Current location：Home>About>News>Industry news
Source：本站
Date2023-10-16
Recently, a piece of news about "pre-made dishes entering the campus" detonated the entire Internet. The reason was that a primary school in Jiangxi Province that had just welcomed the start of the school year was questioned by parents about the use of pre-made dishes in the cafeteria.
Parents reported that not only was the delivery of food severely delayed that day, but their children had not yet had lunch after 3 p.m., and the fruits and vegetables they received also had quality problems. Not only were they wilted and yellow, some fruits and vegetables had not even been washed.
Pre-made meals, as defined by the current industry standards, refer to dishes made from agricultural, livestock, poultry, and seafood ingredients, combined with various seasoning and additives, and undergo pre-processing (such as cutting, mixing, marinating, shaping, seasoning) to complete the dish. They are then produced in a centralized manner in modernized central kitchens, followed by rapid freezing or vacuum packaging techniques for preservation, ensuring freshness and taste. After purchase, consumers only need to perform simple additional processing before consumption, eliminating the need for ingredient sourcing and preparation steps. Pre-made meals are known for their convenience, efficiency, and high taste quality.
According to data released by China Food News last year, the pre-made meal market in China reached a scale of 419.6 billion RMB in 2022, with a year-on-year growth of 21.3%. The B2B and B2C proportion in this market is approximately 8:2.
This means that only 20% of pre-made meals on the market are directly purchased by ordinary consumers, such as packaged steaks, pastries, fried chicken, and various meal kits found in supermarket freezer sections. The remaining 80% are acquired by businesses and enter the market through the foodservice industry.
From this perspective, it seems that pre-made meals have become an important aspect of the future of the Chinese foodservice industry. However, people's opinions about pre-made meals are accompanied by significant controversy.
Among the criticisms faced by pre-made meals, the most prominent ones are related to poor taste and homogeneity. The issue of nutrient loss compared to freshly cooked meals also remains unclear. Additionally, some pre-made meals with a shelf life of about one year have become targets of public scrutiny.
How to balance convenience, nutrition and home-cooked flavors when it comes to food choices?
In the future, the intelligent cooking mode of "cooking robot + fresh vegetables" may become a major trend in the development of stir-frying robot products. Fresh and clean pre-processed vegetables with a wide variety are used. The stir-frying robot is equipped with recipes carefully developed by culinary engineers, and big data is utilized to achieve standardized recipes. The flipping speed, heat control, cooking duration, and timing for each stir-fried dish are preset to achieve precise temperature control and replicate the skills of master chefs.
Shenzhen T-Chef Technology Co., Ltd. is a globally leading high-tech enterprise specializing in the research and development, production, sales, and overall solutions of intelligent cooking equipment for Chinese cuisine.
According to Dr. Geng Kaiping, the Chairman of T-Chef Tech, the company has been devoted to promoting standardized and intelligent development in the catering industry since its establishment.
Currently, they have developed over 20 models of intelligent cooking robot products. These include small-scale electromagnetic cooking robots suitable for the chain fast-food industry, medium-sized cooking robots for buffet and takeout markets, and large-scale cooking robots for collective meal and central kitchen industries. They also offer customized product development and overall solutions based on customer needs.
The company's products not only have the capability to stir-fry various dishes from the eight major Chinese cuisines but also can stir-fry noodles, fried rice, spicy hot pot, crayfish, dry pot, and other single items.
The products have been exported to various sectors of the catering industry both domestically and internationally. Well-known clients include Cafe DE Coral, TaoHeung, XiBei, Nonggengji, as well as Capital Normal University, Alibaba, and other schools and corporate cafeterias. In recent years, T-Chef's products have obtained ETL, NSF, FCC, and CE certifications. They are rapidly gaining market share in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and other overseas markets.
T-Chef has brought together a group of young and energetic post-doctoral teams and well-known cooking masters from various Chinese cuisine disciplines. They have developed more than 2,000 typical Chinese dish templates and 15,000 customer-generated dish programs, as well as establishing a standardized database with 120,000 raw materials, processing techniques, cooking processes, finished product libraries, raw material thermal characteristic libraries, and nutrition databases for Chinese cuisine.
Furthermore, through big data analysis and cloud computing, they have created technical platforms such as dish development expert systems, cloud-based apps based on artificial intelligence technologies like big data and deep learning, kitchen safety managers, nutrition managers, and intelligent kitchen management systems.
Based on AI+ dish development big data platform, utilizing mobile internet technology and big data mining, it provides users with a shared experience platform in the field of dish development and cooking.
According to Geng Kaiping's perspective, "China's catering industry with a scale of nearly 5 trillion yuan and 30 million practitioners is facing the challenges of 'four highs and two lows', and the development of chain and scaled enterprises is under tremendous pressure."
"At the same time, with the disappearance of China's population dividend and young people's reluctance to enter the kitchen, the catering industry is facing difficulties in recruitment, management, and retention of staff, especially with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past three years, which has accelerated the challenges faced by catering enterprises."
Zhigu Kitchen Technology directly addresses the pain points of the catering industry and plays a significant role in cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and food safety through the use of modern intelligent technologies such as cooking robots and the Internet of Things (IoT). The scenarios where these solutions are applied include chain fast food restaurants, food delivery, casual dining, snacks, group meals (schools, companies, government agencies, military, hospitals, etc.), as well as vegetable processing factories.
robots. This shift creates opportunities for high-skilled labor.
From the perspective of labor replacement, while low-skilled labor is being replaced, high-skilled labor is emerging. This not only greatly improves the happiness and satisfaction of professionals in the catering industry but also significantly enhances labor productivity in the food service sector. It accelerates the transformation and upgrading of the catering service industry.
