Prefabricated food: the future path to meet the modern consumption trend

Prefabricated food refers to food that is processed and packaged in a prefabricated manner, allowing for quick preparation when needed.Examples include premade bread, egg tart crusts, handmade pancakes, and pizza.Prefabricated food not only has a long shelf life, but is also convenient for storage and transportation.

In 2022, the size of China's prefabricated food market has reached an astonishing 5.8 billion US dollars, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.7% from 2017 to 2022, indicating that the prefabricated food industry will enter the trillion-yuan level in the next few years.This significant growth is mainly due to two core factors: consumers' pursuit of convenience and deliciousness, and catering enterprises' urgent need for cost control and efficiency improvement.

Although the development of the pre-prepared food industry is very fast, the industry is still in the market cultivation period.At the current stage, the main sales channels are still concentrated in the B-end market, while the acceptance of pre-prepared food by C-end consumers is still low.In fact, currently about 80% of pre-prepared food is applied in B-end enterprises or institutions, and only about 20% of pre-prepared food enters ordinary household consumption.

Due to the ever-accelerating pace of modern life, consumers' acceptance of pre-prepared foods has gradually increased.As the taste of pre-prepared foods improves, their share of the family dinner table will also increase significantly.It is expected that the share of pre-prepared foods on the family dinner table may reach 50%, which is basically the same as that of the B-end, and may even be slightly higher than that of the C-end.This will further promote the development of the pre-prepared food industry and provide consumers with more delicious and convenient pre-prepared food options.

Despite the promising prospects of the pre-prepared food industry, it still faces challenges and risks.For example, how to ensure product quality and how to reduce production costs.The introduction of fully automated production lines in the food pre-prepared industry is an urgent reality. In the links of mixing, rising, cutting, packaging, quick-freezing, testing, etc., it has basically achieved fully automated operation.The automated production line can not only improve the production efficiency of the factory, reduce the cost of workers, but also avoid the problems of hygiene and safety caused by too many manual operations, ensuring the controllability of product quality.

In the future, with the increasing demand of consumers for convenience and deliciousness, as well as the demand of catering enterprises for efficiency improvement, the market of pre-prepared food will have greater development space.