Author | Silver Waterfall
Supervisor | BBB Research Institute
"Can you all buy some Kristine ? Support the old brand? I have really eaten since I was a child. I am reluctant to leave the gold bricks, tiger skin rolls, egg tarts, coffee bread inside!" Ozawa sighed in his circle of friends.
The Christine she mentioned is an old bakery established in Shanghai in 1993. After being hit by the Shanghai epidemic in 2022, she is in a wave of closing stores. It is reported that its central kitchen , located on Yindu Road, has been suspended, but its official website later announced that all stores will resume normal business on August 1.
The epidemic tore a hole in Christine's sick body, and it is certain that if it weren't for the epidemic, it would have been staggering. According to its financial report, Christine has been in losses since 2013, and has suffered losses for eight consecutive years as of 2020, and a store closure has begun since the second half of 2014.
Many baking brands that are once popular are going through three steps: "shut down, shrink, and retreat". Xiangteli’s cake house had already left the market sadly. Shenshen Bakery, which is quietly located on Fuxing West Road, has also closed for several years. Until the complete bankruptcy of Yizhiduo in 2021, and Christine’s mess this time point to a fact: ’s old baking retreated another city, and the signal came up again.
01
Old-fashioned baking pattern
In the early 1990s, a large number of bakeries such as Christine, Xiangteri, Yuanzu, Xinqiao, Croco Square , Marco Polo, etc. grew wildly in Shanghai. By the end of the 1990s, baking brands such as 85 degrees C and Yizhiduo also joined the competition.
At the beginning of this century, a group of new members such as Bread New Language, Commander Kai, Lillian, Silver Snow, and Milk Shed were added to the bakery team of Shencheng .
Image source: Christine official website
They are common and most important retail form, which is to occupy the "nearby" of consumers and be a "good neighbor".
Take Christine as an example. During its prosperous period, its stores were mainly located in densely populated residential areas, and the stable source of customers was mostly consumers based on families. The second was to lay out subway stores, which mainly cater to office workers who need snacks and fast food; and in large shopping malls, Christine is also mostly located on the B1 floor of the department store, and the company will strategically open its stores in areas with many catering brands.
Around 2007, it was Christine's most glorious time. Jinshajiang Road 5,000 square meters flagship store is crowded with people, and chain stores in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai are blooming everywhere. At that time, Christine set a small goal to open 2,000 stores in 2010.
At that time, Christine's cash coupons were very popular. In a month around the Mid-Autumn Festival, even the smallest contracted dealer could sell tens of millions of dollars at will. The card coupon marketing cooperated with the corporate union was an important sales model of traditional bakery.
In 2012, Christine's listing in Hong Kong became a turning point in the decline. Due to business and innovation, Christine's stores have gradually decreased, and the bread category has been updated slowly. Occasionally, I passed by the counter and saw that the old faces were still the same.
On second-hand trading websites such as Xianyu, the "Christine Ruyi Card Transfer" is always on sale, and the face value of 100 yuan is only 60% off. A netizen who specializes in welfare group buying in the main enterprise posted, "In the past, Christine was the sales headquarter, but now she has zero sales for many years. Even if a customer calls for consultation, we will be persuaded to withdraw. Who knows when the company will close down?"
Bread Baking As a member of the retail industry, it is not an exaggeration to emphasize how many times you choose the site. With the number of old-fashioned bakeries becoming smaller and smaller, their convenience is no longer as good as convenience stores such as FamilyMart, Rosen , and "nearby" is losing its appeal.
Review of Yizhiduo, who left the market in a bleak manner, signed the "100 Store Plan" with Shentong Metro in 2016, trying to further strengthen the brand's advantages with the help of the stable large number of passenger flows of the subway station.
and underground business is still undercurrent. As the taste of bread delivered by factories gradually converges, "price" becomes a sensitive point for consumers. In addition to Yizhiduo, there is also a bread brand called "Yinzi" that also divided half of the subway stations at that time. The latter adhered to a cost-effective strategy, and "buy a few and get a few free" is the norm.
Subway rental is naturally not cheap. Natural passenger flow and commuters who are regarded as target customer groups are popular. There are too many brands who want to share a place.
The impact of the epidemic has caused Yizhiduo to close more than 70 subway stores in 2020, and the life gate that relies too much on subway channels was hit.
02
scene expansion of the baking track
baking industry, the alternation between old and new will not stop.
Consumers have better and more choices. On the one hand, the new Chinese roasting is soaring, while the other hand, international roasting brands are entering the mainland Chinese market; on the other hand, coffee and new tea brands such as Starbucks , Luckin , Heytea , Lele Tea and other coffee and new tea beverage brands are vigorously planning their baking business, while on the other hand, consumption scenarios are constantly expanding.
The Hutou Bureau, Standard Chartered Cake Store, Momo Dim Sum, as well as the old internet celebrities Master Bao and Luxihe, have entered the shopping malls. The "front store and back kitchen" model has attracted a large number of customers to queue up to buy, and baking has once become one of the hottest business formats in shopping malls.
Take the whole family as an example. It focuses on streets and subway stations, focusing on high-quality locations. In the more than ten years after entering the mainland market in July 2004, it has undergone wolf-like expansion, both in square meter and scale are cases worth analyzing.
Its layout is like a game of Go, from the inner ring to the central ring, then to the outer ring and suburban counties, it gradually completes the coverage of Shanghai. The whole family divided the large market into small business districts, and then divided it by the radius of kilometers covered by each store, and then set up and open a store.
Home convenience store This dense distribution and 24-hour business will bring consumers a sense of familiarity and peace of mind, and can even be used as a standard for evaluating the convenience of a certain area.
Image source: Public account "Looking for Eat"
As for the attractiveness of bread itself, convenience stores have found their positioning. The family’s own bread brand “Baozhi Workshop” serves bread from its own exclusive factory.
On the bread shelf, the "Baozhi Workshop" products account for about 75%. From soft European buns to cup cake , new products are basically launched every week; it launched a Japanese raw toast that claims to be "no drop of water", which only uses flavors of full fresh milk, which is very in line with the modern consumers' needs for "0 added" food; and seasonal products such as tiramisu Christmas cake, ice-skin moon cake, etc., can cover the needs of most consumers.
own products allow convenience stores to master the right to speak in the supply chain and usually achieve higher gross profits. They are the most differentiated products between convenience stores.
The pace of life of modern people is changing, unlike the first three points and one line, and eating regularly and at regular intervals. For example, you can still see people drinking coffee leisurely on weekday afternoons, or customers often appear alone in convenience stores in late-night shopping malls to buy , Kanto, and .
Therefore, from morning to night, there will be a demand for buying bread, and the need to use bread as a "refreshment" or "staple food".
Based on this common phenomenon, convenience store 7-Eleven has developed products suitable for more scenarios. For example, bread similar to desserts has extremely high sugar content and is suitable for eating with coffee or black tea. Multiple packages are also suitable for sharing as afternoon tea in the office.
European bread is mostly eaten as a staple food, emphasizing the taste of "mill" itself, while Japanese bread is softer and moist. In the process of seizing the minds of Chinese consumers, convenience stores have made corresponding efforts.
As a bread supplier of 7-Eleven, the proportion of imported wheat flour was increased to 70% in a certain bread single product improvement. This is because when domestic wheat flour is kneading, it is easy to cause insufficient kneading and poor water absorption, which leads to insufficient smooth dough and insufficient internal structure of the dough.
Secondly, the bread is not moist enough because the starch is prone to aging and air drying. Chaneves uses a certain proportion of "scalding" (ripe batter). Its addition can increase the moisture content of the bread, refine the bubbles inside the dough, and extend the moisturizing time of the bread.
03
Independent bakery: Back to the streets, back to baking
A convenience store bread usually lasts longer, and the 4-day shelf life gives office workers the confidence to stock up.
Compared with the cost-effective players like convenience stores that can be bought anytime and anywhere, independent bakery stores that are now made on the streets and sold out early and still have a pack of them hard to find.
In Shanghai, if you want to buy black bean pine nuts and chabata from the bakery mbd, it is not difficult to queue up, but also rely on fate. There are people queuing at 10:30 a.m. every day, and there are people queuing up at 9:00. So if you want to buy it, you either queue up honestly or call for errands to squat at the door of the store. Some consumers share their purchase experience: Go on weekends, start paying at 10:10, and go 30 minutes in advance to eat steadily.
cibata comes from Italy and has a high moisture content. Its low sugar and low oil also provides more space for pastry chefs to season the flavor and stuffing.
Black bean pine nuts cebata tastes sweet and meets the "not so sweet" needs of Chinese people. The pine nuts are kneaded into the bread and sipped in one bite, and the aroma bursts out. In the review of mbd's Dianping page, some people describe the feeling of eating chabata: "It's like when you are watching a performance, the actors come to an abrupt end, and the rest of the ending is left to think and meaning alone, and time is extended infinitely by you."
It seems that only bread from independent bakery stores deserves this treatment. Some people cut off their legs for it, while others write poems for it. The fanaticism of a small wave of
is inseparable from the change in consumption trends. People are increasingly pursuing healthier low-sugar oils, such as German alkaline water stalk, bagel , and chabata, which are being pushed to the forefront of the market under the influence of lifestyle. They will pay attention to the aroma of wheat, the flavor of yeast and the soft taste. In contrast, this has also become the motivation for bakers to make excellent bread.
At the same time, with the large-scale coverage of coffee shops, more and more European and Japanese breads are seen by consumers - bread and coffee are the companion business formats.
Shanghai is indeed a paradise for "bread brains". French and Japanese styles are equally matched. For bakery owners, opening an independent bakery is a matter of paying for their dreams, and funds are always the primary consideration.
Xiaobo began to prepare for the offline opening of her own bread brand before the epidemic this year. Before that, she sold bread online for one and a half years and accumulated a lot of fans. She was very glad that she had not finalized the quiet street corner store she had liked for a long time before the blockade, otherwise she would have lost all her money.
In Xiaobo's opinion, it is of course the best for bakery to make bread only, but when the shop and staff settle down, the various funds will also force her to adjust some of the strategies: mainly baguette , grain bags, and chabata, but cakes, coffee and tea drinks have to be added to balance the income. There are more than one way to open source, such as opening a bread workshop, where customers can learn how to make bread in the 3-hour course.
Independent Bread Shop is a "small and serious street fun". The baker has the confidence and can pat his chest confidently and say, "Welcome to taste the bread."
At the moment when old-fashioned baking brands are losing ground, new Chinese baking groups occupy large shopping malls, the story of "nearby" may be continued by independent bakeries. And they all need to speak with products in the end.
Original Produced by Wu Diudi Studio
