By Lin Lili, Source: People’s Daily<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
More and more ready-to-cook dishes are getting onto the dining tables of the Chinese.<\/p>\n
According to statistics, a rising demand for ready-to-cook food has been observed in China since 2022.<\/p>\n
During the five-day May Day holiday this year, the sales of ready-to-cook dishes surged over 80 percent year on year on Tmall, an online marketplace of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, and the growth soared to 230 percent during the mid-year “618” shopping festival.<\/p>\n
Besides, Hema Gongfang, a restaurant chain under Alibaba-invested futuristic supermarket Hema Xiansheng, also saw the sales of semi-finished food double in May this year.<\/p>\n
“I started liking this way of cooking after I tried ready-to-cook meals during the past Chinese New Year,” said Chen Xiao, who lives in Longgang district, Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong province.<\/p>\n
He said ready-to-cook meals taste much better than instant noodles and are more convenient than take-away food, so they are perfect for nine-to-fivers.<\/p>\n
Restaurants and hotels were major consumers of ready-to-cook food, as it made meals more standard and improved efficiency. However, in recent years, ready-to-cook food has been more and more sought after by individual consumers.<\/p>\n
For most of the consumers, ready-to-cook food frees them from washing vegetables and seasoning the dishes. With semi-finished food, all they have to do is to open the packages and heat the dishes. Meals can be ready in just a few minutes.<\/p>\n
Ready-to-cook food not only makes cooking easier, but also creates a new market where a number of players are competing.<\/p>\n
In recent years, many time-honored restaurant brands and chain restaurants have launched ready-to-cook products. What’s more, the market is even joined by some seasoning producers.<\/p>\n
So far, over 5,000 types of ready-to-cook dishes have been put on the shelf on JD.com, a leading online retailing platform in China, and many other online marketplaces have announced to join the market, including Meituan Maicai, an online grocery shopping service under Meituan, China’s leading e-commerce platform for services, as well as Missfresh, an online neighborhood retail platform.<\/p>\n
Besides, 66,700 enterprises had been engaged in the industry of ready-to-cook food as of May this year.<\/p>\n
Li Feng, who’s in charge of a ready-to-cook food program of Meituan Maicai, said e-commerce platforms could help inexperienced enterprises rapidly gain a foothold in the industry and assist them in terms of online-offline integration.<\/p>\n
The ready-to-cook food industry concerns both rural vitalization and consumption reform. It bears important significance for advancing rural development, expanding domestic demand and driving consumption. The industry enjoys bright prospects.<\/p>\n
According to statistics, the output value of the Chinese ready-to-cook food market hit 350 billion yuan ($51.7 billion) in 2021. The figure is expected to reach 410 billion yuan this year and 1 trillion within the next five years.<\/p>\n
A series of measures and standards have been rolled out to support the industry. In January this year, China National Development and Reform Commission issued a notice on promoting consumption, which encouraged the sales of semi-finished food and partially processed vegetables. Recently, China Cuisine Association launched a standard for ready-to-cook dishes, raising specific requirements on the ingredients, hygiene, packaging and storage of ready-to-cook food. Similar specifications have also been issued by China Hospitality Association on June 28.<\/p>\n
As the industry gradually gets regulated, more and more convenient and delicious ready-to-cook dishes are expected to hit the market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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