Boss Wang (pseudonym), who was doing engineering in Luoyang, took three shops in Luoyi Ancient Town, ready to open a milk tea shop and fried skewers, and chose Kuafu fried skewers after many comparisons.
I visited many brands on the market, and the taste of Kuafu is what I like, the cheapest skewer is 5 cents, and a starch sausage sells for 3 yuan, so you can afford to eat it no matter what consumption level. Boss Wang believes that it is the most important thing to provide consumers with cost-effective products, which is why he finally chose to praise his father.
At the end of 2018, the first store of Kuafu fried skewers was born in Xinzhongguan, Beijing, a 20-square-meter store, which sold 300,000 yuan in the first month, and now, it has more than 2,000 stores in the national market.
Recently, at the financing conference of Kuafu's fried skewers, founder Yuan Zelu announced that he would open 3,000 new stores this year.
This also means that the total number of stores will increase to 5,000 by the end of the year, at an average rate of 8 new stores per day.
The fried skewer track is running wildly on the road to the Wandian chain......
2024 will be the first year of the fried chicken skewer track
On February 26, Kuafu Fried Skewers announced the completion of Series B financing, co-led by Yue Capital and Jue **, followed by Fuji Capital and old shareholder Huaying Capital, and Weilan Capital served as the exclusive financing advisor. Joy Capital is an investor in the Wandian brand Luckin, and has invested in Kuafu for three consecutive rounds. So far, Kuafu fried skewers has completed nearly 500 million yuan in financing, becoming the brand with the highest total financing amount of snack chain in recent years.
Everyone no longer doubts the fact that the fried skewer category has become 10,000 stores. In the view of Yuan Zelu, the founder of Kuafu Fried Skewers, it is precisely because of the "10,000 store potential" and industrial Internet genes that Kuafu Fried Skewers can gain the favor of capital in such a conservative market environment.
Questioning the skewers, understanding the skewers, and becoming the skewers is a change in the mentality of many people in the past 5 years.
In stark contrast to the fried skewers, as the most high-profile format in the market in recent years, the new tea beverage industry has become mature. Statistics show that in 2023, the number of new tea stores will exceed 17,000, and the total number of existing stores will exceed 60,000. With the launch of IPOs and the surge in the number of brands and stores, it also announced that the tea consumption market is gradually maturing and saturated. Who can become the next outlet of catering entrepreneurship after tea drinking, and become the focus of attention of all entrepreneurs.
In this regard, the "2023 China Catering Franchise Industry*** Analysis pointed out that the chaining rate of the "snack and drink" category is still faster than that of other categories**. In addition, the "Top 100 Catering Franchises" shows that 200,000-500,000 yuan is still the most attractive initial investment range for a single store for franchise investors.
According to Kuafu, in the past year, the proportion of tea brand franchisees has reached nearly 40% of the customer groups who have come to join. Limited by market space and competitive pressure, tea brand franchisees need to find a new growth curve. In this case, fried skewers as a complementary snack are preferred. In the opinion of Yuan Zelu, the founder of Kuafu fried skewers,It belongs to the same small shop model as tea, and the snack format with an investment amount of 200,000-400,000 yuan is more like a "compressed towel just wet", with great potential.
Based on this,Yuan Zelu set an expansion target of 5,000 stores in 2024 for Kuafu Fried Skewers, and released a 300 million "Mengxiangjia" plan to promote the market: 100 million franchise subsidies and 200 million brand budgets.
In his opinion, "2024 will be the first year of the fried chicken and skewer track." ”
However, what really gave Yuan Zelu the confidence to double the growth was because the mentality of the fried skewer category was becoming more and more mature.
The market has always questioned the new products, as early as the beginning of its establishment, many people have questioned that the excitement of fried skewers is just a gust of wind, and it will soon pass. Now, five years later, more than 2,000 stores have been covered in first- to fifth-tier cities across the country, and the year-on-year growth rate of a single store has continued to remain at about 20%.
Yuan Zelu is confirming his vision of 10,000 stores step by step.
In his vision, the genes of the so-called "10,000-store chain" are nothing more than two key points: first, choose a category that can achieve a high degree of standardization and meet the "greatest common divisor of human needs"; The second is the digital reengineering of traditional catering business processes and organizational structures.
Although the logic is clear and abnormal, practice is always tortuous. Among them, the exploration at the product level alone has gone through three iterations.
At first, the team didn't think it was complicated, the fried skewers market is large, there are no head brands, and it is a category with the potential of 10,000 stores. Drawing on Leshan's marinated fried skewers, similar to skewers fragrant fried skewers, without batter, self-developed soul sprinkles and pepper sesame juice. But this has not yet become a mass product that can capture consumers across the country.
Subsequently, in order to be able to get closer to the public, Kuafu fried skewers began to borrow from barbecue and made 20 version of barbecue fried skewers. Further development of squid, chicken wings, bone and meat connected products and other products. However, in order to reach 10,000 stores, in addition to a small number of diverse products, it is also necessary to solve the problem of rigid demand. One of the larger flow pools that can be used as a reference is fried chicken. So, strictly speaking,30 The product direction should be called "fried chicken fried skewers", that is, fried snacks skewered with bamboo skewers, which are closer to "fast food snacks".
This adjustment brings a lot of room for expansion.
On one occasion, the team was inspired by the advice provided by the franchisee in the internal feedback system. A franchisee said that they have a local barbecue called "raw grilled chicken thighs", which is to cut the chicken thighs thinly and unfold them before grilling. This simple process refinement makes thinner chicken easier to fry and looks better. And in the concept of Chinese, raw = fresh, thus,Kuafu's "Raw Fried Chicken Legs" was launched and sold a total of 6.71 million copies in two months, accounting for about 20% of Kuafu's overall sales in the month of its launch.
Just like Luckin was to let people who don't drink coffee drink coffee, what Kuafu fried skewers wanted to solve was to enter the larger and more mature flow pool of fried chicken and really gain a foothold. However, according to the product operation strategy of Kuafu fried skewers, popular products similar to raw fried chicken thighs are by no means short-lived.
According to Yuan Zelu,In 2024, the product iteration speed of Kuafu fried skewers will reach 80 new models within the year. "The essence of the birth of explosive products is the matching of commodity pools and traffic pools, which is similar to the concept of e-commerce people and freight yards", which is undoubtedly a business process reengineering for the catering industry.
The birth of the explosive product is also the epitome of Kuafu's three-year digital transformation results, that is, the reengineering of business processes.
Based on the whole life cycle journey of franchisees, Kuafu has developed a complete set of digital products from the initial contact with the brand, to the whole process of signing, site selection, preparation, decoration, opening training, and fission to open multiple stores. From the past crowd tactics of man-to-man, it has changed to a multi-stage collaborative digital management process.
Taking the site selection system as an example, Kuafu graded all business districts according to the levels of S, A, B, and C. Open any shopping mall, you can see the recommended floors, recommended locations, distribution of complementary products of competing products, rent, labor and total cost estimates, estimated payback periods, etc. The system can also estimate the takeaway sales of each point, and the current accuracy rate can reach about 90%.
This is an almost metaphysical process of digitization, concretization, and process of site selection logic.
Yuan Zelu said that Kuafu has always adhered to the strategy of agile development, so as to make digitalization as close to the business as possible, and in Kuafu, the longest iteration cycle of R&D is not allowed to exceed 2 weeks, and if a feature development cycle is long, it will be further split into multiple versions.
We've reimagined the McDonald's and KFC systems, but borrowed more from shells. Yuan Zelu believes that the site selection is actually a matching system between the first and the franchisee, which is actually beyond the scope of the traditional catering business, which is based on first principles, based on the concept of consensus, to solve the non-consensus problem that needs to be solved by Kuafu fried skewers. In the last era, catering companies had a strong information color, not digitalization. Today's digitalization is not just about the best of the world, but about a growth-oriented operating system.
Growth-oriented, i.e., scale-oriented. For today's restaurant chain industry, the real challenge comes from the refined operation challenges brought about by the scale of thousands of stores.
At present, the average level of the industry is 1:3 1:5, while the current person-to-store ratio is close to 1:10, that is, 300 employees manage more than 2,000 stores across the country. And Yuan Zelu hopes that the person-to-store ratio in the future can reach 1:15,"Digitalization is to solve the problem of scale, and only digitalization can make it possible to make everything orderly, which we call anti-entropy increase internally. ”
From the "feishuization" of the business process and the "shellization" of the site selection process, we can have a deeper understanding of the disruptive changes brought by digitalization to the catering business. This not only means a reform at the tool level, but also brings about a restructuring of the management model.
In terms of expansion strategy, Kuafu fried skewers.
The first- and second-tier cities and key provincial capitals are the origins and radiate to their periphery. At present, the site selection system of Kuafu fried skewers has completed the network planning of township areas, and identified and marked the points in key areas.
To achieve the simultaneous layout of high-tier cities and lower-tier markets, it is not only based on the site selection system, but also on the support of products. From the perspective of products in a broad sense, franchise is actually a peddling store type, which is essentially a return on investment model, adapted to different people, goods, places, time and space. Kuafu fried skewers have been polished into 7 major store types, including shopping mall stores, street stores, community stores, school stores, office stores, scenic spot stores, and canteen stores, adapting to different scenarios and serving different single-store investment models.
From the perspective of products in a narrow sense, Kuafu fried skewers will also pay attention to cost performance while creating explosive products, in the words of Yuan Zelu, "Kuafu is the happiness to buy within 30 yuan", which seems to explain why Kuafu can still maintain high growth in the case of a conservative environment.
The ultimate cost-effective ** in the mature ** chain system, Kuafu fried skewers in the country has 2 central warehouses and 11 regional warehouses, to achieve nearly 2,800 cities of cold chain logistics distribution network construction, most of the areas to achieve two a week, the headquarters of the implementation of DTC model, in Yuan Zelu's words, Kuafu franchisees almost no "self-picking" situation, because it is difficult to buy more cost-effective products than their own ** chain on the market.
For the future ** chain planning, Kuafu fried skewers mainly focus on three directions:
The first is the continuous investment in the upstream chain ecology. At present, the company is building its own first-class business system, trying to open up the data of all links, including sales, user feedback, inventory, product production links, etc., to achieve a fully traceable digital management system.
At the same time, the company will also lay out its production capacity. This year, two large factories will be put into operation, one is a brine oil factory in Sichuan, and the other is a 30,000-square-meter tandem field in Shandong.
The second aspect is to continuously optimize the warehouse distribution network to achieve the goal of three distributions a week or even daily distribution of stores.
The third direction is to carry out upstream traceability of some special ingredients, as well as the optimization and adjustment of production and processing.
Based on the first chain and based on digitalization, under the guidance of this idea, a new generation of restaurant chain enterprises has also grown a new look: standing on the trend of large categories, and building a different business blueprint with the industrial Internet model.
Summary:
This large-scale financing of Kuafu fried skewers has ushered in a good start in the field of catering financing that has been dormant for a long time this year, and has also injected a "booster" into the catering market.
Capital has always been the smartest money, and the snack fried skewer market in 2024 is very similar to milk tea in 2020, lo-mei in 2018, and coffee in 2021.
Behind the realization of the ideal of Kuafu fried skewers and 10,000 stores, it is inseparable from the mature market of broadband customers, the advantages of the single-store model polished by digital reconstruction, and the ultimate cost performance brought by the mature ** chain.
All kinds of signs show that the boat motor of its sprint Wandian chain has been started, the sail has been raised, and it will set sail immediately!