The driving force behind "junk takeout": mass replication of stores, 20 million yuan in franchise sales

In the fast-paced urban life, food delivery has become a daily choice for many workers. However, the food delivery industry hides some unknown secrets. This article explores the phenomenon of cheap food delivery in the form of "assembly line" that is rapidly expanding and mass-produced in the form of franchises, and reveals how the operators behind these food delivery services attract customers through low-cost entrepreneurial temptations and marketing strategies.

"National trend packaging, black disposable soft spoon, unknown pigment drink, and grilled sausage purchased for 0.01 yuan." The worker spent 50 minutes carefully selecting the takeaway, and then spent another 30 minutes waiting for it to be delivered. When he finally opened the package, he "felt like the sky was falling."

This is the common characteristic of a type of exquisite and cheap takeout summarized by working people. Usually, the stores of these takeout merchants are mostly stalls with an area of ​​15 to 20 square meters. They do not provide dine-in services and only do takeout.

The other category is long and complicated store names, including "Fried rice that I bet my ten-year career as a chef on", "I'm selling spicy hot pot after my rebirth", "I have five apartments in Shanghai, all relying on vegetable rice and bone soup", etc. These stores often have monthly sales of 9,999+ and a score of 4.8 on the food delivery platform.

But the ones who really make a fortune are the operators behind the scenes. They use the franchise model to mass-produce these "assembly line" cheap takeouts. Now they are no longer limited to fried rice, fried noodles, and spicy hot pot, but have evolved into steak, braised chicken, iron pot stew and many other categories.

A person in charge of operations for a takeaway catering brand in the "Betting on a Chef's Career" series told Tech Planet that the company has nearly 700 franchisees and the franchise fee is around 29,800 yuan, which means that the company can make a whopping 20 million yuan in franchise fees alone.

But nowadays, workers who want both healthy and convenient takeout have begun to summarize various strategies to prevent "junk takeout" after falling into the trap countless times.

1. Serving food in 30 seconds, mass-producing “assembly line” takeout

Behind the "Betting on Your Chef Career" series of takeaway stores are many catering practitioners with zero experience like Yang Yang. In the "Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" areas, they need to pay a franchise fee of 29,800 yuan, and the headquarters will charge 3% of the turnover every month as an agency operation fee.

To ensure the stability of the franchise industry chain, Yang Yang told Tech Planet that in order to ensure the consistency of the product taste, rice and fried rice side dishes can be purchased by the franchisee, but the franchisee must purchase the seasoning for bibimbap and fried rice from the headquarters. A seasoning worth 600 yuan can make more than 3,000 servings of fried rice. Based on the current sales of 5,000 orders per month in his store, he still needs to purchase thousands of yuan of seasoning from the headquarters every month.

The headquarters will give a unified design to the online stores, which are usually accompanied by a photo of a chef with the words "Ten years of cooking career, just to cook this one bowl well", but in fact there is no so-called "chef" in the kitchen. Yang Yang said that the taste of the product depends on the seasoning, and these "operators" mainly taught him how to avoid food being stuck during the peak hours of takeout.

Take fried rice as an example. Merchants can mix the seasoning into the rice and steam it in advance, and the meal can be ready in as fast as 30 seconds. In order to attract franchisees, these agencies even exaggeratedly advertised in the investment brochure that the meal can be ready in 8 seconds, which helps merchants greatly save the number of employees and costs.

According to Tech Planet, the "Betting on Your Chef Career" series has currently formed two brands, Chuhe and Wangzhe Fried Rice. Behind the store names of other different online writing series, there are also teams of different sizes operating them, and of course there are also individuals doing it, which has attracted more than ten franchisees.

The reason behind the continuous expansion of such takeaway stores is the lure of low-cost entrepreneurship. According to the investment managers of these brand operating companies, this is a small-cost start-up business. They usually recommend franchisees to choose stalls that only do takeaways to reduce rent costs. At the same time, they can buy second-hand equipment to reduce store operating costs. The locations are mostly located in university towns, office buildings, and business districts with a relatively high volume of takeaway orders. According to the investment manager, the price of fried rice is generally around 15 yuan, and the sales volume can reach more than 600 orders a day.

On the other hand, they use long and complicated names to get more traffic. In addition to the gimmicky names of the "Gamble on Your Chef's Career" series, there are also the "Rebirth" series of online novel names. For example, someone reincarnates to sell spicy hot pot in Beijing, someone reincarnates to sell pork ribs in Hangzhou, and someone reincarnates to sell rice bowls in Shenzhen. For a while, the takeaway boss has become the protagonist of a cool novel.

A brand operation manager of the "Rebirth" series told Tech Planet that the inspiration for the name came from reading online novels in his spare time, and using various hot words in online novels in the takeaway store is mainly to increase the base of users entering the store and help himself obtain more public domain traffic on the takeaway platform. The takeaway store backstage he showed showed that the store had been open for two weeks, with a score of 5.0 and a store conversion rate of 11.2%. The store ranked second among 66 peers in the business district.

2. Constantly changing "vests" to reduce franchise fees

However, the traffic effect of a store name can only be seen in a short time. When users’ sense of novelty about the store name decreases and the taste of the dishes does not meet expectations, the merchant must face a decline in sales and may even choose to close the store within half a year or a year.

Wang Yang, brand operations manager of the "Betting on Your Chef Career" series, told Tech Planet that the number of this type of stores in the northern region has decreased significantly, and more are concentrated in southern cities, especially in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Moreover, newly launched stores in a city often see a surge in orders.

When the traffic of the "Betting on Your Chef Career" series of stores declined, Wang Yang introduced that the headquarters could only suggest franchisees to purchase some ingredients at low cost in store design and add more "0 yuan purchase" products. Common ones include sausages, beef balls, and fish tofu at 0.01 yuan, and large chicken legs with sauce at 1 yuan, etc. The main purpose is to give users a sense of getting a good deal and attract them to place orders.

In essence, this is also a strategy that many food delivery merchants use today, and it has been summarized by netizens as one of the formulas for cheap food delivery. Now, these food delivery marketing operations are gradually becoming large-scale and market-oriented. Now, you can find all kinds of food delivery service providers on the Internet, providing various operational services such as opening new stores, revitalizing old stores, and reducing the rate of negative reviews.

In addition, more importantly, the company will change the new project name to attract franchisees. Wang Yang introduced that what the company is doing now is the "One Bowl to Satisfy" takeaway store prefix, which is still the fried rice series. Since it is unknown whether the new project name can attract more traffic, the franchise fee will be reduced to 19,800. If the sales of the original franchisees continue to decline, they can join for free.

Overall, these brand operating companies continue to reap franchisees by constantly changing their "vests". In particular, when the national trend takeaway packaging was complained about, they began to require franchisees to purchase takeaway packaging from the headquarters, charging 1 yuan for a set of takeaway packaging, which is much higher than the market price.

Zhang Liang, a fried rice franchisee of the "Betting on Your Chef Career" series, told Tech Planet that the costs that merchants need to pay are getting higher and higher, and the unit price of takeaway packaging purchased by themselves is only 0.3 yuan. Zhang Liang did some calculations, including rent, ingredients, etc., although only operating a takeaway business, the initial investment budget is about 100,000 yuan, and the high sales in the first two months of opening also require franchisees to spend an additional 10,000 yuan on the takeaway platform to achieve a monthly sales of 9999+, which has now dropped by half.

At present, Zhang Liang’s takeaway shop has an average of about 166 orders per day, half of which are contributed by Meituan’s “Pin Hao Fan”. Zhang Liang said that due to the low pricing of the product and its fit with the current popularity of “Pin Hao Fan”, he can get a fixed income of 10 yuan for each “Pin Hao Fan” order.

According to Zhang Liang's calculations, after deducting the platform's deductions and the headquarters' deductions, he now only makes 200,000 to 300,000 yuan a year. In order to earn more income, many merchants like Zhang Liang will offer lower prices to attract other franchisees to join, earn franchise fees, and then purchase raw materials from the headquarters under the pretext of opening a new store.

3. Exquisite and cheap takeout, backstabbing workers

From the user's perspective, these cheap takeouts fit their current mentality of focusing more on cost-effectiveness, but the probability of product failures also increases accordingly.

Various strategies for preventing “junk takeout” have begun to appear on social networks. For example, many stores named in the style of online literature serve tasteless food, while traditional Chinese takeout packaging often appears in fried skewers, braised pork rice, and pork trotter rice.

Workers define it as exquisite and cheap takeout. Compared with white plastic bags, these packages are exquisite on the surface, but in fact they are of poor quality. They are usually equipped with disposable chopsticks that fall apart when broken, ultra-thin disposable napkins, and black plastic spoons that are obviously bent when scooping rice. They were initially attracted by the super high cost performance, but the product tasted bad, which gave them a strong "backstab feeling".

For example, the "national fashion takeaway" that has been complained about refers to the use of the same "sunglasses + Peking Opera costumes" character image in bulk on takeaway packaging. In fact, the image comes from the content posted by Douyin user YUMI You Xiaomi in 2020. It was originally sent to a certain website, but later the original manuscript was spread due to some disputes. Later, it was simply made open source for everyone to use for free.

The reason why it has become the choice of many takeout merchants is that it has low cost. From platforms such as Pinduoduo, we can see that the unit price of this type of national trend takeout packaging box is only 0.1 yuan, and some stores show sales of more than 700,000.

In fact, behind this is also related to the strategy of many takeaway merchants in recent years. They have invested too much energy and cost in marketing, but ignored the taste of the food. Or because they want to achieve high sales through low-price wars and attract customers through low prices through "Pinhaofan", they began to cut costs on takeaway packaging.

In addition, since these takeaway merchants usually only run takeaway stalls and do not have offline stores, workers who are discouraged by the taste of the food have begun to summarize the national trend takeaway packaging and online article names of stores as synonymous with "small workshops, unhygienic, and pre-prepared dishes." They want to be affordable, but they are also more concerned about the cleanliness and hygiene of the store.

In September this year, CCTV News exposed a number of takeaway stores that rented licenses and used fake addresses and fake photos to become popular takeaway stores with high scores. There were even several takeaway stores opened together with scrap recycling stations.

This has made young people more cautious when choosing takeout. Takeout stores that rely solely on marketing will obviously become short-lived more quickly.

(Note: All names in this article are pseudonyms.)

Text | Lin Jing This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Tech Planet], WeChat public account: [Tech Planet], original/authorized to be published on Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.