In the midst of the takeaway war in full swing, Meituan Pinhao Fan is quietly rising – on July 12, its daily order volume exceeded 35 million, and the 6.9 yuan potato roast chicken bowl and 3.9 yuan jasmine milk green fruit tea attracted a large number of consumers at a price comparable to subsidies. What’s even more striking is that Pinhao Fan is no longer a gathering place for small businesses, and chain brands such as Yonghe King, Nancheng Xiang, and Burger King have settled in one after another, becoming more and more “tasteful”. This article will provide an in-depth analysis of Pinduoduo’s model innovation: how it replicates Pinduoduo’s explosive logic and achieves the ultimate cost performance by optimizing the supply chain and improving performance efficiency.
The takeaway war is still hot, and now the weekend of migrant workers has become a start with a list of various wool picks.
On July 12, Meituan took the lead in disclosed data showing that instant retail daily orders exceeded 150 million, hitting a new peak again. It is worth noting that in the battle report disclosed by Meituan this time, it was mentioned that the number of orders for good meals exceeded 35 million.
When wool gathering becomes the theme of this round of takeaway wars, consumers who are accustomed to cheap mentality may eventually turn to fighting good meals, and the quietly rising order volume also proves this. As can be seen from the page of Pinhao Rice, the potato roast chicken rice bowl for 6.9 yuan and the jasmine milk green fruit tea for 3.9 yuan a cup are almost comparable to the price after the subsidy of the takeaway war, and another distinctive change is that Pinhao Rice has become more “tasteful”: the homepage list is full of chain catering brands that users are more familiar with, such as Yonghe King, Nanchengxiang, Burger King, and Shanghai Auntie.
The core categories of the Pinhao Rice page mainly cover stir-fries, rice bowls, rice noodles and other meal categories, which can better meet the needs of consumers for three meals a day.
Compared with the adrenaline rush caused by the short-term subsidized takeaway war, local life enterprises, as a platform linking the needs of consumers and merchants, explore why Pinhao Fan can achieve such a high cost performance, and the influx of large chain brands to choose to gather together, which is more meaningful for the innovation and efficiency improvement of local life models.
01 Fight for a good meal and reproduce a “Pinduoduo”
Unlike the main takeaway displayed in merchant stores, Pinhao Fan presents products with SKU logic. Merchants have launched several sets of packages that are fixed and matched, with fewer SKUs and cheaper prices than the main takeaway, with an average price of 10 yuan ~ 15 yuan. Taking Yonghe King’s Kung Pao chicken rice bowl as an example, the takeaway price of the main station is 20 yuan, and the price of the set meal is 9.9 yuan.
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Users can also choose to “join the group” or “pick up at the store” to further reduce the price, especially when the store is far away, it will be more cost-effective to pick up at the store, taking a cup of 1.7KM Shanghai Auntie fruit tea as an example, the online delivery price is 6.9 yuan, and the price of in-store self-pickup is 1.5 yuan.
Caption: Screenshot of the homepage of Meituan’s good meal
Whether it is from the page design of Pinhao Rice or the logic of explosive products, it inevitably reminds people of Pinduoduo. Moreover, like Pinduoduo, Pinhaofan has also canceled the addition to cart link to simplify the payment transaction process for users.
With the development of instant retail, the demand for 30-minute delivery of everything has grown, and the boundaries between food delivery and e-commerce have blurred. Represented by Pinhao Fan, food delivery platforms are also experiencing an efficiency revolution of e-commerce.
Merchants focus on several core SKUs to reduce material preparation and production costs, and the time for centralized meals is faster, and riders can also send several more orders at a time, with higher performance efficiency, which is ultimately transformed into a price advantage. In other words, the cost performance of a good meal is the cost optimization squeezed out of the various chains of takeaway.
The production process of many catering is to serve in batches, which is naturally suitable for making good meals. This is the case with takeaway merchant Shi Jianlong, who runs a “happy cauldron” store in Shijiazhuang, which is a typical dine-in set meal with sufficient portions and is very cost-effective, and Shi Jianlong’s store has three cauldrons, which can maintain an efficiency of 200 servings per pot at noon every day.
The online meal can allow Shi Jianlong to make full use of this capacity advantage, and his online “standard cauldron dishes + 2 steamed buns + homemade kimchi” package is priced at only 6.9 yuan. As long as there is more order scale, for Shi Jianlong, he has to make money, and he can also reduce the loss and waste of daily ingredients. Now the orders for Shi Jianlong store to make good meals have reached 5,000 orders every month.
In terms of pricing, after the platform limits the maximum price and the minimum specification of the meal, the merchant declares the guaranteed price to the platform, and finally the platform adds the delivery fee and service fee to show the actual selling price to the user.
For example, a braised meat set is priced at 12.8 yuan on a good meal, with a cost of about 6 yuan, and the merchant’s profit per order is about 2 yuan. The merchant is a fixed profit of “selling one order to earn one order”, which may not be as high as the takeaway of the main station, but it is more deterministic and stable income.
Moreover, the main body of traditional takeaway is the store, merchants need to rely on normalized delivery to maintain exposure, and the good meal is mainly based on product display, and small and medium-sized catering merchants actually use low prices in exchange for exposure and sales, and then make profits through high turnover.
The sales of good meals are not counted in the takeaway of the main station, and they do not affect each other with the takeaway of the main station and offline dine-in, and form feedback and complementarity. Shi Jianlong said that the initial hesitation of whether to go online was because he was worried about grabbing customers in the store, but judging from the results, the order increased by 50%.
In his opinion, if customers buy 3,000 sets of pancakes and fruits now, they can give discounts, and the 3,000 sets of pancakes will be sold in batches on dates. The low price of a good meal does not rely on the cost of suppressing the cost, but on reducing the unit price by going through volume.
From this point of view, Pinhao Fan is not a takeaway with a lower price than conventional takeaway, but a new takeaway supply, and behind the low price is a model innovation of the takeaway platform.
02 Large chain catering brands have also begun to pour in
The key to whether the scale effect of the food delivery business is significant lies in whether the supply side can continue to meet user needs stably. A major change in Pinhao Fan now is that batch chain brands are pouring in collectively, which can be seen from the “Stir-fried Rice Bowl” page of Pinhao Fan, including many brands such as Nonggengji, Nanchengxiang, Yonghe King, and Claypot King.
According to Meituan’s disclosure data, Pinhao Fan has now settled in more than 5,000 catering brands, covering well-known brands in different categories such as tea and coffee, Chinese simple meals, and Western food.
According to Wang Wei, head of the marketing department of the Nanchengxiang brand, relying on these 4 meals alone, the daily number of new orders is 5,000 to 7,000 orders, accounting for about 13% of the total takeaway orders.
Unlike e-commerce sellers, the “three mountains” pressing on the heads of catering merchants are labor, rent, and raw material costs, Wang Wei introduced, the additional “13%” order volume, the more important role is to help share these daily fixed costs, at the same time, Pinhao Fan has attracted a group of sinking users who are more sensitive to price, increasing new customer bases.
Caption: Spell Good Rice “Explosive Rice Zone”
Another major change in Fighting Good Rice is to improve the quality of the mind. First, Pinhao Fan launched the “Quality Dine-in” area, screening merchants with dine-in dining in various places, and consumers who often go out to dine-in can choose meals that are trusted by familiar merchants nearby. Second, the Pinhao Rice brand area has been launched nationwide, and more than 5,000 catering brands have settled in.
A third-party survey report on Pinhaofan users shows that 40% of Pinhaofan’s active users are quality-oriented, and their demand for quality emphasizes “brand”, and the “brand” from the user’s perspective has two core characteristics: famous (I and the people around me know) and clear quality expectations (I know what it is, including taste, service, price, etc.).
In the past two years, while improving the supply side, Meituan has obviously focused on breaking some of the prejudices of the outside world about good meals. It can also be seen from the page that the “Bright Kitchen and Bright Stove” option has been added to encourage merchants to show the real environment of the kitchen and store through live broadcast or pictures.
In fact, the model of fighting for good meals is also a channel for small and medium-sized catering enterprises such as street shops to increase their income. These small and medium-sized merchants are generally based on local classic traditional meals, are street shops that local residents are familiar with, pay more attention to their own reputation, fight for good meals to alleviate the challenges of their online operations, save marketing, packaging, streaming and other links, merchants only need to pass a few explosive products, can compete with big-name catering online, and effectively broaden the radiation range of these stores, increase the efficiency of ping, and increase the frequency of consumption.
According to a study by Huatai Securities, 90% of merchants who settled in Pinhao Fan achieved a sales increase of more than 30%, and the superimposed efficiency of meals led to a decrease in costs, with an average reduction of more than 20%.
In essence, behind the continuous enrichment of the supply side, it is that fighting good food can bring deterministic business growth to merchants. Regarding the public’s concern that merchants will treat the main station takeaway differently, Shi Jianlong frankly stated that merchants like him, dine-in, ordinary takeaway, and good meals are all produced in the same pot, and will not deliberately differentiate in quality.
03 A C2M experiment in the catering industry
For many years, e-commerce platforms have been pursuing the realization of the C2M model, and Pinduoduo is a typical representative of targeted aggregation of needs through large-scale customization to achieve the ultimate cost performance. In contrast, Pinhao Rice is a C2M (Customer to Manufacturer) customization with a shorter chain from consumer to producer.
Lin Shuai, who runs a “Chenmen Dou Braised Meat” store in Putian City, Fujian Province, said that braised pork is the same as large pot dishes, pig’s trotter rice and other categories, all of which are served in batches, and his store will prepare several pots of boiling water, boil the meat, and cook it in five minutes, and a pot of braised meat can make more than 20 meals. Through large-scale orders, while achieving small profits and quick turnover, it can also dilute the upstream ingredient procurement costs.
Moreover, in terms of good rice, whether it is rice bowl or spicy tang, all categories are fixed and well-matched packages, and users no longer need to choose the combination by themselves, which not only reduces the entanglement time of consumers with a little difficulty in eating, but also many other types of catering merchants can also achieve faster centralized meals like “Chenmen Dou Stewed Meat” and other stores.
In the previous takeaway channel, merchants have to take into account the common growth of profits and revenue due to the problem of delivery costs, and will limit the starting delivery price, and users usually need to order two or even three cups at one time to meet the delivery needs. The online meal has helped Mixue Bingcheng break the problem of single-person scene delivery and meet the consumer demand of “single cup delivery”.
Zhang Weilong, head of the operation of Mixue Bingcheng Pinhao Fan, said that the Pinhao Fan channel is also a unified management, unified products, unified settlement price, and all meal standards are the same. For customers, no matter which channel, they only need to identify the brand of Mixue Bingcheng when placing an order.
According to the data disclosed by Meituan, on July 12, the daily order volume of Pinhao Fan exceeded 35 million, setting a new high. Behind the rapid development of Pinhao Fan in the past two years, it is also in line with the current situation of the catering industry and the new needs of users. At present, major chain brands are optimizing the supply chain and expanding the scale effect to achieve cost performance, and consumers are more inclined to parity consumption and quality-price ratio consumption.
According to the data, the post-90s and post-00s accounted for more than 70% of the users of Pinhao Fan, covering migrant workers, students and residents in sinking markets in first-tier cities. Rather than racking your brains to set up a stall at the door of the concert to “grab people”, for many chain brands, this is undoubtedly one of the channels to quickly reach young people.
The relevant person in charge of Burger King said that the value of online Pinhao Fan is the interactive link and expansion of more new users and young customer groups. In the future, it is planned to create C2M exclusive meals for the Pinhao meal channel.
Represented by Pinhao Fan, when takeaway begins to explore the C2M model, local life platforms will eventually realize new takeaway products with “low price and high quality”.
