Automatic meal vending machines

Compared with the high delivery costs of O2O takeaways, automatic meal vending machines characterized by mass delivery have been considered as a new form of O2O in the post-departure era, and are considered by many restaurant companies as a magic weapon for office and community catering. Last year, a group of companies represented by Jiahe Yipin, Sanquan Fresh Food, and Youbao made arrangements in the area of ​​automatic meal dispensers. However, Beijing Commercial Daily reporter visited some of the automatic vending machines in the field recently and found that their operations did not have the expectation of optimism, and some even became a decoration. The survey found that the lack of optional meals, poor consumer experience, and price-free advantages are major obstacles to the current development of automatic meal machines.

The emergence of automatic meal vending machines allowed catering companies to see the possibility of entering the community and office space. However, with regard to the situation of office catering stations, their living conditions are not optimistic. From the user feedback information, it can be seen that many users do not have a good experience for the automatic catering machine. Today, people are more demanding on dietary diversification and the quality of their meals. Auto-selling machines are not yet able to cater to consumers' needs.

According to Liu Jingjing, general manager of Jiahe Yipin, the music store's automatic meal vending program in Beijing, there are currently more than 100 outlets in Beijing. However, due to the Spring Festival holiday, only 30 websites are displayed on the official website. She said that this year, Jiahe Yipin will continue to promote the music stack project, deploy more automatic mealshop sites, and will also actively promote cooperation with more catering companies.

However, many people in the food and beverage industry are not optimistic about the automatic meal plan project. An owner of a restaurant owner who asked not to be named told the Beijing Business Daily: “The most feared food is stored for a long time. There is no way to guarantee the quality of the product, and it is not as direct as a takeaway to consumers. Now, Consumers' demand for product quality is increasingly strict. If the experience is not good, it is not only a negation of the sale of the dining machine, but also a negation of the supply business. Therefore, many businesses do not want to cooperate with this kind of brand image in order to maintain their own brand image. The project started to cooperate."

In addition, from the perspective of the operation of the automatic meal vending machine, the advantages of low delivery costs are also difficult to highlight. Originally, due to the adoption of unified delivery and user-initiated methods, the meal-selling machine saves the cost of the departmental branch logistics compared to the take-away delivery method. However, the current order quantity is too low, which results in a similar distribution between point-to-point distribution and unified delivery. Coupled with the use of cold chain transportation for some meal machines, the advantages of logistics costs cannot be reflected.

Zhu Danpeng, a food industry commentator from China, said that the selling of meals is relatively novel to most consumers. At present, the early promotion and promotion of businesses are not in place, so the market acceptance is relatively low and the market is more difficult to cultivate. At present, people's consumption habits do not match the business model of the catering machine, leading to the current status of the current vending machine.