The trillion-yuan pre-prepared meal trend is here: how to maximize the deliciousness?
How can you save time, effort, and money to enjoy a healthy and delicious meal at home with a sense of occasion?
The answer is pre-prepared meals. Eliminating the hassle of buying ingredients, no need to wash or prepare vegetables, simple heating or steaming/stir-frying is all it takes to serve them directly, making them popular and distinctive dishes. This is the recently booming pre-prepared meal trend. Reports show that the current market size of pre-prepared meals in my country is approximately 300 billion yuan, and the market size is expected to reach one trillion yuan in the next 6-7 years.
Behind this strong rise are both opportunities and challenges. What changes will the sudden widespread availability of pre-prepared meals bring to the catering industry?
From Restaurants to the Family Dining Table
Pre-prepared meals have been quietly contributing to stable food quality, increased meal production rates, and reduced costs, but the pandemic has catalyzed their rise from behind the scenes of central kitchens to the forefront of daily life. And pre-prepared meals that can be "taken home to enjoy" are particularly popular among the younger generation. According to data from Hema Fresh, 54% of Hema Fresh customers born after 1995 frequently buy groceries and cook for themselves, with semi-finished meals being one of their favorite products.
This is related to the fast pace of life. Especially for busy young urban professionals, cooking at home is increasingly becoming a luxury, and cooking time is becoming a significant cost to consider.
Therefore, for increasingly busy and less active young people, pre-made meals have become a balance point between work and life: not only balancing time and nutrition, but also freeing them from the tedious process of preparing meals, allowing them to better focus on work and enjoy life.
The Battle for Market Share Begins as the Trend Shifts.
The change in the main consumer group means a change in the battlefield. Amidst this booming market, new brands are rushing in, established players in the catering industry are leveraging the momentum, and upstream food giants have been planning for a long time:
Xibei opened its first store with its pre-prepared food brand "Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine"; Haidilao launched its "Let's Eat" series of semi-finished dishes on multiple e-commerce platforms' official flagship stores and its own app; Weizhixiang, the "first stock in pre-prepared food," passed the IPO review and is about to be listed on the main board; Hema Fresh, a representative of new retail, established "Hema Workshop," launching several pre-prepared meal sets… This has activated the demand for innovation in pre-prepared food, leading to increasingly higher requirements for the fidelity of dishes. More careful consideration is being given to the selection of dishes, ingredients, and even packaging to ensure maximum flavor reproduction.
The Most Important Detail in Flavor Reproduction
It seems simple, but not everyone can do it. It requires professional analysis and targeted research and development of the dishes, centralized production, scientific packaging, and the use of flash freezing technology (minus 18 degrees Celsius) for preservation and transportation… Reproducing flavor while ensuring the freshness and safety of the dishes is crucial. Packaging materials are the most easily overlooked aspect. Choosing high-quality packaging materials is essential for preventing food damage and contamination during cold chain transportation.
Changsu's functional BOPA film offers excellent barrier properties, along with toughness, puncture resistance, and resistance to high-temperature cooking and low-temperature refrigeration. It not only helps lock in freshness and flavor, maximizing the preservation of the food's taste, but also prevents bag breakage and flavor transfer, ensuring the safe delivery of prepared meals to every table so people can fully enjoy their meals.