Fresh snack stores: whose cheese have they moved?

On the B1 floor of the commercial district, a battle of dissolving category boundaries is unfolding.

When the price war of bulk snack stores has driven profits to the bottom, the new Chinese-style baking sector has gone through a round of reshuffling, and bottled fresh fruit tea has been fiercely competing on raw material costs, the fresh snack format has quietly incorporated baked cakes, bottled fruit tea, boxed fresh food, short-shelf-life pastries, freshly stir-fried nuts, and cold-processed braised food all into the same store.

It is no longer the store that people traditionally perceive as "selling stir-fried goods and loose-weight snacks", but a neighborhood collection store with "freshness" as its unified label.

It is not the rise of a single new category, but a cross-track traffic interception.

It has not directly put forward the slogan of "replacing someone", but in the same customer group and the same consumption scenario, it has diverted orders for afternoon tea, impulsive purchases, gift souvenirs, and short-distance snacking demands.

Cakes are no longer exclusive to in-store baking specialty stores, fruit tea does not have to be bought from tea drink chains, and boxed fresh food is no longer limited to the fresh food section of supermarkets.

Once the boundary is broken, the first players under pressure are those who have built public awareness relying on a single category for a long time.

As this round of business format becomes popular, whose cake is being re-divided?

01 Disruptors enter the market, traditional players can no longer sit still?

The B1 floor of shopping malls has always been the main traffic battlefield for offline retail.

In the past, the division of labor was very clear: new Chinese-style baking stores occupied the queuing and check-in traffic, tea drink stores took charge of fruit tea and bottled drinks, stir-fried food stores focused on nuts and sugar-fried chestnuts, and the fresh food sections of supermarkets placed boxed cold food and short-shelf-life desserts.

The customer groups highly overlapped, but each party stuck to its own shelves and rarely engaged in head-on fierce competition.

After the entry of fresh snack stores, this tacit understanding has been completely broken.

Now when you walk into a typical fresh snack store, the display logic has been completely different.

At the entrance are freshly stir-fried nuts and free tasting stacks. Moving inward, pre-packaged mousse, chiffon rolls and cheesecakes are placed in the cold cabinet; neatly arranged on the side shelves are bottled fruit tea and cold-brewed fruit drinks; there are also boxed mixed dishes, cold braised food, short-shelf-life bread and soft-centered pastries.

In short, it packs all the hit products that were originally scattered in baking stores, tea drink stores, traditional stir-fried food stores and supermarket fresh food sections into the same store, and uniformly labels them as "short shelf life, less additives, visible freshness".

The site selection also focuses on the B1 floor of shopping malls, subway entrances and young communities, which highly overlaps with the prime locations of baking and tea drink stores, which is equivalent to directly competing for orders in the same traffic pool.

The most intuitive impact falls on the new Chinese-style baking track that has gone through a round of bubble reshuffling.

In the new Chinese-style pastry trend a few years ago, brands became popular relying on queuing effect and single-product hits, but high rent, high labor cost and in-store baking loss have always been heavy burdens.

The customer order value of many stores just falls in the 30-50 yuan range, which highly overlaps with that of fresh snack stores.

For ordinary consumers, the difference between the two is blurring: both offer short-shelf-life cakes, rolls and mochi, both are suitable for afternoon tea, while fresh snack stores have a wider selection, allowing customers to get pastries and bottled fruit tea in one stop without queuing at two separate stores, and the price is often more competitive.

In fact, it may not completely replace high-quality baking stores that focus on in-store baking and sophisticated craftsmanship, but the diversion effect on chain baking stores that focus on traffic-oriented, standardized short-shelf-life pastries has already appeared.

Especially in non-core cities and among groups that are not heavy baking lovers, the substitution elasticity of "buying by the way" is very large.

Following closely is the bottled fruit tea and ready-to-drink fresh fruit tea track.

The main product of traditional new-style tea drink brands is freshly made cup drinks, and the core capability of stores is on-site production and flexible sugar adjustment.

But in recent years, many chains have been making efforts to develop pre-packaged bottled fruit tea as in-store incremental products and shelf retail items.

The entry of fresh snack stores is equivalent to skipping the heavy link of "on-site production" and directly putting industrially packaged fresh fruit tea on shelves.

For people who pursue convenience, do not want to wait for meal preparation, and want to pick up a bottle when buying snacks, the decision-making threshold is extremely low.

What it grabs is not heavy milk tea lovers, but the "impromptu drink demand": pick up a bottle casually when shopping, pair it with cake or stir-fried snacks, and get everything in one stop.

This scenario originally belonged to tea drink stores for a long time.

Traditional stir-fried food and loose-weight snack stores are also under extrusion.

In the past, the ceiling of stir-fried food stores was very clear: single category, strong repurchase but limited customer order value, and high supply chain threshold for expanding new categories.

Essentially, fresh snacks can be understood as the "upgraded version" of the stir-fried food format, which retains mature conversion methods such as free tasting, loose weighing and fresh stir-frying, and then grafts baking, drinks and boxed fresh food to increase the customer order value.

What a single stir-fried food store can meet is the demand of "coming specifically to buy nuts"; what fresh snack stores meet is the impulsive consumption of "walking around and picking whatever you see".

When the latter provides richer products, it will naturally divert the customer flow that originally went to traditional stir-fried food stores.

Of course, the impact cannot be generalized, and we cannot simply conclude that baking, tea drinks and stir-fried food are about to be replaced.

High-quality in-store baking emphasizes on-site aroma, baking rhythm and handmade texture, and has a stable core group of enthusiasts; leading tea drink brands have strong brand awareness, membership system and differentiated freshly made products, and bottled impromptu drinks are only part of their business.

The lethality of fresh snacks does not lie in full-scale substitution, but in blurring scenarios and capturing the part of demand that features "weak awareness, impulsive purchase, and standardized hit products".

Many consumptions are not rigid demands, but just "passing by and buying something by the way", and this type of order is the most likely to be intercepted by cross-sector players.

Retail Theory believes that the most dangerous opponent in retail competition is often not the direct competitor in the same track, but the player with overlapping scenarios and cross-category operations. In the past, the industry was used to dividing tracks by category: baking belongs to the baking sector, tea drinks belong to the tea drink sector, and stir-fried food belongs to the stir-fried food sector, with everyone benchmarking against each other and doing competitor analysis.

Fresh snacks have broken this classification framework.

Its core weapon is not extremely low price, nor extremely fresh on-site production, but scene bundling.

It captures young people's psychology of "one-stop casual purchase", and gathers the most standardized hits in multiple categories that are easiest to be made into short-shelf-life pre-packaged products.

This means that the future offline traffic competition will no longer be product vs product, but scene vs scene.

Stores that only rely on a single hit product or single category will continue to expose their shortcomings: the customer group and site selection are the same, but the product portfolio is much thinner.

It may not trigger a wave of store closures across the whole industry, but it will continuously reduce the living space of stores with weak differentiation.

02 The two sides of franchisees: attractive revenue, unquantifiable loss

Any rapid replication of offline stores will eventually land on the books of franchisees.

Different from the logic of rapid store expansion of Mingmang Mangmang and bulk snack stores in the past, fresh snacks do not adopt the centralized procurement model of long-shelf-life standard products, but operate a mixed business of multiple short-shelf-life categories.

Baked cakes, boxed fresh food, bottled fruit tea and freshly stir-fried nuts belong to completely different supply chain systems, with huge differences in shelf life, storage conditions, turnover rhythm and loss rules.

Many franchisees are attracted to enter the market by the queuing scenes and high customer order value in store exploration videos, but the real profit and loss are hidden behind the word "freshness".

On paper, the model is indeed attractive.

Compared with bulk snack stores that follow the route of small profits but quick turnover and low customer order value, the multi-category combination of fresh snacks is easier to increase the customer order value.

Stir-fried snacks are used to attract traffic, baked cakes and bottled fruit tea contribute higher gross profit, boxed fresh food enriches the choices, and the free tasting model continues the conversion method that has been verified in the stir-fried food industry.

In high-traffic mall stores, once the turnover runs smoothly, it is easy to achieve impressive revenue in the opening period, and social platforms further amplify the demonstration effect, attracting more potential franchisees to join in.

This is also the core reason why this format can blossom everywhere in a short time: the model stores have excellent performance, the story is full of novelty, and it has the basis for rapid investment promotion and expansion.

But the model store is not equal to a replicable model, and the biggest variable is loss.

For long-shelf-life bulk snacks, the approaching-expiry rhythm is slow, and the inventory tolerance space is large; among fresh snacks, cakes, boxed fresh food and some short-shelf-life pastries often have a shelf life calculated in "days". Once the turnover cannot keep up, it will directly lead to cost loss.

The supply chain is another hard threshold for expansion.

Baking, fruit tea and cold fresh boxed food have much higher requirements for cold chain, distribution radius and central kitchen than ordinary bagged snacks.

Most leading brands in mature regions follow the core logic of taking self-owned factories and central kitchens as the core, opening stores densely within a limited radius, and spreading the cold chain cost through store density to ensure the turnover speed.

Once expanding across regions, with sparse stores and longer distribution distance, the pressure on cost and quality control will rise simultaneously.

This has given rise to the highly controversial "frozen-to-fresh" model in the industry: pre-made frozen products are produced in the central factory, distributed to stores, thawed and reheated, and presented to consumers as short-shelf-life fresh food.

From the perspective of compliance, there is no hard violation as long as it is marked truthfully; but from the perception of consumers, it is easy to form an expectation gap with "freshly made on the same day".

Once the expectation is broken, the backlash of public praise will come quickly.

In the expansion cycle, there will also be differentiation on both ends.

Some brands take a cautious route, giving priority to direct sales and joint operation, building factories and laying supply chains first, and controlling the pace of store opening; other brands have stronger willingness to expand, opening up franchise rights and rapidly seizing market share.

At this time, the risk is transferred to the franchisees: the brand side collects franchise fees and supplies materials, while the approaching-expiry loss, lower-than-expected passenger flow and regional distribution costs are mostly borne by the stores.

Compared with bulk snack stores such as Mingmang Mangmang, the pitfalls of bulk snack stores are mostly single store diversion and price involution caused by excessive dense store opening; the pitfalls of fresh snack stores are more about the catering-style supply chain and loss, covered by the shell of retail stores.

It is more like a catering business than an ordinary snack store, but it is often promoted for franchise under the expectation of an ordinary snack store.

Retail Theory believes that fresh snacks are not unprofitable, but it is a "strong-condition model" rather than a universal model. High traffic, high density, short-distance cold chain and stable turnover are all indispensable. Missing any one of them, the book profit may be eaten up by loss and logistics cost.

For franchisees, the biggest misunderstanding is to take "freshness" as a natural traffic password and underestimate the complexity of multi-category mixed operation.

It integrates the free tasting conversion of stir-fried snacks, the loss management of baking, the inventory turnover of ready-to-drink drinks, and the cold chain requirements of cold fresh food. Essentially, it is a complex business format, and the operation difficulty is significantly higher than that of bulk snack stores.

In the future, the track may see obvious differentiation: players with upstream factories, controllable distribution radius and cautious store expansion rhythm are more likely to succeed; players who simply rely on OEM assembly, quickly open franchises and chase the trend will most likely face a round of store closure and reshuffling after the heat fades.

03 Long track, thick snow, re-cutting the cheese

From a longer-term perspective, the impact brought by fresh snacks is not only grabbing in-store passenger flow from baking stores, tea drink stores and stir-fried food stores.

It is stirring up the stock competition of the entire near-field retail, forming a game of mutual penetration and mutual imitation with fresh food systems such as bulk snack stores, community supermarkets and Hema Workshop.

In the short term, it is a trend of store opening; in the long term, it is the change of consumer demand forcing supply restructuring.

In the past few years, bulk snacks have been the most mainstream narrative in the retail circle.

Brands such as Zhao Yiming and Mingmang Mangmang have reshaped the public's snack consumption through centralized procurement, compressing intermediate links and extremely low prices, sinking channels to penetrate county towns, and squeezing the profit of long-shelf-life bagged snacks to a very low level.

But in the later stage of the price war, the bottleneck gradually appears: serious homogenization, more and more densely opened stores, declining single-store output, and it is difficult to create new increments simply by competing on prices.

Fresh snacks can be regarded as a branch of the snack track looking for new increments: abandoning the route of extremely low prices, turning to value upgrading, using short-shelf-life, fresh-made and multi-category combinations to increase customer order value and gross profit, targeting young customer groups who are willing to pay a premium for "freshness, convenience and one-stop shopping".

In other words, bulk snacks focus on "cheaper", while fresh snacks focus on "better shopping experience, fresher". The two have overlapping customer groups but different value propositions. They will coexist for a long time in the future and learn from each other.

Leading bulk snack brands have already added short-shelf-life baked food and boxed fresh food in their stores, which is essentially a response to this trend.

At the same time, it is also competing with the fresh food business of supermarkets and front warehouses.

The fresh food stalls of Hema Workshop and regional chain supermarkets have long been selling short-shelf-life baked food, boxed cold food and freshly made side dishes.

The advantages of supermarkets lie in complete SKUs, stable repurchase and coverage of family purchases; the disadvantages are weak shopping atmosphere, insufficient free tasting experience, and fresh food is often buried in huge shelves, lacking special traffic packaging.

Fresh snacks are equivalent to taking the fresh food section of the supermarket out separately, placing it in commercial districts and subway entrances, and superimposing the free tasting, display and atmosphere sense that stir-fried food stores are good at, to create an independent "fresh snack specialty store".

The bigger proposition is the change of consumer demand itself.

The definition of snacks is being broadened, the boundary is dissolving, and the intersection between "snacks" and "light fresh food" is getting larger and larger.

This is the underlying logic that supports the continuous development of this format, rather than a short-term internet celebrity effect.

Young people are more and more accepting of small-portion, short-shelf-life, visually verifiable fresh products, willing to pay for convenient combinations, and social media content marketing further accelerates the spread of demand.

As long as this demand continues, even if the first batch of trend-following brands are eliminated, the mixed format of "fresh food plus snacks" will remain as a long-term existing retail branch.

Retail Theory believes that whether a business format can go far ultimately depends on whether it can continuously solve three things: stable quality control, controllable loss, and replicable supply chain. These three points are exactly its biggest weaknesses. Once the expansion rhythm exceeds the construction speed of the supply chain, problems such as the "frozen-to-fresh" controversy, unstable quality control, high loss and deteriorating franchise profitability will be exposed