How To Fight In The New Noodle Shop

Recently, the noodle fast food brand met Xiaomian and announced the completion of a new round of financing, with a financing amount of more than 100 million yuan. This round of financing is led by Country Garden venture capital and followed by xijiade.

This is the second round of financing completed this year. In March this year, Xiaomian just announced the completion of ten million yuan financing, led by Country Garden venture capital, and followed by Hongyi Baifu and xijiade. In a short period of three months, the valuation of small face has also soared from 1 billion yuan in the last round of financing to nearly 3 billion yuan now.

In fact, it is not only the small noodles that we met. Recently, the mian race track has been very popular with the capital. Five Ye mixed noodles and Hefu Laomian were invested by CDH and CMC capital respectively. Only in the field of Lanzhou ramen, Ma Jiyong, Chen Xianggui and Zhang Lala have won investment from Sequoia Capital, source capital and Jinshajiang venture capital respectively this year. In addition, Ruixing coffee founder Lu Zhengyao also focused on the small noodle market, and then innovated the brand "Xiaomian".

When I met Song Qi, the founder of Xiaomian, he saw that the new noodle shop was a comprehensive transformation and upgrading of the traditional noodle shop. With the support of capital, the new noodle restaurant industry, which is closely related to people's daily diet, is likely to become a chain brand with global influence.

"Food and beverage is a good channel for foreigners to get to know China. When foreigners use chopsticks and eat the top bars, they can also have a more three-dimensional perception of Chinese culture." Song Qi said, "meeting Xiao Mian has gone through the initial accumulation stage of cultivating internal skills, and is now entering a period of rapid expansion. I believe that with the passage of time, meeting small noodles can not only spread all over the country, but also go to the world. "

From French fries to pasta

In people's impression, many catering industry practitioners are not highly educated. They may be farmers and laid-off workers. They run a husband and wife shop in order to make a living. Song Qi is one of the few highly educated entrepreneurs in the industry. He is also a "young veteran". Although he is only in his thirties, he has been rooted in the catering industry for more than 10 years.

It is understood that Song Qi graduated from the South China University of technology, and then studied for a master's degree in the Hong Kong University of science and technology. After graduating from the master's degree in 2010, Song Qi, a science and engineering major, left his job in a technology company for one year and joined McDonald's in Hong Kong as a management trainee for more than a year.

"When I fried the first basket of French fries at McDonald's, I had the idea of creating a brand and even challenging McDonald's. I'd like to see how these fortune 500 companies operate in the end, and pave the way for my own business in the future. " Song Qi said.

In 2011, Song Qi returned to Guangzhou to join the Development Department of Yum. He was mainly responsible for the location of new stores of KFC and pizza hut. After two jobs accumulated experience in operation and site selection, Song Qi officially started the entrepreneurial road of Chinese catering in 2012.

In the two years from 2012 to 2014, Song Qi successively opened tea restaurants, northeast restaurants, and northeast dumpling restaurants, constantly learning from the success and failure. In 2014, Song Qi and his partners officially founded the first 30 square meter noodle shop in Guangzhou's inner streets. Su Xuxiang and Luo Yanling, two co founders of the company, are also Song Qi's undergraduate students in South China University of technology.

"We are very typical of starting from scratch, with little resources and background. Even the 300000 start-up capital for the store at that time was patchwork together. " Song Qi said.

Song Qi, who is determined to do catering, also meets the entrepreneurial opportunity created by the times. In 2014, the first wave of entrepreneurial peak of China's modern catering was emerging. It was during that period that new catering brands such as Huang Taiji and Xi Shaoye emerged. At the same time, the policy of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" encourages entrepreneurship and innovation in China, and capital pays more attention to start-up companies.

In this environment, when Xiaomian was founded three months ago, he got an angel investment of RMB 3 million from Qingbi capital and individual investors. More than a year later, in 2016, when we met Xiaomian, we successively received investment from Jiumao and Hongyi Baifu, and the brand valuation has reached 100 million yuan.

Wang Xiaolong, the managing director of Hony investment and CEO of Baifu holdings, once told the 21st century economic report that compared with other restaurant entrepreneurs, meeting the small face founding team was very unusual“ First, they are elites with high education background, and their learning ability has an advantage. Second, they are young and can cater to the consumption habits of young people more. Third, there are a lot of people who have ideas, but too few can be down-to-earth. Meeting the small noodle team is very pragmatic and is likely to become a "black horse" in the field of Chinese fast food. " Wang Xiaolong said.

However, the company that gained capital favor did not choose to expand rapidly. It had 4 stores at the end of 2015, 10 stores at the end of 2016, and only 20 stores by the beginning of 2019“ This is determined by the team's genes. We think it is difficult to accumulate and accumulate this matter without long-term accumulation and precipitation, and without a solid business model. " Song Qi said.

In Song Qi's opinion, when the number of stores is small, the team operates "online red brand", which tests the ability of single product to create popular money and marketing communication. When the store scale expands rapidly, the team needs to build a mature system, and keep up with the supply chain, personnel management, digitization and other aspects, otherwise the faster the expansion, the faster the collapse.

Therefore, in the first five years, we have mainly laid the foundation and improved our internal skills, and explored how to turn the local facets that people usually don't pay much attention to into categories that can be branded, chained and commercialized, and realize the capitalization operation.

Starting from 2019, Xiaomian is accelerating its expansion at the rate of doubling its stores every year. At present, the company has more than 150 stores, covering the first and second tier cities in China. Song Qi disclosed that the company hopes to double its store growth every year from 2021 to 2023, reaching the scale of nearly 1000 stores in three years.

There are high barriers behind the low threshold

Accelerating the expansion of small areas, but also faster to attract the attention of the management. Since this year, we have successively completed two rounds of strategic financing, with the company's valuation rising from 1 billion yuan to nearly 3 billion yuan. Country garden venture capital is the leading investor in the two rounds of financing.

"In fact, I didn't want to go to a new round of financing so quickly. It was their sincerity that moved us. Basically, when I go to Beijing, they come to me in Beijing. When I was in Guangzhou, they came to Guangzhou to find me, and they must do it. " Talking about the process of getting country garden venture capital investment, Song Qi recalled.

At the same time, country garden and meet small face also have some industry agreement. For example, the property resources and robot business segments of country garden are able to cooperate with each other.

Mou Baolu, executive general manager of country garden venture capital, told the 21st century economic report that after the last round of investment, all aspects of development have exceeded expectations. There are three main reasons to keep optimistic: track, business growth and business quality, and team.

"From the track point of view, noodles are one of the most important staple foods on the Chinese dining table. It is a high-frequency product that the public just needs. Small noodles in Sichuan and Chongqing have strong taste memory points, which is easier to form a brand." Mou Baolu said.

As far as the growth of enterprises is concerned, during the epidemic period in 2020, Xiaomian has achieved a growth of more than 100% in terms of development. Compared with the counterparts of other listed companies, the operation quality of stores is at an excellent level, whether it is flat efficiency, turnover or store profit margin. From the team point of view, the team meeting the small face is young, highly educated and has been deeply engaged in the catering industry for many years, with both methodology and practical ability.

In fact, not only did they continue to gain the favor of capital when they met small noodles, but they also received large amount of financing recently to speed up the pace of expanding and opening stores. Just as the new tea brands such as Xicha and Naixue have rewritten the tea racing track, the new noodle house competition with the support of capital is opening up completely. Compared with the traditional noodle shops such as Weiqian ramen, Western Mahua and Mr. Li, the new noodle shop has also been upgraded in terms of talent structure, marketing channels and service experience.

Song Qi said that compared with the traditional noodle brand, the new noodle brand has distinctive characteristics. First of all, in the past, most of the catering practitioners were not highly educated. Now a large number of highly educated talents are pouring into the new noodle industry, which has stronger learning ability, cognitive ability and capital operation ability. The entry points of brand segmentation of new noodle shops they founded are often very accurate, such as Lanzhou ramen, Chongqing noodle, Hunan rice noodle, Yunnan rice noodle, etc., forming a clear brand positioning in the minds of consumers.

Second, from the perspective of channels, most of the new noodle shops are opened in shopping malls. They may be neighbors of KFC and McDonald's. They have greatly improved the decoration environment, sanitation and personnel management services. This is similar to the new tea market. The original milk tea shops were mainly in the streets, but now Naixue and Xicha are able to open hundreds of square meters of stores in shopping malls, bringing upgrading experience to consumers.

Third, the new noodle shop pays more attention to brand marketing and digitization, and has more brand tonality in store design, which makes consumers have more perceptual cognition besides rational consumption. At the same time, the digital mode improves the operation efficiency of stores, and through the operation of wechat public account and other platforms, it increases the opportunity of communication with customers.

However, it should be noted that the catering industry is an industry with high barriers but seemingly low barriers. If you just follow the wind blindly, you may not get good results in the end.

"It's easy to invest hundreds of thousands to open a new noodle shop, but the scale-up from one noodle shop to ten or one hundred will bring a lot of challenges." Song Qi said. From the purchase of raw materials, the control of food safety in the supply chain, to the location, design and preparation of stores, and then to the recruitment, training, marketing and it system construction of employees, the chain of catering chain will be very long, and the team needs to continuously improve its systematic operation ability.

At the same time, from a longer-term perspective, compared with KFC, which has tens of thousands of stores in China, and McDonald's with more than 4000 stores in China, whether it's Hefu Laomian with more than 300 stores, or the small noodles with more than 100 stores, can only be regarded as the early stage of development. In this competition for new noodle shops, will Chinese fast food brands rival KFC and McDonald's really come into being? Who will be the last to laugh at? Time will tell.

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