Why is the national breakfast becoming less and less like fireworks?

As the old saying goes: Eat better in the morning, full at lunch, and less in the evening. However, today’s younger generation of consumers often neglect breakfast. Moreover, I don’t know since when, Chinese breakfast started to “change the taste”. Is breakfast still a good business these days? When it comes to breakfast, there are two cities that have to be mentioned. One is Guangzhou, where you can have morning tea until the evening. During this period, just one table can replace several groups of friends while going back and forth; the other is Guangzhou, which has a dock culture and is known as "the breakfast city Wuhan, the capital of China, can eat 3.5 million kilograms of hot dry noodles in one day.

Breakfast, this important element with local characteristics, carries the local culture and habits, and is the most direct way to understand the lifestyle of residents in a new city. However, when you get up early to have breakfast today, you will find that most consumers are generally middle-aged and elderly people, and the concept of breakfast seems to be gradually lost in the life circles of young people.

Changes in the age structure of the population and the urbanization rate are the core variables that determine my country's medium- and long-term economic growth. They also affect the market-oriented development model of the catering industry.

Just like Guilin rice noodles, which are popular all over the country, with the gradual adjustment of urban planning, it was possible to set up a rice noodle stall business in a simple street front house. Now, we need to move towards a more standardized business path with more standardized licenses, health and consumption licenses.

Yes, the small merchants and hawkers who were once highly active on the streets have basically ceased to exist, and have been replaced by restaurants (breakfast shops) with unified storefronts. At the same time, with the population changes and the integration of regional cultures, the morning taste of local characteristics has become one of the links between people from foreign lands who maintain their homesickness.

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Changes in Breakfast

Compared with most industries, breakfast is a "diligence" in many industries.

There was once a very interesting entrepreneurial story. A buddy opened a breakfast shop, but he failed because he couldn't get up in the morning!

The so-called "diligence" means doing business early in the morning. Merchants have to prepare the ingredients they plan to sell early in the morning at three or four in the morning. This is very obvious in recent food variety shows, such as the "Breakfast in China" and "Eat of the Sun" series. Another interesting phenomenon can be found in the footage: most of the people who go to have breakfast are middle-aged and elderly people.

It seems that we can draw such an unwritten rule - breakfast belongs to the culture of the elderly, while late-night snacks are the base of young people.

In fact, in terms of taste and diversity, breakfast is no less than midnight snack, but this is the presentation of two cultures. China's breakfast is the best in the world. Some netizens commented that it would be impossible to film 100 episodes of breakfast in various cities in China just in the form of a documentary. There is almost no city in the world where you can just eat breakfast and not bring the same thing for a month.

Just Wuhan!

People in Wuhan enjoy breakfast very much. In the morning, the streets of Wuhan are filled with all kinds of breakfast stalls, and the stalls are crowded with diners. Breakfasts are available in all seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter. You can choose, there is basically no duplicate. Such as hot dry noodles, three fresh bean curds, rice cakes, eggnog, rice wine paste, fried buns, bean curds, heavy oil shaomai, cockscomb dumplings, steamed dumplings, roasted plums, happy dumplings, fish paste powder, steamed cakes, Pot stickers, dumplings and more.

These categories all represent strong regional attributes and are the breakfast culture of Wuhan people. In the snack street of Han Street, local breakfast and other delicacies are also one of the "weapons" to attract foreign tourists.

However, it is difficult to see these roadside stalls that you once saw.

In view of the fact that the catering industry plays an important role in ensuring and improving people's livelihood, expanding consumption, promoting employment, and stimulating economic growth.

In 2016, the Ministry of Commerce issued relevant guidance: In recent years, the catering industry has adapted to the new normal of economic development, proactively adjusted and actively transformed, and has made great progress in popular development. However, factors such as heavy operating burdens have restricted the pace of its innovative development.

In order to further optimize the development environment of the catering industry, effectively reduce the burden on catering enterprises, promote the accelerated transformation and development of the catering industry, adhere to the principle of market-oriented operation, and build popular catering around key areas such as communities, business districts, and areas with concentrated population flows Service network, focusing on solving weak links in the market and outstanding contradictions and problems faced by enterprises in their development.

Under the guidance of relevant policies, catering companies have set up business outlets in communities, schools, hospitals, office clusters, transportation hubs and other places, and developed into breakfast, fast food, group meals, specialty snacks, and food street stalls. and other livelihood service formats and specialty food. A breakfast supply system with standardized production and chain operations covering residential communities has been formed, and the development of products for specific consumer groups such as the elderly, primary and secondary school students, and patients has been encouraged.

Breakfast is indeed gradually becoming more uniform, but the "firework smell" in breakfast is gradually disappearing.

“I haven’t had breakfast for almost seven years since I started working in college for three years. When I was in college, it was because I played late at night and couldn’t get up in the morning. After work, I still wanted to Sleep more. There may be another word to replace breakfast in my life, and that is 'brunch'," Xiao Liu, who works hard in a first-tier city, told the author.

The author observed on the street at around six o'clock for two consecutive mornings that compared to the bustle of the subway, the street above ground seemed very deserted. Except for the cleaners sweeping the street and pedestrians in twos and threes, almost everyone It's the uncle who is out walking the dog. Most of the stores that are open are fresh food supermarkets and breakfast shops.

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A microcosm of culture, hard to find business opportunities

A city represents the breakfast culture of a city.

Wuhan attaches as much importance to breakfast as it does to every new year and festival, and the word "pass" in "Zao Zao" fully reflects this. "Eat of the Sunrise" also explains that Wuhan people, who can eat 3.5 million kilograms of hot dry noodles a day, love hot dry noodles very directly.

"A Bite of China" is the top work among Chinese food documentaries. However, industry insiders believe that it cannot be regarded as a food program in the final analysis. Under the surface of food, there are all the living beings, the past and the future of the glorious China. , is a manifestation of the current Chinese people’s spiritual outlook and aesthetic pursuit.

The various breakfast categories across the country are the epitome of regional culture and the inheritance of lifestyles from generation to generation. It can even be said that one of the happinesses of Hunan people is a bowl of rice noodles in the morning, while Yunnan people eat a steaming bowl of shredded bait or rice noodles, and a bowl of clay pot soup can make Nanchang people wandering around feel homesick. Feelings.

However, whether it is Yunnan Cross-Biao Rice Noodles, Guilin Rice Noodles, Nanchang Rice Noodles, Chongqing Hot and Sour Rice Noodles, Shaanxi Roujiamo, Shanghai Pan-fried Buns, or Cantonese Rice Roll Rice Noodles, etc., in most people’s minds In the memory of taste buds, it is difficult to taste the taste of hometown or childhood.

Precisely because these specialty snacks have strong local characteristics, it is difficult to copy them “authentically” to other regions across the country.

Compared with Guilin rice noodles and Lanzhou ramen, other local snacks either have less popular tastes that cannot be nationalized (such as Hu spicy soup); or the eating techniques are not conducive to national replication (such as mutton steamed buns) , hot dry noodles); either the working population cannot form a cluster (such as pan-fried buns, rice rolls); or the entire supply chain and product standardization of snacks is low (such as duck blood vermicelli); or there is no A pure snack to replace a meal (such as stinky tofu).

The breakfast in the convenience store is very commercial in scale, but it doesn't have the smell of fireworks in the streets and alleys, which makes it a bit off.

Why does China’s breakfast, which is so delicious and diverse, lose the smell of fireworks?

1. The unified market operation model is constantly "killing" the flavor with local characteristics.

This is also strongly reflected in the current store recruitment. Rich and colorful street culture (different store signs, different types of store types, large and small business formats distributed in nooks and crannies, etc.) is an important factor in building a vibrant area. Losing personalized development is equivalent to losing the vitality of innovation. .

2. The weakening of social attributes is an important factor in the loss of the smell of fireworks.

Breakfast is a scene with strong social attributes. The intersection between neighbors is separated by buildings, but the breakfast stalls scattered downstairs are important scenes where they can interact. I still remember three or two people sitting on small benches huddled under the same small square table, and they could still talk to each other. This down-to-earth communication method seems not tacky and natural.

But having said that, breakfast shop operators basically exist as husband-and-wife shops, and whatever they earn is personal. Under the market-oriented operating system, almost all of these are not included in the calculation of total social retail sales, and there are millions of breakfast stalls like this across the country.

So, in order to better control the red line of food safety, is the loss of the smell of fireworks an inevitable price?