Hefu, which has run more than 500 stores in ten years, will increase the number of stores by 7 times in the next three years.
This article was originally published by Red Meal Network (ID: hongcan18), author: Wang Xiuqing, editor: Fang Yuan.
On the day of the winter solstice in 2023, Li Xuelin, the founder of Hefu Lao Mian (hereinafter referred to as "Hefu"), revealed a message at the brand strategy upgrade conference with the theme of "evolution": by 2026, Hefu Group will have 3,500+ stores, including more than 2,000 Hefu Lao Noodles and more than 1,500 Alan Beef Noodles.
Although the temperature was as low as minus 8°C, the atmosphere at the press conference was warm. Before announcing the news, Li Xuelin shared some recent developments, such as Hefu Lao Mian is currently in more than 80 cities across the country, with more than 500 directly-operated stores and more than 20 million members.
Hefu, which has run 500+ stores in ten years, will increase the number of stores by 7 times in the next three years. In the past ten years, Hefu has been playing high, making high-end quality and high-end experience, and opening directly operated stores in high-potential energy points in high-tier cities. If Hefu still expands stores according to this logic, it is not an easy task to achieve the goal of more than 3500+ stores in three years.
Li Xuelin is well versed in these market logics, and he proposed that in the next ten years, Hefu should "evolve", "find friends, sink down, go to sea, and deepen the layout", that is, open joint ventures, join hands with 5000+ strategic partners to open stores in sinking markets and overseas, and do encrypted layout in the original area.
It is understood that Hefu has launched the 2024 global partner selection plan. Among them, the threshold for joint operation of Hefu Lao Noodles is 890,000 yuan, and the Alain's beef noodles are 450,000 yuan. In addition, for the top 100 partners, Hefu will be equipped with more abundant market resources and brand support.
This signal has attracted the attention of many people in the industry. According to reports, some catering people joined the "queue army" for the first time and said that the brand that has done well in direct sales basically does not release opportunities, and the head brand like Hefu will control the input cost within 900,000 yuan in this first joint operation plan, which is indeed very attractive.
The opening of the joint venture means that the development of Hefu will be greatly accelerated in the next ten years.
It is said that entrepreneurship is like running a marathon, and professional marathon runners often do not sprint at full speed at the starting stage. Looking back on the situation of the noodle track in recent years, Hefu is not the fastest one. But its choice to start picking up speed at this time also means that the marathon has entered a new phase.
In the new stage, how will Hefu achieve its new goals?
Get ahead of the trend
Before achieving the new goals, Hefu had to address the challenges at hand.
In the past two years, Hefu has been "found wrong" by netizens with a magnifying glass, and "expensive" has become a common challenge faced by all new consumer brands.
As a dark horse running out of the new wave of consumption, Hefu has become accustomed to walking in the spotlight. During the period of consumption upgrading, Hefu not only remade the noodles with the logic of new consumption through the scene of eating noodles in the study, but also opened up a consumption method that consumers had never seen with a bowl of "high-end noodles".
The unique label made Hefu a class of its own, and quickly became well-known and opened dozens of directly-operated stores.
In the past ten years, Hefu has received a total of six rounds of financing, including well-known capital such as Tencent, Longfor, and Huaying. However, in the past two years, consumers have become more sensitive to **, and as a representative brand of high-end noodles, Hefu has already accumulated the strength of "turning".
In fact, Li Xuelin discovered the clues of changes in consumption trends very early, and Hefu has been silently cultivating internal skills. Starting from 2023, on the production and research side, Hefu has introduced new special snacks and some new products priced at 25-29 yuan, aiming to establish consumers' new perception of the brand - Hefu Lao Noodles, more than a bowl of high-end noodles.
At the press conference, Li Xuelin officially announced Hefu 2The three key words of 0 upgrade are health, green, and inclusive, and a new "four treasures of health" have been released - herbal soup, coarse grain noodles, longevity vegetables, and health tea. Today, when health care has become a hot consumer trend, Hefu has been working hard in the field of pan-health care for ten years, and this upgrade is more of a follow-up trend.
There is a certain threshold for catering consumption that focuses on the concept of health preservation, such as being expensive and not delicious. Health care means better quality ingredients and more original cooking methods, and it also means that health catering is often high and tasteless.
Hefu should not only be healthy, but also delicious. In Li Xuelin's eyes, "an excellent brand cannot solve a problem and create a new problem." In order to solve this contradiction, Hefu has set up a professional product research and development team, including the former state banquet masters, Le Cordon Bleu chefs, and masters invited from old restaurants in alleys across the country to polish the taste of the dishes.
In addition to health preservation, Hefu has also made a more friendly ** layering. At present, the ** range of Hefu's main products is 25-108 yuan. Compared with the past, Hefu has enlarged the product matrix of 20-30 yuan to improve the overall quality-price ratio of the brand; At the same time, it retains the classic ** belt of the middle and high-end to meet the needs of some business scenarios and young people to enjoy their own consumption.
For example, when white-collar workers in the core business districts of first- and second-tier cities need a "dinner table" for business negotiations, but do not have enough time to spend at a restaurant, high-quality Hefu will become the first choice.
Despite the first-class layering, Hefu not only did not reduce the quality, but improved the quality-price ratio of each ** belt. Li Xuelin pointed out at the press conference, "Hefu does not do cheap and low-quality things. Let everyone spend less money and enjoy higher quality, the original intention has not changed. ”
Do not fight unprepared wars
British economist Martin Christopher once said: "The 21st century is not a competition between companies, but a competition between **chain**chains." ”
This is certainly the case in the F&B market right now. Recently, the well-known tea brand Bawang Chaji and Tea Baidao have established joint ventures twice, aiming to consolidate the best chain between the two sides. In the white-hot competition of the new tea drink track, even if it is a competing product, the two sides still choose to cooperate to do a good job in the first chain.
The case of brand cooperation to build the first chain is becoming more and more common. At the beginning of 2023, the hot pot brand Xiaolongkan acquired another hot pot brand, Shu Daxia, one of the purposes of which is to integrate the ** chains of both parties and improve operational efficiency.
"Chain is king" has become the industry consensus, mature and stable chain is the guarantee of food safety, product development and standardization of catering enterprises, the first two are the foundation of catering, and the third is the foundation of restaurant chain. Therefore, restaurant companies have spared no expense to invest in it.
For example, Mixue Bingcheng, which has more than 30,000 stores, claims to have invested 5 billion yuan in its intelligent production, processing and export base and Asian headquarters project, and plans to invest another 2 billion yuan in Hainan to build a new first-chain headquarters base. In fact, Mixue Bingcheng began to lay out the ** chain in 2012. The mature ** chain is the key to Mixue Bingcheng's ability to run more than 30,000 stores.
In the same year that Mixue Bingcheng began to build a ** chain, the central kitchen of Hefu has also taken shape. It is worth mentioning that before the first store of Hefu Lao Mian was born, Hefu's central kitchen and ** system had already taken shape, which is enough to see that Hefu attaches great importance to the ** chain.
For Li Xuelin, who has worked hard in the mobile phone retail industry for ten years, cross-border catering is not a whim, even if it is a profession that is regarded as a low threshold by outsiders. He wants to be more than just a noodle restaurant, but to be a nationally renowned brand, "to make every street in the world have a taste of China", which is the original intention and vision of Hefu.
In order to achieve this goal, we cannot follow the traditional logic of catering entrepreneurship, that is, first open stores, then expand, and then start to build the first chain after making sure that it can be replicated on a large scale.
In 2010, after deciding to do catering, Li Xuelin led his team to investigate and prepare for self-built factories all over the country.
The mature ** chain system and sufficient market research have prepared grain and grass for the layout of Hefu in the next few years. In 2014, Hefu officially stepped out of Rugao and opened stores in first- and second-tier cities such as Shanghai and Suzhou; By 2016, Hefu had opened 50 directly-operated stores in hot cities in East China and North China.
At present, Hefu can reduce prices and improve quality, which is also inseparable from the support of the first-class chain capacity. Nowadays, the three major costs of the catering industry, such as raw materials, labor, and rent, are rising, and the first range of 20 yuan can be achieved without reducing the quality, thanks to the fact that Hefu has made a lot of "stupid efforts" in the first chain, scientific research, and digital intelligence for so many years. As a restaurant chain enterprise, the back-end must be heavy, the front-end can be lighter, and the scale can be better realized.
Today, Hefu has built a modern food industrial park of nearly 100,000 square meters, and its kitchen is among the largest kitchens in the country. Chefs from Hefu cook soup, stir-fry toppings, roll noodles and develop new products here every day. Up to now, the number of new products in Hefu has reached 3,677. According to reports, Hefu's first-chain capacity can support the basic operation of thousands of stores in the future, as well as the demand for cold chain distribution nationwide.
In addition, this industrial park also contains a food safety laboratory built by Hefu with an investment of nearly 10 million yuan, which can inspect ingredients, food and even packaging materials through a number of indicators such as pesticide residues, animal residues, heavy metals, and biological colonies. It was revealed that the laboratory conducts about 2,000 batches of high-standard food safety testing every month to ensure food safety is protected.
But in Li Xuelin's view, these are not enough.
From 2023 onwards, Hefu will further expand the first-class chain territory and continue to build four base centers for production, R&D, logistics and management. Everything is preparing for the future of Hefu.
Run to a wider market
Behind the goal of 10,000 stores is a high degree of standardization, in addition to the standardization of products, there is also the standardization of operation management.
Store management has always been one of the difficulties in the development of catering brands, the public is highly sensitive to "entrance" consumption, once there are individual store staff do not operate in accordance with the regulations, even if it is an occasional incident, it may bring heavy damage to the store and even the entire brand.
This requires mature restaurant companies to establish a mature management system and powerful digital intelligence tools.
Hefu is one of the earliest digital catering brands, taking the store side as an example, when most restaurants still rely on waiters to manually record consumers' table numbers, Hefu has taken the lead in using cards to wait for meals.
A complete digital and intelligent operation system is interlocking. From customers entering the store to order, to the terminal of the store to eat and stock, and then to the headquarters of the digital center, the first chain deployment, and even the research and development of products, raw material procurement, from the consumer at the end of the industrial chain to the first kitchen in the midstream, and then to the upstream food production and purchase, Hefu's digital and intelligent operation has opened up the entire industrial chain.
According to reports, up to now, Hefu has invested nearly 100 million yuan in digital intelligence construction, developed and iterated 76 systems, and accumulated 2 billion label data and more than 6,000 data contacts. **All aspects of the chain and store operation have been digitally intelligent, standardized and refined management, and the decision-making ability of the enterprise has also been strengthened.
After passing the test of more than 500 stores, Hefu's system has the feasibility of further scale, which is also a big opportunity for Hefu to choose to start joint operation at this time.
After making sufficient back-end preparations such as the first chain, digital system, and management system, Hefu began to run to a broader blank market. "Outside the Fifth Ring Road, the real Chinese market", for Hefu, which only lays out hot city A and B business districts, the vast county market, overseas markets and some points that few players have paid attention to in the past are waiting to be explored.
For example, in transportation hubs, under the tide of catering expansion last year, a number of catering brands have successively entered airports and high-speed rail stations, and Hefu has already planned the layout in these places. In May last year, Red Dining Network has experienced Hefu's health noodles in the terminal of Guangzhou Baiyun Airport, compared with some restaurants with higher prices, Hefu Airport Store and downtown stores have the same price, which is undoubtedly another killer feature to attract consumers.
On June 14 last year, Hefu signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Huangju Commerce and Trade to further expand the layout of transportation hub scenarios such as airports and high-speed rail stations.
As for the vast sinking market and overseas market, in the next ten years, Hefu chooses to cover it through association with 5000+ strategic partners.
The confidence to find these 5000+ strategic partners lies in Hefu's mature ** chain, management system, and digital intelligence system, as well as high quality-to-price health products, which brings it relatively high human efficiency and ping efficiency, which is exactly what the joint venture partners are concerned about.
It is understood that with years of accumulated store operation and market data, the success rate of Hefu in the past 10 years is 94%, which is higher than the industry average. Some professionals pointed out that the success rate of big brands joining and opening stores is generally about 70%, and after the opening of the Hefu joint venture, its advantages in site selection, operation, and ** chain will empower the joint venture, and the success rate of opening a store is more guaranteed.
Regarding the ultimate goal of Hefu's joint venture business, Li Xuelin once said with a smile, "My greatest success is that when I travel around the world, every country I go to, there are local Hefu people to pick me up." This also echoes Hefu's vision to "make every street in the world have a Chinese flavor".
In the track where the most promising Chinese food "McCann" is born, it is not out of reach for Hefu to realize this vision. According to the "Blue Book of China's Noodle Industry" released by Frost & Sullivan, as of September 2023, in the domestic noodle market, Hefu Lao Noodle has the largest direct sales revenue, and the growth rate of direct sales revenue and the number of directly operated stores are leading the industry, ranking first in Chinese noodle restaurants.
Earlier, when a number of catering brands were sprinting to thousands of stores one after another, Hefu was still concentrating on polishing the ** chain and new business models. Today, standing at the new starting point of 500+ stores, Hefu is constantly encrypting potential energy, penetrating into the sinking market, and moving towards a "giant" step by step with the products, first-class chain and management system that have been polished for ten years. New Year's Eve food travel sharing