The pace of the Spring Festival is getting closer and closer, and as in previous years, the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner orders in major restaurants are still hot, and some well-known restaurants are even full of orders as early as August. Different from previous years, there is more news about pre-made New Year's dishes in the market, on the one hand, because the discussion about pre-made dishes has never stopped throughout 2023, and on the other hand, the batch launch of prefabricated New Year's dishes by manufacturers at the end of the year has given more room for discussion of pre-made dishes.
Source: Maker post members.
Pre-made dishes Chinese New Year's Eve rice 238 yuan 16-course Chinese New Year's Eve rice pre-made dishes gift pack hot sale Pre-made dishes to seize the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner table Topics such as hot search have sparked tens of millions of discussions. The discussion of pre-made dishes on the C-side has been brought to a new level, and unlike the pre-made dishes on campus in September, the discussion this time is more modest, and the frequency of tweets from consumers actively embracing pre-made dishes has increased significantly.
Since the end of 2023, the pre-made Chinese New Year's Eve lunch gift box has been lined up for admission, and the New Year goods market, offline supermarkets, retail platforms and online live broadcast rooms are full of lively festive atmosphere and hot New Year's food sales scenes.
On the one hand, they cater to the needs of consumers for "hard dishes" in the New Year's dishes, and on the other hand, they have developed into a more mature prefabricated food category, occupying a considerable market share with their simple, convenient and high resilience characteristics. Professional Buddha jumping over the wall production brands such as Juchunyuan, Haiwenming, Yige abalone, etc., are in the forefront of sales, and are distributed from hundreds to thousands.
Source: Screenshot of the online sales platform.
In addition, classic dishes such as equally ripe pepper pork belly chicken, braised lion's head, peppercorn chicken, and sauerkraut fish can not only be applied to the daily table, but also in the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner.
Source: Maker post members.
F&B brandsFor example, Da Dong Hotel, Xibei Noodle Village, Quanjude, etc. have launched New Year's gift boxes containing their own signature dishes. With the slogan of "If you have a baby, you will eat Xibei", Xibei Noodle Village has specially launched a baby New Year's gift box in addition to the regular gift box, which contains 4 kinds of colorful vegetable cod and shrimp cakes, small Mongolian cheese buns, milk fruit and vegetable steamed buns, thick Dudu cheese beef patties, cooked tomato beef sauce noodles and meat Dudu original beef sausage, full of childlike fun and balanced matching.
Source: Xibei Noodle Village.
Professional prefabricated food manufacturerFor example, Guangdong Hengxing, Guyan prefabricated dishes, Weizhixiang, Maizima, etc., have accumulated their strength early and launched a variety of gift boxes to meet different consumer needs. Gu Yan Prefabricated Food, which won the first place in the "2023 Online TOP Gold List - Prefabricated Dishes", launched the "Gu Yan Banquet Jubilee Gift Box" and a variety of Gu Yan Family Banquet Gift Boxes; Hangzhou Asian Games official pre-made dishes ** Shangwei Zhixiang launched a special Chinese New Year's Eve dinner gift package for the Year of the Dragon, including three gift boxes: high-end business model (Zhiwei Furui), Pepsi co-branded model (Pepsi Zhiwei), and Happy Family Banquet (Zhiwei Reunion), covering product types and rich prices, so that consumers can choose more suitable products according to their own needs.
Instant retail platformFor example, Dingdong Grocery Shopping, Little Elephant Supermarket, Hema and so on are also gearing up to make great efforts in this invisible war: self-owned ** chain promotion, refined product layout, customized theme activities, etc., strive to seize the opportunity in the fierce market competition and win the favor of consumers.
Large supermarketsFor example, Wal-Mart has been deeply involved in product development by virtue of the customer insights accumulated in the front-end, and has gradually established the "celebrity chef" mentality by cooperating with 29 catering brands of 24 catering companies, and has created five series: "Celebrity Chef's Family Banquet", "Celebrity Chef Dishes", "Celebrity Chef Famous Spots", "Celebrity Chef Supper" and "Celebrity Chef New Year Gift Coupon", which are suitable for various scenarios.
The success of Harbin Cultural Tourism has made the "Specialty Survey" popular, and the northern and southern provinces and cities have given each other special products, which not only enhances the friendship between various places, but also arouses the curiosity of netizens. People are more willing to pay for the experience, and they can taste the very characteristic Chinese New Year's Eve meals across the country without leaving home, while a large number of raw materials and dishes with local characteristics have not been successfully explored, and the industrialization of traditional dishes is the key means to achieve the shine of characteristic New Year's dishes.
As early as October 2023, starting from a symposium in Guangdong, the curtain of local specialties working together to stir up the "New Year's Cuisine Economy" was opened across the country, and various forms of discussions broadened the exchanges and promotions in the prefabricated food industry. "New Year's Cuisine" is another innovative measure to create a new form of consumption and realize industrial iteration and upgrading.
According to reports, the popular product "Royal Eight Immortals Banquet" is a New Year's gift box made of eight kinds of seafood such as sea cucumber, butterfly shrimp, abalone, and sea bass as raw materials along the Jiaodong region with the theme of "Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea".
Source: Lushang Group.
The event is divided into three major Cantonese cuisine cultural publicity themes: "Cantonese cuisine", "Chaoshan cuisine" and "Hakka cuisine", Yangjiang oysters, Yiyi Cheng and other "hot" aquatic products, pearl horseshoe, Gangmei duck and other special delicacies are included.
In the Gaoyao "Gao Gui" New Year Cuisine Series Press Conference and Gao Yao Prefabricated Dishes Tasting Activities, New Year's dishes such as Southern Frankincense Taro Button Pork, Braised Golden Pomfret, and Gao Gui Spicy Soft-shelled Turtle attracted the general public to taste and buy. In this series of New Year's dishes, many of them use cinnamon, a high-quality specialty, as an adjunct.
The sales of Hangzhou Linping's special New Year's dishes such as Tangqi duck, braised mutton, Tang-style crispy fish, and silver wool meatballs in the New Year's Gift Package of 100 counties and 1000 bowls of Linping are booming, and the perfect combination of New Year's culture, regional culture and food has been realized with the teaching of New Year's cuisine.
Online and offline efforts to bring consumers the characteristics of the north and south of the river, these New Year's dishes not only meet the needs of the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner, but also have a distinctive packaging design has also become a gift option for visiting relatives and friends during the New Year.
"Co-branding" has many highlight moments in 2023, and the co-branding of Moutai and Luckin Coffee has detonated social networks, and the cooperation between the two powerful brands can often achieve the effect of "1 1 2". There are also many co-branded marketing cases in the new products of pre-made dishes, which not only have the mutual achievements of the platform and the brand, but also the complementary advantages between the brands, bringing consumers a dazzling effect.
In the morning, Jingdong Supermarket and Juchunyuan, the enterprise with the longest history of inheriting Buddha jumping over the wall, launched the first co-branded prefabricated dishes, and Jingjiafang, Jingjiafang, Jingjiafang, together with China's time-honored brands and Michelin restaurants, launched a series of 100 series of classic prefabricated dishes.
Source: Jingdong Jingjiafang.
The New Year's dishes co-branded by Wei Zhixiang semi-finished dishes and Pepsi Cola include Pepsi Cola chicken wings and Pepsi osmanthus smoked fish, two creative dishes with cola as raw materials.
The No. 1 brand in the shrimp slip category "Catch Shrimp Ji" and the "No. 1 brand in the fish maw category" Guanzhan are dedicated to creating a co-branded hot pot New Year gift: "Golden Soup Shrimp Slippery Abalone Fish Maw Chicken". The gift box includes 4 kinds of sea and land delicacies, including abalone, North Sea shrimp slippery, Vietnamese fish maw, and grain-fed three-yellow chicken that grows for 100 days, which is delicious and nutritious.
Source: Maker post members.
Clean labels originated in the European Union to preserve the natural properties of food products in the ingredient section of the label. With the deepening of consumers' understanding and awareness of food health and safety, clean label enables consumers to reduce their concerns about the ingredients of food ingredients, and conforms to consumers' demand for healthy foods and market trends. In the R&D and promotion of prefabricated dishes, manufacturers are also deepening the awareness of clean label applications to provide consumers with more safe and reliable prefabricated dishes.
Dingdong shopping can be said to be an earlier practitioner of clean labeling, this fine tradition is naturally inherited to the selection and display of New Year's dishes, "no addition of preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors" is the general principle of Dingdong cleaning products, Dingdong shopping advocates the food industry "refuse to add redundant, do not add non-essential" cleaning concept.
Source: Dingdong grocery shopping.
Last year's Spring Festival captured the hearts of consumers with the slogan of "rejecting popularization, pre-made New Year's dishes should be anti-routine", and this year's answer sheet of Hema is also full of innovation. In terms of technology, the first "high recovery rate" is promoted: the core process of the original soup freezing technology is adopted, and the original soup that has been boiled for 4-6 hours is rapidly cooled and frozen, so as to reduce high temperature sterilization and eliminate the addition of preservatives on the basis of ensuring food safety, so as to retain the freshness of the original soup, and at the same time make the ingredient list of the finished product cleaner.
The intangible cultural heritage gourmet cow skin from Zhengding, the ancient city of Shijiazhuang, has been painstakingly developed and improved by Gu Yan, on the basis of traditional technology, combined with modern food processing technology, and has achieved the slogan of Gu Yan beef hide: "0% added preservatives, safer, healthier and more delicious".
In the development and innovation of prefabricated New Year's dishes, I am afraid that only delicious food can not stand out among many competitors, and the prefabricated food merchants have gradually rolled up to a new height, and have made efforts in service to win the preference of consumers with thoughtful supporting services.
Hema's "big dish" has prepared a "plating instructions" for consumers. Taking the Dragon and Tiger Leap Banquet as an example, Hema has refined the reheating order and plating standards of this dish, so that consumers can restore the taste of the dish and restore its "appearance", which not only facilitates consumers' Chinese New Year's Eve meal photo needs, but also facilitates its wider dissemination on social platforms. At the same time, Hema also cooperates with the "New Year's food first-come-first-come" supporting service to meet the needs of migrant workers working outside.
Chef Yi Expected has carved out a new track with the "Pre-made Dishes Whole Family Banquet" series, covering all aspects of appetizers, cold dishes, soups, hot dishes, staple foods and desserts, replicating eight major Chinese and foreign cuisines and nearly 100 dishes to the family's Chinese New Year's Eve dinner table.
As a high-end prefabricated dish, the prefabricated New Year's dishes almost reflect the highest level in the prefabricated food industry, from the production process to the marketing promotion everywhere to show the manufacturer's intentions, from the prefabricated New Year's dishes reflected in the highlights and trends will be applied to the daily prefabricated dishes after market testing, so as to improve the overall level of the prefabricated food industry.
*: Food Partner Network Food R&D Innovation Service Center.
February** Dynamic Incentive Program