The Prefabricated Vegetable Industry Welcomes The Cross-Border Entry Of Mengniu And Yili

In recent years, the prefabricated vegetable industry has risen rapidly with its convenience and efficiency, attracting the attention of many food and beverage enterprises. Uni President, Yili, Mengniu, Yizi, Yangshengtang and other enterprises have crossed the border into the prefabricated vegetable track. Today, the prefabricated vegetable industry is like a besieged city. Enterprises outside the city are eager to enter, but enterprises inside the city are facing various challenges, and even have to choose to exit.

As a large enterprise in the food and beverage industry, Uni President launched a new brand "Start Small" as early as 2018 to challenge the takeaway market. With its positioning and convenient way of eating, self heating rice has quickly become a product of Uni President. In the next few years, Kaixiaozao continued to improve the product matrix through product extension, launched a number of new products such as self heating hot pot, red oil Wonton, and rice topping, and its performance also increased significantly. In particular, in the first half of 2020, the revenue from small cooking has exceeded 170 million, becoming the highlight of unified performance growth.

However, with the intensification of competition in the prefabricated vegetable industry and the continuous change of consumer demand, the unified prefabricated vegetable business has not been able to maintain a strong growth momentum. Although Uni President has invested a lot of resources and energy in the field of prefabricated dishes, and even spared a lot of money to recruit talents from competitors and hire stars to speak for them, the sales performance of the prefabricated dishes business is far from meeting expectations.

At the same time, there are still some enterprises who are optimistic about the development prospects of the prefabricated vegetable industry and choose cross-border entry. At the beginning of September this year, Mengniu and Yili dairy companies both announced their entry into the frozen product field. Mengniu held a "full season new product launch conference" in Jinan, Shandong Province, and released nearly 100 SKUs, covering frozen beef, seafood, dumplings and other staple foods. These products will be sold in the "ice cooler" of Mengniu's frozen food chain supermarket. "Ice cooler" is a brand that Mengniu started to deploy four years ago. At present, it has opened nearly 1600 stores nationwide, mainly serving family users.

Another dairy Yili is also stepping up the layout of frozen food prefabrication. Yili announced that it has reached a strategic cooperation with Haixin Food, a listed frozen product company. The two sides will sell various products of Haixin Food through Yili's retail network. This move not only brings Yili new growth points, but also broadens the sales channels for Haixin Food. Before that, Yili had tested the frozen water products business and cooperated with enterprises such as Hai Bawang.

According to the analysis of the financial report in the first half of this year, the life of dairy enterprises is not easy. The problems of excess raw milk and insufficient consumption at the C-end have led dairy enterprises to focus on the B-end catering and baking track to find new growth points in the field of instant manufacturing. As an important part of the catering industry, prepared dishes naturally become the focus of dairy enterprises. However, the competition in the prefabricated vegetable industry is becoming increasingly fierce, and cross-border enterprises need to have a strong supply chain, channel network and brand influence in order to gain a foothold in this market.