Crayfish Ride the Takeout Wave and Sell Like Hotcakes

Summer is the season that belongs to crayfish. But this year, crayfish have arrived by hitching a ride on the Internet takeout wave. Gathering friends and family around at home, watching TV and chatting about jokes while sucking the claws with a noisy slurp - that is the most correct way to enjoy crayfish right now.

Born to Suit Online Takeout

Shetou Henmang, Juanfu, Xia Baby…… Since last year, these crayfish takeout names have flooded WeChat Moments. Central kitchens, WeChat ordering, courier delivery…… These Internet tricks have turned crayfish into the latest takeout Internet celebrity.

“Crayfish are born to suit takeout.” Wang Xue, founder of Shetou Henmang, told the Economic Daily reporter that a box of crayfish priced at just over 100 yuan usually contains about 20 pieces, so the average order value is high and the delivery cost is low. In addition, crayfish have a limited range of flavors - just spicy, thirteen-spice, garlic, braised in oil, and plain - which makes them easy for the kitchen to prepare; and after two or three hours of travel, the thick-shelled, strongly flavored crayfish are even more flavorful than when eaten in the restaurant. Even after being frozen and reheated, the taste does not change much, making them especially suited to the takeout market.

Therefore, in 2015, when plain meal-delivery takeout was locked in bloody competition, many people set their sights on the blue ocean of crayfish takeout. It is said that more than a thousand crayfish takeout projects emerged nationwide last year, including more than 200 in Beijing alone. Juanfu Crayfish, Lightning Shrimp, Xia Baby, Jack's Shrimp, Daxia Laile and others were all founded last year. 2015 was also called the first year of the crayfish “Internet celebrity.”

“The best sales season for crayfish is just June to September.” Wang Xue said that Shetou Henmang launched in July last year, and the first product it rolled out was crayfish. In 3 months the repurchase rate reached 60%, giving the company a strong start.

Entering 2016, takeout shrimp became even hotter. Data from the Meituan Dianping Data Research Institute show that crayfish performed outstandingly in the hundred-billion-yuan takeout market. Especially in June this year, which coincided with the European Cup, 1,500 tons of crayfish rode on the delivery riders' electric bikes to food lovers' homes during the late-night snack period (20:00 to 23:00), with the sales peak appearing from 21:00 to 22:00.

Why do crayfish become a “late-night snack Internet celebrity”? Just look at the crayfish's physique and you have the answer - only about 20% of a crayfish's whole body is meat. Although they take a very long time to eat, they do not fill you up. Even if you eat your fill at dinner, nibbling a few crayfish is no problem.

“Our braised shrimp will soon be launched on Dianping's takeout channel too.” Sitting in the newly opened “Yipin Chu Xia” restaurant in Beijing's Fengtai District, owner Xiang Junjie told the reporter, “Qianjiang braised shrimp uses dozens of secret ingredients, plus techniques such as removing the head, splitting the back, and braising for more than 10 minutes, so the flavor penetrates deeper, it is salty and fresh and palatable, and the texture is especially good.”

He specifically emphasized that his shrimp are white-gill shrimp air-freighted from Qianjiang, which means the water in which the crayfish lived was clean. In fact, whether online or offline, well-known crayfish merchants nationwide currently sell white-gill shrimp. That is because in the online takeout market, diners value cleanliness and hygiene above all, and the Internet is enough to magnify even the tiniest problem a thousandfold. Once a food safety problem occurs, no crayfish takeout shop can bear the enormous consequences.

The Two-City Rivalry Moves Online

The crayfish that have become popular all over the country mainly come from Qianjiang in Hubei and Xuyi in Jiangsu.

On June 12 this year, the 7th Hubei Qianjiang Crayfish Festival opened once again. This small city with a population of just over a million seemed to be painted crayfish red, with advertisements for crayfish brands such as Weidao Gongchang and Xia Xiaodi everywhere.

Also on June 12, the 16th China·Xuyi International Crayfish Festival was staged in Xuyi, Jiangsu, a thousand li away. However, as early as June 5, the “China Xuyi·JD.com” 2nd Internet Crayfish Festival had already opened, with stars such as Wulan Tuya placing JD.com's Xuyi crayfish “first order” on site, delivered on the spot by a JD.com courier.

The rivalry between the two crayfish cities has already moved from offline to online, becoming the main driver of crayfish's path to Internet celebrity status.

The crayfish of these two cities have long been old rivals. Xuyi is the birthplace of the thirteen-spice crayfish flavor, currently the most popular crayfish flavor nationwide; Qianjiang's braised prawns are most popular in Hubei and Guangdong. Before 2003, Jiangsu's crayfish export volume ranked first nationwide for 13 consecutive years, but from 2004 to now, Hubei's crayfish exports have taken the lead. Therefore, in 2008 Xuyi County was awarded the title “China's Crayfish Capital” by the China Cuisine Association, while Qianjiang was rated “China's Hometown of Crayfish” in 2010 by the China Aquatic Products Processing and Marketing Alliance.

At present, the crayfish of these two cities are also actively seizing new Internet territory. In May this year, the Qianjiang Crayfish Trading Center began operation, adopting an online and offline dual-track circulation model of “Internet + crayfish + logistics,” with an average daily trading volume of more than 300 tons. Xuyi is not willing to fall behind either. Since the beginning of this year, many local crayfish enterprises have set up online sales platforms on the three major e-commerce companies Taobao, JD.com and Suning.com, and annual e-commerce sales are expected to reach more than 50 million yuan.

The Internet Express Goes Straight to the Rice Fields

Xuyi crayfish and Qianjiang crayfish are fighting fiercely, and shrimp farmers in both places have also made plenty of money.

According to statistics, China's annual crayfish output currently exceeds 600,000 tons, while in 2003 this figure was only 50,000 tons. The surge in crayfish output stems from the innovative shrimp-rice rotation and shrimp-rice co-cropping farming models created by the people of Qianjiang.

In 2000, Qianjiang farmer Liu Zhuquan was the first to raise crayfish in rice fields during the agricultural slack season. The shrimp ate the natural bait in the rice fields and grew better. Because it could increase income by several thousand yuan per mu, this farming model was even written into the No. 1 document of the Hubei provincial government in 2006 and promoted throughout the province.

In 2010, the Qianjiang Municipal Aquatic Products Bureau launched the “shrimp-rice co-cropping” model based on the original shrimp-rice rotation. Every year in April and May, when the rice fields are being planted, juvenile shrimp can be raised in the ditches beside the rice fields, and after the fields are prepared and the seedlings transplanted, the juvenile shrimp are put back into the rice fields to grow. By August or September, another season of large shrimp can be harvested. According to reports, through the “shrimp-rice co-cropping” model, one season of rice and three seasons of shrimp can be harvested in a year, with an average net profit of more than 4,000 yuan per mu, 4 times that of pure rice fields. At present, Qianjiang has 350,000 mu of crayfish farming area and an annual processing capacity of 300,000 tons. Last year its comprehensive output value exceeded 10 billion yuan, driving the number of employed people to more than 70,000.

Xuyi has also implemented the “shrimp-rice co-cropping” comprehensive farming model across the county on 35,000 mu, and the “shrimp-rice co-cropping” comprehensive farming model has been promoted throughout the province. In late March this year, the Xuyi “shrimp-rice co-cropping” standardized demonstration zone received provincial approval, becoming one of three agricultural standardization demonstration projects in Jiangsu Province.

In 2015, Xuyi native Duan Defeng returned to his hometown and contracted 1,500 mu of farmland and 150 mu of water surface for planting rice and farming crayfish, naming it Xiaohe Farm.

The farm also uses the shrimp-rice co-cropping model, but Duan Defeng uses the latest Internet of Things technology to carry out data-based management of the entire shrimp-rice growth process, testing multiple indicators such as water temperature, nitrite, pH value and ammonia nitrogen every day to ensure the traceability of the final product and food safety. Duan Defeng's crayfish quality has been recognized by the market. In June this year, the rice-field shrimp raised by Duan Defeng were launched first through the online platform U Zhanggui. Cooked shelled shrimp, one and a half jin, priced at 119 yuan, have already sold more than 5,000 portions. Crayfish lovers nationwide can even spend 4,999 yuan to subscribe to one mu of shrimp field, with a return of at least 200 jin of crayfish, plus rice that has grown under their own online monitoring all along.

In Xuyi, there are quite a few new shrimp farmers like Duan Defeng. The online crayfish takeout brand Juanfu also selected Xuyi as one of its crayfish bases, so the crayfish had already boarded the Internet express while still in the rice fields.

Internet Celebrity Restaurants Must Avoid “Dying on Exposure to Light”

The relationship between online takeout and offline merchants is a bit like a besieged fortress: those online want to come down, and those offline want to go up. Offline merchants frequently run into problems on Internet takeout platforms, and for online merchants turning into physical stores, it is not easy at all.

The playbook for offline physical stores and online takeout is very different. Besides chefs and marketing, site selection, decoration, store managers and waiters all require attention. The evaluation indicators also differ. The “Industry Research Report on Consumer Habits of Third-Party Takeout Platform Users” released by Horizon Research shows that 68.1% of users, when choosing a takeout platform, place the greatest importance on quality factors such as the restaurant's safety and hygiene. But when everyone goes to a physical store to eat, they usually value taste most, which is also the reason many delicious “hole-in-the-wall” eateries thrive.

The differences between online and offline are so great - can Internet celebrity restaurants adapt? The answer is probably not optimistic.

Juanfu Crayfish may be the first restaurant to make a big splashy move from online to offline. The Juanfu brand was born through Internet crowdfunding, and afterward it raised more than 16 million yuan from supporters nationwide through crowdfunding to open 10 physical stores in 10 cities.

Recently, the Beijing Juanfu Crayfish Baiziwan store officially opened. This is already the 4th restaurant to open at this store location in recent years; the previous ones all failed.

In choosing such a store location, Juanfu may have confidence in itself, because it is an Internet celebrity brand that comes with its own fans, but on the other hand it also shows they are taking a bit of a risk, because the several restaurants previously opened in this place all did poor business. A reporter's on-site investigation found that one important reason is that the store's location is not obvious and it is hard to find by car. In addition, based on the actual experience, Juanfu's service and taste cannot be considered good either - the waiter did not even notice that the handle of the takeout bag was broken.

Today's Juanfu, like the once-hot Diaoye Niunan, are masters of online marketing. But any business model that only tells stories will not last long. Once it goes through the real test of the market, all the storybook coloring will fade, and what remains will only be its core competitiveness - an excellent user experience, including comprehensive evaluations of taste, environment, service and value for money. Whether online or offline, successful merchants are no exception. If Internet celebrity restaurants want to avoid “dying on exposure to light,” they still need to put in more effort to improve the user experience.