The mooncake war is filled with smoke, which side are you on?

After bidding farewell to the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, the foodies began to wait for Chang'e again, and warmed up their mouths in advance to prepare the moon tribute. However, where the foodies could not see, local time-honored brands, foreign companies, star hotels, restaurants The company and others have already put on their battle uniforms, swung their necks and swung their butts, and started the Nth round of PK battle without gunpowder...

The focus of the competition between the two parties is the protagonist of the Mid-Autumn Festival and the magic tool for attracting money-mooncakes ! In just half a month last year, mooncakes sold for 13.5 billion yuan! So this year, major companies are doing a lot of tricks, competing for appearance, taste, and singing everywhere with loudspeakers: The spring breeze is not as good as my mooncakes~~~

Foreign companies: Mooncakes represent my heart!

Now foreign-funded companies are lamenting that these days, Chinese consumers are becoming increasingly difficult to serve. In addition to keeping up with the trend, they also have to play the emotional card. On the Mid-Autumn Festival, a day that exudes a strong sense of family, selling mooncakes not only shows your closeness to Chinese consumers, but also makes money, killing two birds with one stone! Therefore, Starbucks, which sells coffee, H?agen-Dazs, which makes ice cream, KFC, which sells fast food, and Disney and other foreign-funded companies have crossed over to enter the mooncake market to grab a runway. However, they are not as good as the "lick and twist" biscuit brother - Oreo!

First of all, in order to make a stunning debut and outshine their peers, Oreo carefully chose a special day - the day of the total solar eclipse in the United States to "create" the moon in China~~

I then followed the trend and launched my own mooncakes——

Sure enough, it successfully attracted the attention of foodies. The first batch of 500 copies was quickly sold out, and it even caused the Oreo service provider’s system to crash. .

The pioneer Haagen-Dazs has long launched ice cream mooncakes, which not only look good, but also have the most popular fresh style, which is still popular today. Haagen-Dazs has also become one of China's top mooncake manufacturers, selling 2 million boxes of mooncakes every year.

Starbucks’ coffee mooncakes are particularly foreign this year. They can be called “Starbucks Kenya coffee with rich fruit flavor, fragrant cheese, and Kenya coffee cheese blueberry flavor mooncakes wrapped with blueberry soft filling”!

Local: Only you can think of it, but I can’t do it!

Seeing that foreign brands are working so hard to please foodies, local time-honored brands are also anxious: since ancient times, mooncakes have been exclusively sold locally. Originally, during the half-month peak season, my family felt that they were not enough, but outsiders came. Grab food! Intolerable! No one wants to be fresh and fresh, so we strive for creativity, so a lot of Internet celebrity mooncakes are released~~

Five-nut barbecued pork mooncakes, French toffee custard mooncakes, crayfish mooncakes, sauerkraut bullfrog mooncakes, Liu Heart-durian mooncakes...mooncakes with various fillings have flavors that foodies can't imagine, and there are no mooncakes that merchants can't make.

For example, in Shanghai, the 166-year-old Zhenlaodafang launched seaweed and fresh meat mooncakes, adding moss strips to the pastry; First Food launched a "sauerkraut bullfrog mooncake" that was dubbed by netizens "Unbelievable", Wang Baohe continues to make last year's crayfish meat mooncake to the end, and Xinya's prawn cheese mooncake has the most potential to become an internet celebrity. Similar scenes have been staged in various places~~

At the same time, netizens also complained:

Or made suggestions, looking forward to a new world of mooncake flavors next year:

Internet celebrities Mooncakes play with creativity, while traditional mooncakes play with sentiment. For example, traditional fillings such as bean paste, custard, and five kernels have become a breath of fresh air among all kinds of coquettish products with their simple and earthy appearance and substantial interior~~ That’s the taste of my childhood~~

Why are everyone crazy about mooncakes? Gross profit exceeds 40!

What keeps Chinese and foreign companies from fighting is the huge market and huge profits behind mooncakes.

Public information shows that since 2012, the online transaction volume of mooncakes has increased year by year. Taking Taobao as an example, the platform transaction volume in 2012 was more than 1 million, and in 2016, the scale exceeded 10 million. In addition, nearly 90% of the trading volume is concentrated around the Mid-Autumn Festival.

For foreign-funded enterprises, the emotional appeal brought by mooncakes is a powerful weapon for them to take root in the Chinese market.

"The full moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival brings people together, and eating moon cakes creates good feelings. Although we are foreigners, we understand your hearts~~" Brands that are willing to put in effort to please Chinese consumers often get rich rewards.

Chinese food industry analyst Zhu Danpeng further said:

“In fact, foreign giants such as Mondelez, Haagen-Dazs, and Starbucks do not make mooncakes to make up for profits. Because mooncakes The proportion of its profits in the entire group is very small. The key is that the company can use moon cakes, a traditional food, to give it new elements and new vitality, so that it can communicate with the new generation of consumers and promote stickiness. Sex.”

Domestic companies start mooncake wars every year mainly to make money. It is understood that the selling price of the mooncake industry is much higher than the cost, and the industry profit is more than 40%. In addition, the technical threshold is not high, and there is no need to have a specific production line. Many food factories can do OEM.

Mooncakes even dominate the performance of some listed companies. For example, the financial reports of Yuanzu, Christine, Guangzhou Restaurant, and other companies show that Mid-Autumn moon cakes account for a large proportion of corporate sales revenue and profits, so the revenue and profits of industry companies in the second half of the year are much greater than those in the first half.

Some media calculated based on Christine’s 2016 annual report that its mooncake gross profit margin in both 2015 and 2016 exceeded 82. Guangzhou Restaurant’s mooncake series products have a gross profit margin of over 60% for three consecutive years.

Counting on our fingers, there are still 33 days left before the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is foreseeable that the mooncake war between various brands will intensify. However, due to the powerful power of foodies, merchants will still be creative with pain and joy, and foodies will be refreshed again and again on the world view of moon cake fillings~~~

WeChat public account: MBA Research Society The most interesting workplace social platform for MBAs