In China, people take food as the sky, and the Spring Festival "family banquet" is the most representative of them. In recent years, we have found that pre-made dishes are increasingly on the table of Chinese New Year's Eve. If "Chinese New Year's Eve Rice" becomes "Pre-made New Year's Dish", can it still have that taste? This is where the survey begins.
In the process of going to the supermarket to shoot and interview, the biggest feeling of the program team is that the pre-made dishes are abundant, and everyone's desire to buy is also very strong. However, for a long time, pre-made dishes have rushed to the hot search, not because of hot sales, but because of various controversies and negative reports. In September 2023, many parents of students in Rongjiang New District, Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province reported that many local primary and secondary schools and public kindergartens began to use ** kitchen catering, and the topic of "prefabricated dishes entering the campus" rushed to the hot search.
Since then, the debate about pre-made dishes has never stopped. In January 2024, an anchor said on social ** that "pre-made dishes should be eaten for children the most" and "milk powder and old godmothers are pre-made dishes", and for a while, "pre-made dishes" were completely pushed to the forefront of ** and encountered an unprecedented crisis of trust.
On the one hand, there is the hot sale of prefabricated dishes in supermarkets, and on the other hand, there are doubts about the safety of prefabricated dishes on the Internet, which one is the truth?
In our collection of various data on prefabricated dishes, we found that in the past few years, the development of the prefabricated food industry has shown a blowout trend, and the scale of the industry has expanded rapidly. According to the data of the "Prefabricated Vegetable Industry Development Report" of the People's Daily Online Research Institute, the scale of China's prefabricated food market will reach 419.6 billion yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 213%, becoming a new economic growth point and is expected to develop into a trillion-level market.
In fact, pre-made dishes have penetrated into everyone's daily catering consumption scene today: restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, ......and so onRegardless of whether it is **, as long as there is a business opportunity for prefabricated dishes, the relevant track may be captured. There may be people who don't want to eat pre-made dishes, but they can't avoid it. Even many people don't know that they bought pre-made dishes after buying them. So, what exactly is a pre-made dish?
In the Chinese network, netizens have a variety of opinions about "what is a pre-made dish". According to different classification methods, pre-made dishes contain different foods, which can be called Paul's thousands. However, one of the most common classification methods is to divide it by the method of eating, a total of four categories. The first category is called ready-to-eat dishes, which can be eaten after opening. The second category is ready-to-heat dishes, which can be eaten when heated. The third category is called ready-to-cook dishes, which are refrigerated or stored at room temperature in portions after relatively deep processing, which can be immediately put into the pot to reduce the cooking time. The fourth category is the side dishes, which are sifted, washed, cut, portioned, and finally cooked and seasoned by themselves.
After logging on to the official websites of China's National Health Commission and China's State Administration for Market Regulation, we did not find the official concept of pre-made dishes. At present, for the definition of prefabricated dishes, the most recognized and widely used in the industry is the "prefabricated dishes" group standard drafted by the China Cuisine Association and a number of units. The standard defines prefabricated dishes as finished or semi-finished dishes made by pre-processing (such as cutting, stirring, pickling, tumbling, molding, seasoning, etc.) and pre-cooking (such as stir-frying, frying, roasting, boiling, steaming, etc.) and pre-packaging by using one or more agricultural products as the main raw materials.
However, this is not an official standard. If there is no one in China, will there be one abroad?
"Prepared foods" first originated in the United States. In the 80s of the 20th century, prepared foods also began to emerge in Japan, Canada and some European countries. In the course of the investigation, we found that in Europe and the United States, in fact, there is no "pre-made food" such a general term for prepared food, and their pre-prepared food has many classifications and similar names, such as prepared foods, ready meals, frozen food, etc., in these categories, including what we usually think of as pre-made food, such as sandwiches, salads, instant hot burgers. In the English-speaking world, their only unified name is "industrialized food". So, pre-made food is actually another way of saying industrially processed food.
However, it seems that what you eat in your mouth will make people feel unhealthy when you add industrialization. But if you don't buy it, you won't necessarily be able to eat it, and restaurants and takeaways seem to be dominated by pre-made dishes.
Landing on a wholesale**, some merchants will purchase pre-made dishes here. If you search for "pre-made dishes", you will find that rice bowls are the most popular and there are all kinds of cooking kits. After our rough statistics, we found that the common dishes in restaurants such as Buddha jumping over the wall, sauerkraut fish, and pork belly chicken are all "hard-hit areas" occupied by prefabricated dishes, and the sales are very high, and they are much cheaper than restaurants.
On August 3, 2022, the China Chain Store & Franchise Association released the "2022 China Chain Catering Industry Report", which investigated the use of prefabricated dishes by a number of domestic catering enterprises. It shows that nearly eighty percent of the sample enterprises use prefabricated ingredients. Among them, 16% of the sample enterprises use clean vegetables or pre-processed ingredients, and the proportion is as high as 75% and 100%. Only 22% of the companies in the sample said they did not use clean vegetables or prepared ingredients at all. In addition, the report also pointed out that about 70% of food delivery businesses are using cooking kits.
We can understand why some restaurants and takeaway businesses use pre-made dishes, saving time, effort, and money, and the main reason is to ensure quality control through assembly line operations. In particular, consumers go to restaurants to eat, catch up with the dining peak, a table of dishes, from cutting vegetables to cooking, 10 dishes can take hours. However, if the pre-made dishes are likely to consume much less time, consumers will be able to experience a "fast-paced" dining experience. However, the question is, are consumers really willing to spend the money of "Ming Kitchen and Ming File" to eat a bowl of pre-made dishes?
Is eating pre-made dishes in a restaurant considered to be deceived by the merchant? Is it necessary for the merchant to inform in advance that prepared food is used, and does failure to do so involve a violation of the consumer's right to know?
Rao Wei (Deputy Director of the Consumer Rights Committee of the Beijing Lawyers Association): For consumers, he first has the right to know, and he has to know what I am eating with this money. If he now goes to the restaurant and spends the corresponding money, but ends up eating pre-made dishes, he will feel that his rights have been violated. Based on the right to know, the right to choose can be generated, and he can choose to eat or not, or choose me to eat the corresponding dishes with this **. Fraud is a legal concept that says that one party deliberately provides false information and then causes the other party to mislead in a belief, thus producing an expression that goes against the true will. At this stage, it is not appropriate to clearly determine that the merchant has infringement, if the merchant clearly lists me as a pure natural and fresh dish on his advertising board or menu, then this is equivalent to giving a promise and actually reaching an agreement with the consumer. In this case, the merchant has to follow this rule. If he does not clearly identify it, in the current consumption scenario, we may not be able to judge whether the dish is pre-made or pure fresh except for the consumer's own taste. If the merchant himself clearly informs him, I think he has to keep his promise, which is a basic requirement for him.
At present, the problem of the right to know about the prepared food in restaurants is widespread around the world. If you find this difficult to understand, perhaps you can feel relieved by thinking about the collective term for "prepared food" in Europe and the United States. "Industrial food", simply understood, is that in the development of industrialization, the popularization of prepared food has been an irreversible existence. According to the data, in 2011, the sales scale of prefabricated dishes in the U.S. market has reached 324$500 million. In 2021, the penetration rate of pre-made dishes in the United States and Japan has reached more than 60%, while in China it is only about 13%.
On February 13, 2023, the "Opinions of the Communist Party of China on Comprehensively Promoting the Key Work of Rural Revitalization in 2023" mentioned "cultivating and developing the prefabricated food industry", and prefabricated dishes were written into the first document. Guangzhou, Zhejiang and other places have also included the development of prefabricated dishes in the first work report.
In September 2023, an electrical appliance company announced that it intends to enter the prefabricated food industry across the border, and many industry giants have also entered the prefabricated food field across the border. When the "prefabricated food" industry is rising, it is inevitable that these leading enterprises will not only enter the game. The safety of pre-made dishes makes Chinese people nervous. "Can children eat it? "Preservatives, additives, and ingredients are not transparent" and other problems have become problems that people have to look at while enjoying the "convenience of prefabrication".
On January 2, 2024, the 2023 consumer complaint and consumer rights protection public opinion analysis report released by the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Rights Protection Commission showed that the consumer disputes of prefabricated dishes continued, ranking first in consumer rights protection public opinion. Judging from the content of the complaints and the monitoring of public opinion, the relevant problems are mainly concentrated in three aspects: first, the prefabricated dishes do not match the publicity, the taste is not good and there are food safety problems; Second, offline restaurants were not informed in advance of the use of pre-made dishes, and consumers' right to know was not properly protected; The third is that the information on the identification label of prefabricated dishes is incomplete, which causes consumers to worry.
Regarding everyone's concerns about pre-made dishes, lawyer Rao Wei also gave some answers.
Although the relevant regulations of China's prefabricated food industry are not yet comprehensive, the new national standard for prefabricated food has been submitted for review, and the competent authorities are also constantly improving the relevant industry regulations to escort the "prefabricated food". I believe that the future can be expected, and the prefabricated food industry can get better and better, adding a safe "dish" to the table of the Chinese people.
Producer: Liang Yin.
Choreographer: Yang Xinye.
Editor: Yu Erya.