Business Giants Pile Up Cross-Border Catering

On February 14, China Post opened its first directly-managed coffee shop, Post Office Coffee, in Xiamen. Post Office Coffee was a hit on the opening day, once becoming the first local coffee shop hot list, business is as hot as the net red shop, an average of 2 hours to order, a day out of the cup volume of more than 600 cups.

Industry insiders say that Post Office Coffee has "abundant" resources, such as a large number of high-quality lot shops, covering the country's warehouse logistics supply chain and other hard resources, as well as other new coffee brands do not have the high visibility, high exposure and other soft resources.

In addition to Post Office Coffee, when it comes to cross-border dining, many consumers first think of IKEA restaurants. Data shows that 30% of people go to IKEA just to dine. Why are IKEA restaurants so popular? The majority of consumer comments are that they are "delicious and not expensive".

According to industry insiders, the IKEA restaurant is not a business model, but an IKEA mall with a restaurant is a business model, which determines how standardised and ahead of its time it is in terms of operation and management.

For IKEA, the role of the restaurant goes far beyond driving traffic to the store and increasing the length of stay of customers, but more importantly, it conveys a simple and sophisticated lifestyle to the consumers in the home furnishing stores through the healthy and tasty food served in the restaurant. IKEA's move to crossover into food and beverage not only boosts the performance of its main business, but also diversifies the brand itself, which is a double win.

Combing through the situation, we found that cross-border catering is being done by traditional brick-and-mortar large corporations, internet companies, luxury brands, as well as celebrities, celebrity secondaries, and even food companies.

Seeing the broad market prospects of coffee and new tea drinks, PetroChina set up the Kunlun Hospitable Coffee, Sinopec set up the Yijie Coffee, Wahaha opened a milk tea shop, Wang Laoji layout of new tea drinks. At present, Kunlun Hospice Coffee has more than 120 shops, and its products include black coffee, milk coffee, milk tea and other popular categories, with prices ranging from RMB 12-24, which is more grounded. EasyJet Coffee has opened 54 shops in Beijing and Suzhou alone.

Many luxury brands like to open restaurants. Regarding luxury brands crossing borders, there was once a rumour going around that you could go to a Mercedes 4S shop to taste fine wine, go to Chanel for dessert and drink coffee at Burberry. At present, in the Chinese market, Mercedes-Benz launched Mercedes me restaurants, two of the three have closed down;

Burberry's cafe has only opened one; Hermes entered the new tea drink, the overall rating of the public review is currently less than 4.0, many consumers commented that the tea is very general; GUCCI's global first Full-Service restaurant has now closed down. From the development of the above-mentioned luxury brands' shops, most of these restaurants are not running well.

While the big names are "taking it personally" by opening restaurants across the border, the internet giants prefer to invest in their shares. Tencent's investment company, Guangxi Tencent Venture Capital Co Ltd, currently has stakes in brands such as Hefu Lo Mein, Ma Ji Yong, Xi Cha and Sheng Xiang Ting Hot Lo. Tencent prefers to pick chain brands and headline projects. From a category perspective, coffee, new tea drinks and noodles are the hottest tracks in the past two years, and have a 10,000-store gene, making them easy to scale up.

In addition to Tencent, in terms of investment in the restaurant industry, Dragon Pearl Capital, a subsidiary of Meituan, has invested in chain brands such as Xi Cha, Honey Snow Ice City, Gu Ming and Manner Coffee; Byte Jump has also invested in Manner Coffee and Lemon Season, in addition to building local life and opening Heartbeat Takeaway; the video platform Beeping has also entered the game, with shares in Eagle Set Coffee and Charlie's Pink Burger.