a tuna bread that could be sold for 15 yuan for a very small one, but consumers would not find it expensive.
First, I think the materials I use are very good, the camellia flour I use, there was no ** merchant at that time, it was particularly difficult to buy, and I had to ask many people to send international express. The second is that only I am selling this product, and consumers can't eat it elsewhere, so I have pricing power. Xiao Nan explained.
However, with more and more entrants in the baking industry, various types of bread, cakes and desserts from abroad have been introduced into China. Coupled with the rapid development of the Internet, the products of various bakeries have nothing to hide, and after a new product comes out, it will soon be imitated by peers, resulting in serious product homogenization.
In the absence of their own differentiated products, bakeries have started the first war.
For example, in the baking market in Chengdu, there was a store at the beginning, and when it opened, the ** was set very low, and the lye bread without fillings was sold for three yuan a piece, and those with fillings were sold for 6 yuan a piece, purely relying on the volume. As a result, the store quickly became popular with its high cost performance.
Subsequently, many newly opened stores, due to the lack of customers, have followed this "low price and volume" model; And those old stores that already have a customer base can't stand the menacing arrival of new stores, and they have begun to reduce prices. After all, on the premise that the taste is not very different, many customers will be lost if the price is not reduced.
Under the fierce competition, there is still a continuous influx of entrepreneurs, and it has also attracted a lot of capital in the past few years.
Because China's baking industry is currently low in chain and scale, it is expected that the size of China's baked goods market will reach 3069 in 2023900 million yuan, and the market size will reach 351.8 billion yuan in 2025, with huge market development space.
But the money in the baking industry is not so easy to make, and high entry and high elimination are its biggest characteristics.
First of all, there are many people who don't understand the baking industry and plunge into entrepreneurship, and the bakery opened by entrepreneurs in this situation is bound to go out of business.
Many people learn to open a store directly after a year and a half, but in fact, it is difficult to form a unique selling point on the product. Because baking is also a very deep science, it does not mean that you can make a product.
Some people say that if you can't do it yourself, you won't hire a master? A master with good technology can indeed solve product problems in the short term, but it is still unknown whether the master can work for a long time and whether he can perceive market changes and continue to develop new products. The manager needs to understand the product, and he can't be a hands-off shopkeeper.
Secondly, the baking industry has a low rate of return.
Many girls dream of opening a bakery that sells delicate and delicious breads, cakes or desserts.
But anyone who has actually done it in the baking industry will know that a lot of it is out of pure idealism. Otherwise, how could the bakery be listed as a "three-piece set of literary and artistic youth bankruptcy" with flower shops and homestays?
Peeling back the glamour of the surface is the hard work of getting up early and greedy for darkness, the backache and tenosynovitis, and the rewards that do not match the effort.
In addition to running his own bakery, Xiao Nan will also bring some students who want to open a store. She would first dissuade the students: "Many people want to open a store as soon as their minds are hot, and they have not been exposed to the whole process of the baking industry. I would advise him that this industry is very hard, first of all, you have to think about whether you can endure hardship. ”
For those who want to open a studio or private room and do pre-customized smuggling domain channels, it is generally 1-2 people to take care of the entire bakery. From expanding customers, replying to customer messages, making products, taking orders, packaging and distribution, almost every trivial thing has to be handled.
The layman may not know that in the process of making bread, in addition to bread shaping, bakers are basically on the move, and it is not unusual to walk tens of thousands of steps a day.
Cakes and desserts with less complicated processes will be simpler to make than bread, but staring at the cake embryo for a long time will also be easily damaged by the cervical and lumbar vertebrae; In addition, products such as cakes and desserts have an obvious "peak season", and orders will surge before the holidays, and this kind of large orders in a short period of time often require the manager to "overwork".
In addition, opening a bakery also requires psychological preparation for not making much money. Zhao Qiu, who transformed from private baking to a studio last year, also said frankly: "The studio has been open for about half a year, and the cost of the initial investment is about 80,000 yuan. ”
For bakeries with slightly larger stores and offline sales, store rent, decoration, baking equipment, labor costs, marketing, etc. all require funds, and the cost of investment is higher, ranging from two or three hundred thousand yuan to more than one hundred thousand yuan.
Some stores may not be low in sales every day, but after deducting various costs, the profits are negligible or even negative, and there is no way to survive in the long run.
In the list of bakeries that have closed down, there are not only old stores that have enjoyed the first wave of baking industry benefits, but also new stores that were born in the period of high involution in the baking industry.
It stands to reason that the old store has accumulated a stable source of customers, so why did it go out of business?
Six or seven years ago, there would still be a type of customer who ate margarine, but as people pay more and more attention to health nowadays, margarine has no advantage.
From vegetable butter to animal butter, coupled with the cost of raw materials such as flour, butter and sugar, has been rising, but it is more affordable, and the old store that has been operating for many years cannot support it. Zhao Qiu analyzed.
From a deeper level, we have to mention the people who originally did the baking industry.
This is a relatively unspeakable fact: many people who started to work in baking did not go to university to study vocational high school, or study in baking school, or from apprenticeship to master step by step. Xiao Nan told Shangyin Agency.
After the epidemic, many of the successful baking entrepreneurs have been transferred from the Internet or other industries. These people are either highly educated or well-informed, and they have enough advantages to put them ahead of others at the starting point: for example, they understand marketing; For example, with a wide range of contacts and resources, it may be worth a year's income for others just by making a gift box for the enterprise.
The old store only knows how to make products, sells bread honestly, and does not understand the Internet and marketing, so many of them are eliminated.
Born in the period of high involution in the baking industry, there are also many new stores that are not well managed and eventually close their stores. Like some mid-to-high-end bakeries mentioned at the beginning, their closures are caused by a variety of factors.
For example, in terms of products, many stores have always had a single and repetitive product, with no more than 10 categories of bread, cakes, and biscuits.
The baking industry needs to pay attention to market trends and changes in consumer demand, adjust product strategies and launch new products in a timely manner.
In addition, in terms of customer sources, some bakeries are positioned at the high-end and have relatively few customer groups, so there is a problem of low customer stickiness and low repurchase rate.
The market of the baking industry is changing rapidly, and it is not as simple as it seems to pay attention to marketing, make timely adjustments to products, and control costs.
Sam's, Freshippo, and Meituan's suppression of bakeries
Sam's, Freshippo, Meituan, etc., which continued to make efforts in the baking field last year, also had a big impact on bakeries.
Last year, Hema took the lead in provoking a ** battle against Sam on the single item of durian mille-feuille cake. Subsequently, the two sides repeatedly adjusted the price around the durian mille-feuille cake.
In addition, various stores under Hema ** and online simultaneously launched the "Yishan Price", directly benchmarking Sam's, Swiss rolls, mochi bread and other popular products. And Meituan Maicai has also quietly launched a "tug-of-war price" in the dairy baking category.
The battle of these retail giants can allow consumers to buy more preferential products, but it is bitter for bakeries. A person who does not have two stomachs and has bought bakery products in new retail channels will naturally no longer go to bakeries to buy them.
Sam's Club's star products, durian mille-feuille cake, Swiss rolls and mochi buns, are all OEM produced by factories in the frozen baked goods industry, the former two from Enxi Village and the latter from Ligao Foods.
In April last year, Hema officially put into operation its bakery factory, Sugar Box, which transports wheat ashore by water, processes it, and then transports freshly finished bread and frozen dough to Hema warehouses in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai through Kunshan's extensive high-speed network.
The establishment of the new retail bakery chain system can realize the full-link production and transportation from wheat to bread, and achieve the optimal cost and efficiency.
Once the new retail brand begins to focus on building its own baking chain, it can directly reduce costs by controlling the chain, provide more competitive products, and force bakeries to reduce prices.
Under such an impact, it is particularly important for bakeries to establish their own brand moats.
In the past few years, a large number of Internet celebrity brands such as Hutou Bureau and Momo Dim Sum Bureau have grown rapidly with the help of capital, but at present, many of them have died down.
"Heavy marketing, light products" is a common problem of dead Internet celebrity brands. For young people, high-value influencer products inspire them to try them, but homogeneous and featureless products cannot make consumers build loyalty to a brand.
There is a problem that needs to be solved urgently in the baking industry:For brands that have been scaled, product development and innovation are limited; And the brand that does well in the product takes the initiative to be confined to "small and beautiful".
For a single store of a bakery chain brand, the degree of freedom in product development is not high, and the larger the chain brand, the lower the degree of freedom. However, the types of products that customers prefer in different regions are different, and when operators want to make and sell certain products, they have no way to do so.
For some self-created brands that have been in business for many years, many managers often understand both products and customer needs, and have greater advantages in developing new products and testing new products.
But these owners are not very willing to scale their brands.
I don't really want to open a big store, at most I will open a small store facing the street. Zhao Qiu said.
I have been in the baking industry for so many years, and all kinds of people have asked me to cooperate and invest, and they have all contributed money, but I have all refused. Xiao Nan told Shangyin Agency.
These bakery owners are actually making trade-offs. The entry of capital can help the manager to make the brand bigger and stronger, and it will also quickly "circle money" within a year or two, bringing huge economic benefits to the manager, but the corresponding price is: the brand may die.
Capital can find and build other brands, but I can't accept watching the brands I have slowly cultivated die. Xiao Nan said.
Because once the brand is large-scale, many aspects are uncontrollable: in order to maintain operations, considering the improvement of store decoration, publicity and marketing, labor costs, etc., coupled with the involution of the entire baking market, it is likely to be necessary to reduce the cost of raw materials, and raw materials directly affect the taste of the product, which is contrary to the original intention of the brand.
How to make a "small but beautiful" baking brand?
At present, the scale of the baking industry is becoming more and more difficult, and the data of Qichacha shows that the number of financing in the baking track in 2023 will only be 12, compared with 22 last year, which is almost halved, and the publicly disclosed financing amount is less than one-third of last year.
As a result, "small and beautiful" has become the choice of many bakeries, and from the summary of interviews with many industry insiders, the following points need to be achieved to create a "small and beautiful" baking brand.
First, it is necessary to have strong product research and development capabilities.
This requires a solid grasp of the basics, an understanding of the baking ingredients, and then the development of the product you want, rather than learning a recipe.
Recipes are dead and can be changed flexibly. After figuring out the principle, how to write the formula and how to change it. Bakers who understand baking knowledge very thoroughly will be able to guess the recipe when they eat a product.
And you have to have the ability to integrate it. Bakers may have learned some techniques and techniques from various sources, but they need to be able to understand the purpose of a certain method and then apply it flexibly in the production process.
For example, white chocolate is often added to matcha in French desserts, because the smoothness of white chocolate can suppress the astringency of matcha and only highlight the fragrance of matcha. Matcha bread products on the market generally add a lot of sugar to suppress the astringency of matcha, resulting in a particularly sweet matcha product. If the idea of sweetness is applied to making bread, it can not only highlight the taste and reduce the astringency, but also the sweetness of white chocolate itself will not make the sweetness so high.
How did you get the inspiration for product development?
It is to be able to visit a store correctly. Many people stay on following the trend of visiting stores, for example, if a certain product is very popular at the moment, they will imitate it.
But experienced people will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of this product, and how they can use its advantages in their own products.
In addition, many people in the industry believe that no matter how much you can use as inspiration for your bakery products, you can use any food as inspiration for your bakery products.
The second is to reduce the cost of R&D products.
If you want to reduce costs, you need to do some research and development on the basis of existing raw materials, rather than directly buying a novel material.
For bakeries with limited funds but insisting on developing products, this model solves the problem of high attrition rate. Because once some novel raw materials are bought, customers may not necessarily pay for them, which will bring a lot of losses.
If you make some flavor combinations, shape changes, etc. according to the existing materials, you need to buy not many raw materials, the cost and loss can be controlled within an acceptable range, and the frequency of product updates can be maintained.
The third is to understand marketing.
Nowadays, we are in an era of "wine is also afraid of deep alleys", no matter how good the product is, if you only know how to make it and don't know how to market, customers have no chance to know your product.
In terms of enhancing popularity, operating the social ** software of each platform, regularly releasing exquisite baking ** and ** is the basic operation, and you can also rely on the platform to carry out interesting interactions such as voting and challenges.
However, how to allow users to punch in and spontaneously spread the grass is very crucial: for example, the appearance of the product should be exquisite and beautiful, and it should have the basic conditions for punching in and sharing; For example, set up a certain reward mechanism to increase the probability of users sharing the baking experience; For example, cooperate with some influential social influencers or bloggers to attract more users to check in and spread the grass.
Co-marketing campaigns with other brands are also ways for bakery brands to increase their awareness.
In addition, seasonal restrictions can also greatly stimulate consumers to place orders. For example, the bakery chain Panera Bread launches new seasonal menus every quarter, such as a strawberry salad limited to spring or pumpkin cookies limited to autumn.
Finally, it's important to improve the shopping experience, retain customers, and increase repeat purchases.
We have a 1,600-square-meter bakery in our local area, and we are constantly promoting it through various channels every day. ”
The fundamental reason is that they can't retain customers, they don't serve existing customers well, and they keep attracting new customers in order to make money. Although it seems that the daily turnover is high, there will be high marketing costs, operating costs, and the boss will lose more customers in order to make the profit margin worse raw materials, so he will lose more customers, forming a vicious circle.
Although the fierce competition has led to the death of countless bakeries, the "survival of the fittest" is also reversely stimulating baking brands to improve their capabilities, which is a process that both bakery chain brands and "small and beautiful" brands have to go through.