Mixue Bingcheng and Gongcha have more than 1,000 overseas stores... The pattern of catering enterprises going overseas is beginning to emerge

At present, the Chinese catering industry has already formed a rudimentary echelon of going overseas. The author introduces the current situation of catering brands actively exploring overseas markets and analyzes and summarizes how catering brands should go overseas.

As of now, China's catering industry going overseas has already formed a rudimentary echelon.

The first echelon is mainly composed of tea and coffee brands, such as Mixue Bingcheng, Gongcha, and Sunrise Tea, which have more than “thousands” of stores overseas; the second echelon is mainly represented by hot pot and fast food brands, such as Shaxian Snacks, Tehai International (Haidilao), etc., which have more than “hundreds” of stores overseas; and formal dining brands are also gradually expanding into overseas markets, forming the third echelon.

Of course, this pattern is only in its infancy and there is still the possibility of change, with latecomers emerging as the winners.

Because, in 2024, more and more catering brands are planning to place their bets on going overseas. Brands that have already gone overseas want to gain a higher market share and seize the initiative; leading catering brands that have not yet gone overseas also plan to "win by surprise" overseas and open up a second growth curve.

1. China is involuted, and the storm is rising overseas

The reason for this phenomenon is largely inseparable from market changes. " The fierce competition in the domestic catering market has continued to escalate, which has prompted many catering brands to actively explore overseas markets and find new growth points ," said Yuan Lijun, vice president of the Shanghai Catering and Culinary Association, at the Dialogue with Navigators Private Sharing Conference held by MorketingGlobal.

Why?

Because the domestic market is no longer able to expand, and many companies have also encountered a ceiling in their development process, especially some catering companies that already have a high market share in China, and their store coverage in domestic cities is already very high. On the other hand, overseas, there is a sufficient market to be explored, and brands can choose cities that match their products to enter the market.

We can look at two sets of data on this point:

1. The international Chinese food market has exceeded US$260 billion, and it is expected that by 2026, the international Chinese food market share will be 10.8%;
2. According to the report data titled "Quality Builds Brand and Makes Chinese Food the First Business Card for Overseas Expansion" released by Zhejiang Securities Co., Ltd., the scale of the Chinese food catering market in these 12 different countries in 2021 has reached: US$48.1 billion in the United States; US$10.6 billion in Japan; US$7.6 billion in Singapore; US$6.1 billion in the United Kingdom; US$3.9 billion in South Korea; US$3.2 billion in Canada; US$2.6 billion in Thailand; US$2.5 billion in Australia; US$2.4 billion in Malaysia; US$2.3 billion in Indonesia; US$1.8 billion in Vietnam; and US$400 million in the UAE.

It can be seen that the scale of Chinese food in the overseas market has been expanding. "Take Melbourne as an example. In the past two years, many young people born after 1985 have appeared. Some young couples born after 1985 sold their houses in Shanghai and bought a big mansion and a nanny car in Melbourne. The number of Chinese people has increased. They like to eat and drink tea at noon. There are 20 million Chinese in Indonesia and 10 million Chinese in Thailand. The Chinese population in these countries is large and their consumption capacity is stronger," Yuan Lijun shared.

Of course, the market level is only part of the reason, what is more important is that “the time has come”!

Nowadays, Chinese catering culture is gradually "rising" around the world, and it is not only overseas Chinese who love Chinese food. Some time ago, there was a hot topic that Chinese people are all over the world, like mercenaries going to the Amazon jungle to perform a mission, and they met their fellow villagers selling instant noodles in the jungle; there was a couple of Internet celebrities who went to the so-called loneliest town, and the only restaurant was opened by Chinese people... If we put aside the jokes and look carefully, we will find that the market space for "Chinese catering" overseas is huge, and there is a huge user group base: overseas students + overseas tourists + overseas people who are interested in Chinese food.

First, at the level of overseas students, " according to the data, there are more than 60 million overseas Chinese in the world, and the number of overseas Chinese is increasing. A Chinese hot pot meal and a cup of bubble milk tea to relieve homesickness have become the choice of many overseas Chinese ," said Zeng Qiao, founder and CEO of Morketing.

Secondly, in terms of overseas travelers and people who are interested in Chinese food, Chinese food culture has gradually spread outward from Southeast Asia with the development of short videos. According to data from the food delivery service platform GrabFood, the average person in Southeast Asia buys 4 cups of bubble tea per month, the average Filipino consumer drinks 5 cups of milk tea per month, and the average Thai consumer drinks 6 cups per month. Consumers spend nearly 4 billion US dollars a year on new tea drinks.

Zeng Qiao shared, " In addition to Southeast Asia, people who love watching short videos should often see people bringing foreign friends to experience Chinese food, staying abroad to cook Chinese food for foreign friends, etc. In fact, there are also many users on TikTok who are spreading Chinese food and taking the lead in helping Chinese food to make a good impression overseas ."

While Chinese food culture is constantly expanding, the actual situation on the other hand is "scarcity of overseas catering talents, Chinese food and catering".

"I once had a discussion with the French Catering Association, and talked about the shortage of Chinese chefs in Paris, France. They said that they had used the power of the black market to 'kidnap' chefs. This seemingly joking remark indirectly represents the shortage of Chinese chef talent abroad. At the same time, there is still a big gap in the level of chefs compared to domestic chefs. Because in recent years our restaurants have been very popular and improved rapidly, and they have cultivated local cuisines from all over the world. However, the scarcity of talent in the overseas market remains unchanged, so how to achieve standardization and talent matching is a big challenge for Chinese food to go overseas," said Yuan Lijun.

In addition, most catering companies going overseas are in the early stages. According to incomplete statistics from MorketingResearch on the number of new catering overseas cities, many Chinese catering companies have only expanded into 1-3 countries. This means that a large number of catering companies have just begun to enter the overseas market and the industry is still in its early stages.

Moreover, many of the current overseas catering companies are husband-and-wife shops that open restaurants by taking advantage of the natural geographical advantages. Many overseas Chinese told MorketingGlobal that many Chinese restaurants in overseas tourist spots or other places are not delicious in terms of taste, but many Chinese people are forced to choose at the time and have no choice but to accept it, so it is both unpalatable and expensive.

2. Three strategies for going overseas

Therefore, in the initial stage of catering overseas expansion, the more powerful the product and the more mature the catering enterprises are, the higher the potential and success of overseas expansion may be. Especially when they have a certain reputation in China, the actual threshold is lower. So what can catering enterprises do when going overseas?

1. The first step: understand the market

As the saying goes, knowing yourself and your enemy is the key to success. Grasping consumption and market trends can help you better grasp the brand management process. To understand the market, one must first understand the laws and regulations on food in the country you choose to export to, and the other is to understand industry trends, understand the development trends of different countries in food categories, and fight in a targeted manner.

First of all, only by understanding local policies and rules can we ensure that the products are correct, especially since different food categories have different requirements. For example, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is the core of U.S. food safety laws, requiring the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to govern the production, processing, packaging, and storage of domestic and imported foods other than meat, poultry, and some eggs.

Therefore, the company needs to have professional personnel to conduct research and analysis. At the same time, many countries have laws and regulations that explicitly prohibit false propaganda about food, exaggeration of its efficacy, etc., including restaurant hygiene standards and personnel management, which also have corresponding laws and regulations.

Therefore, the first step for catering companies to go overseas is to study whether their products, hygiene management, and personnel management can meet the standards of the country they are going overseas.

Secondly, in addition to food laws and regulations, it is also particularly important to understand the catering consumption trends in the local market. In this regard, Morketing has reviewed the food consumption trends in Southeast Asia and the United States in 2023 based on the TikTok platform, hoping to provide some inspiration for catering companies that want to go overseas this year.

In 2023, the “snacks, condiments, beverages and convenience foods” market in Southeast Asia will achieve rapid growth

In terms of the scale of Chinese food e-commerce in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia rank high, with US$810 million, US$420 million and US$300 million respectively.

In terms of the food track, considering the growth rate of the Chinese food track in the above three countries, the four tracks of "snacks, condiments, beverages and convenience foods" are developing fastest, with a GMV growth of millions per month. In addition, in Southeast Asia, the growth rate of canned food is 24%, the conversion rate of puffed food is high, and there are companies in the coffee market that have achieved a million-dollar performance with a single product.

In terms of consumption trends, "health, beauty and deliciousness" are the main driving forces. Indonesia mainly prefers delicious food and immediate consumption; Vietnam prefers dry snacks and likes healthy products; in Thailand, nutritional and delicious supplements are more popular among consumers, who pursue health, beauty and delicious indulgence.

In general, the demand in the Southeast Asian market is clearly divided. The beverage category pursues deliciousness and weight loss and beauty, especially in Thailand, where this trend is more obvious; at the same time, health functional foods are highly sought after; snacks are mostly low-priced and consumption has not yet been upgraded; the coffee category is mainly coffee powder and weight loss formulas; spicy turkey noodles have a niche popularity.

In the US market, pickled foods, coffee, tea, and instant noodles are worth noting, with coffee and instant noodles growing at a 10-fold rate.

Looking at consumption trends, snacks can be divided into two categories: fun and delicious snacks and fitness snacks; the coffee category is still in its early stages of development; convenience foods, such as self-heating pots and turkey noodles, have a niche popularity; the demand for healthy energy supplements is reflected in most beverages; condiments and dry finger foods tend to be spicy and sour.

In this regard, brands can find their own advantages based on category insights.

2. Tip 2: Be flexible

Of course, understanding the market is one thing, and on the other hand, you must be flexible enough. In the process of going overseas, companies often encounter different problems. Only by being flexible can they better cope with various complex markets and avoid potential risks.

The premise of being flexible is not to be afraid of failure. " When we go from China to a new city overseas, we sometimes get lost or take the wrong road, but we get familiar with the place after going there a few times and staying there for a while, so we still have to pay the tuition fees ," said Song Jidong, head of Mengniu's overseas business.

How to do it specifically?

The first point is to make great efforts to gain deeper insights into local consumers and markets.

In addition to the consumption trends in different regions mentioned above, overseas companies also need to do a lot of details: clarify your market positioning, formulate your product strategy, and price and channel strategy, etc. For example, in terms of price positioning, you can refer to the situation of competitors, and then set prices based on costs, and provide different pricing combinations.

The second point is to iterate in small steps, first enter the market through export and trade to see the degree of consumer acceptance, or find some OEMs to test the market's acceptance of its products, take small steps and move fast, and stand in line while moving forward.

For example, at the product level, companies can take small steps and start with products that are less likely to go wrong, and then adjust and iterate products based on local preferences. In December last year, Heytea opened its first offline store in the United States. In the early days of its opening, it only offered common fruit teas such as grapes, mangoes, and grapefruits. Not only because this is Heytea's classic product, but more importantly, it can reduce the pressure on Heytea's supply chain and leave more room for subsequent product structure adjustments.

The third point is to communicate more with experienced companies. "In the past few years, Chinese companies, especially in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, have cultivated the first batch of talents to go overseas, so we should communicate more with these companies that went overseas a few years ago," said Song Jidong.

3. The third trick: create content

In fact, for catering companies that have a certain foundation in China, when going overseas, they can use the marketing capabilities they have accumulated previously to promote their products and demonstrate user experience, and closely integrate with local users through short videos, live broadcasts and other forms.

We have observed that many catering companies attach great importance to content when going overseas, especially short video content. "We started cooperating with TikTok when we opened a store in Indonesia in 2021, and we have been All In TikTok for the past two or three years, not only in Indonesia, but also in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. TikTok has a very fast penetration rate and population growth," said Song Jidong.

Why is it important to create short video content? The main reasons are as follows:

1. Crowd matching. According to data, 65% of TikTok users love snacks. At the same time, the exposure of food-related content is as high as 4 billion, which means that each TikTok user is exposed to food and beverage-related content more than 16 times per month on average . In addition, compared with other platforms, the interaction rate of food and beverage content on TikTok is 1.6 times higher.

2. Possibility. Content marketing may bring the feasibility of creating a super hit for a brand. Taking TikTok as an example, when catering companies go overseas and make segmented tracks in different markets, they can seize the initiative by choosing the right hit product, which can account for more than 50% of a single store.

MorketingGlobal observed an eye cream product that created a viral video on TikTok, demonstrating the effect of timely wrinkle reduction. The eye cream then quickly sold out, and sales in the week after the video was played reached the brand’s sales in the past six months.

This means that if your content is good enough, it is very likely that your product will quickly become a "hot item". So how can catering companies do a good job of "content" ?

Step 1: Enter different social platforms and establish content touchpoints so that users can see your brand on the site.

Owen Yang, vice president of Happy Lamb, said that operating a TikTok corporate account can solve the cultural generation gap problem for free. "In the process of dissemination, we found that many products and eating methods are unknown to overseas consumers. For example, when I first went to the United States, many Americans put noodles first, then vegetables, and finally meat when eating hot pot, so the noodles became a lump and there was no way to cook soup. We could only keep adding soup. He thought it was a military hot pot. Later, we demonstrated through content how to properly cook hot pot, first meat, then vegetables, and finally noodles."

So Happy Lamb started to produce popular science content about Chinese food. "There are a lot of Chinese medicinal herbs such as tsaoko and angelica in our soup pot. Then a customer in the store was looking at what tsaoko is. I ran up to him and wanted to tell him that it was inedible, but he put it in his mouth before I ran up to him. So we started to 'educate' overseas consumers through content that tsaoko is not edible."

Of course, in this process, the brand still needs to build a small content team of more than 2 people, find the positioning and personality of the account, and then assist in producing high-quality content, focus on operations, and actively participate in user comments in order to achieve better results.

Step 2: Learn to combine with topics, find content that users like, and expand exposure.

It is easy to open an official account, but it is not easy to do a good job in content. When companies are producing content, they actually need to pay attention to "which content users are really interested in?" in real time, so as to better arouse attention.

MorketingGlobal learned that currently on the TikTok platform, the three types of catering topics, " Chinese style, health, and functionality", are very popular. For specific analysis:

Chinese style, content related to local cuisine, spicy challenges, and Chinese tea are very popular among users.

Local cuisine is popular, and Southeast Asia and the United States have a high acceptance of Chinese local cuisine. For example, foreign consumers like Jianbing Guozi and Suan Ni Bairou very much, and they will also produce some related content. When the content becomes popular, users who don’t know what Chinese food is will become interested, and if they are interested, they will buy it and publish related content, thus achieving the effect of going viral.

It is worth noting here that, unlike in China, if people think that a restaurant is ordinary when they see a short menu, many restaurants overseas are "big single product stores". For example, a hamburger restaurant only sells hamburgers with different meats; a Korean soup restaurant only sells soup rice. If a Chinese restaurant prepares a long menu for overseas expansion, although the variety may be rich, it may be necessary to explain what the different dishes are to overseas audiences, because they do not understand Chinese catering culture and have obvious catering culture barriers. Including eating habits, overseas everyone has one portion, while domestic people share together. So this means that there are development opportunities for catering companies to go overseas and open big single product stores.

In addition to local cuisines, overseas users also like "spicy challenge" related content, such as hot pot, malatang, and spicy hot pot. North Americans mainly like spicy challenges; Southeast Asian hot pot has more diverse ways of playing, and consumers like to participate in spicy eating challenges and stunt challenges.

At the same time, on TikTok, with the blessing of Chinese tea culture, Kung Fu Tea, which went overseas earlier, Cixi, and Neon Tea Dance, which just opened in Las Vegas, USA, have been loved by many users.

Because they like health-related content, more and more consumers are shifting their milk tea consumption from milk powder to fresh milk, and from milk tea to fruit tea.

From a detailed perspective, in terms of health, users prefer "0 sugar" and plant-based products are popular, such as oat milk, coconut milk, soy milk, and nut milk. On TikTok, users often post content on topics such as "vegetarianism, building tolerance to "gluten-free", and no additional sugar added".

In addition, the sales of sparkling water on TikTok are also very high, including on Amazon. Recently, Lacroix sparkling water in the United States is very popular. At the same time, in the overall sparkling water category, the growth rate of flavored sparkling water is much higher than that of original sparkling water. In addition, sparkling water is also very suitable for DIY. How to use the flavored sparkling water I bought to customize a special drink I made at home is also a very good content direction.

Functionality, people like to read "professional home brewing, workplace brewing" and "health-related" content.

In Southeast Asia, people prefer "weight loss coffee for health, beauty and slimming needs", so companies can actually create content for professional weight loss scenarios such as home brewing. In North America, people prefer black coffee, so companies can create content for scenarios such as workplace brewing.

For example, how can an ordinary coffee brand compete with a strong coffee brand in Southeast Asia? In fact, it can be based on the categories and content that users like, add functionality to the product category, and link the content with health functions.

In terms of health preservation, in Southeast Asia, we can focus on the content directions of "daily health preservation", "functional satisfaction" and "classical"; in North America, we can focus on the content based on user needs. For example, exotic flavors such as British tea, Japanese matcha, and Indian tea are very popular in North America, so we can produce some content about the tea culture of different countries.

Step 3: You still need to find marketing experts to amplify the content.

Catering companies that are conducting influencer marketing overseas can refer to this path: "First, find a large number of KOCs to look for exclusive marketing scenarios - then use mid-level influencers to enhance user awareness - and finally find top influencers to further stimulate user purchasing interest."

In the process of influencer marketing, we must use the content to the fullest extent. For example, after the influencer has created the content, how can the company reuse it?

In fact, some advertising can be added to continue the popularity and once again expand the number of orders and exposure. Taking TikTok as an example, natural traffic will not disappear just because the company purchases commercial traffic, but will extend the amplifier. At the same time, under the content of influencers, more hooks to promote purchases can be pre-buried to efficiently guide traffic conversion. For example:

1. The user clicks on the anchor conversion component at the top of the expert video comment area, and jumps to the landing page to guide the purchase;
2. You can create exclusive promotion codes for influencers, amplify the benefits, and accurately measure the influencer conversion effect;
3. You can add external links to the influencer’s personal homepage for in-depth endorsement, thereby reaching additional fans and people with high interest.

In general, if there is content with good organic performance, you can use this content as a "seed" and use advertising arsenal to invest more in it, so that more people can see the good video content and bring more transactions and conversions to the company.

3. Conclusion

Finally, catering companies need to pay attention to one thing when going overseas. They should not only focus on Chinese people, but also on people from different countries.

"70% of our store customers are foreigners now, so when brands go overseas, they should stop doing business with Chinese people. The number of Chinese people is limited, but there are 300 million Americans. We need to change our concepts and ideas. Once we do, we will find that serving Americans is a blue ocean. Of course, this is also related to the product category. We cannot compete in the coffee business, but Chinese food is the best bargaining chip we have. We just need to focus on the characteristics," said Owen Yang.

However, whether doing business with Chinese people or doing business overseas, it is certain that the era of Chinese catering navigation has arrived.

Author: Rita

Source: WeChat public account: Morketing (ID: Morketing)