Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat WeChat official account’s "New Consumer Daily" (Daily”(ID:NewConsumerDaily), and is written by Sober Zhang, published by 36Kr with authorization.
The winter solstice has passed, and the temperature in China is decreasing day by day, but one area is heating up: the hot drink market, especially the "self-heated drink".
From coffee and milk to milk tea and red wine, all kinds of drinks can be self-heated. What is the current performance of "self-heated drinks" in this winter limit? Who will buy "self-heating drinks"?
First of all, since the winter of 2020, the new consumer Daily has observed that three different brands have successively launched three different categories of self-heating drinks, covering milk, coffee and red wine.
At the end of November, Nongfu Spring’s charcoal coffee launched a self-heating set, which was equipped with a self-heating cup+self-heating bag set.
The self-heating principle of this self-heating coffee is similar to that of the self-heating chafing dish. The user will put the self-heating bag into the self-heating cup, inject a certain amount of water, then put in the drink, cover the cup and wait for 6-8 minutes to complete the "self-heating" process.
On December 7th, Jin Dian, a high-end dairy product, announced that it would launch a self-heating milk gift box.
It is understood that the self-heating mode of this product is "wireless hot charging" mode, which can heat the milk at 55 degrees Celsius in 15 minutes and keep the constant temperature for 3 hours. However, as of press time, this product has not been sold in its official flagship store.
At the beginning of the month, the founder of the wine brand Zui Goose Niang wrote in his official Weibo that Zui Goose Niang launched the "first self-heating jar of red wine in the universe". Just press the bottom button and shake the bottle immediately, and you can get a cup of hot red wine with appropriate temperature.
In addition to some new self-heating drinks in the winter of 2020, in 2019, there was such a little-known self-heating milk tea on the market: antler tip.
It is reported that the heating method of this self-heating milk tea is still using self-heating bag heating, which will provide consumers with "self-heating" necessities such as self-heating bag+purified water+tea powder bag+straw.
Compared with the self-heating drinks that have been born in the past month, "self-heating" is not a new word, but when most of us mention the word "self-heating", they are often followed by food such as "hot pot" and "covered rice".
Looking back at 2020, which is coming to an end, "self-heating" has also led the trend of the food market.
The outbreak of the epidemic at the beginning of the year made self-heating hot pot, self-heating rice and other self-heating foods popular in every household. This is a joy beyond the "epidemic" of the self-heating market. After the heat, it also attracted capital injection: in May 2020 alone, cannibals and Mo Xiaoxian, two food brands with self-heating hot pot as their main products, completed tens of millions of A rounds of financing, and Zigui Pot completed more than 100 million yuan of B rounds of financing in May.
Although compared with the heated self-heating food market, drinks are lacking in the self-heating market, to some extent, self-heating drinks are located between the self-heating market and the ready-to-drink hot drink market.
However, after the appearance and fierceness of self-heating food made consumers more familiar with the concept of "self-heating", "self-heating beverage" met the booming hot beverage market in China.
According to public information, the scale of hot drinks market in China has exceeded 100 billion yuan, covering soybean milk, fruit juice, original tea beverage, milk tea, coffee, almond dew, walnut dew and so on. At the same time, the 2018 consumer beverage temperature preference index shows that 54.7% of consumers will choose hot drinks as drinks in winter.
Although for most beverages, the cold winter is often the off-season, consumers, especially those in China, obviously have a demand for hot drinks, and brands have also realized this and started to meet the needs of consumers.
According to the observation of the new consumption Daily, both the cutting-edge beverage brands and the traditional beverage companies have made different layouts for the (ready-to-drink) hot beverage market:
Yuanqi Senli introduced a new product of Yuanqi forest milk tea mini, and the package was thickened and reinforced with multiple ribs, which greatly improved the heat resistance and stability of the bottle and could meet the needs of beverage heating.
Since October 2020, Coca-Cola Company has successively introduced a variety of hot drinks in winter, including Coca-Cola Ginger+,COSTA Cafe Family English black tea latte milk tea drink, Minute Maid cinnamon warm pear fruit drink, etc.
Suntory Beverage also launched an upgraded series of warm drinks in winter, including sweet-scented osmanthus-flavored Liqu milk tea, honey-scented fruit tea, classic sugar-free oolong tea, Liqu latte and other products.
It can be seen that although the beverage market has entered the stage of fierce competition, there is still a broad market for ready-to-drink hot drinks.
After all, in the current development of ready-to-drink hot drinks, no single product or brand has ever become bigger and stronger, and it can successfully seize the big cake under the appearance of the so-called "off-season of winter drinks". As long as the demand has not been met, there will be unlimited market potential. Coca-Cola, Nongfu Spring and Yuanqi Forest all have insight into this. As far as the current development is concerned, the market of "self-heated drinks" can be said to be "blank".
After talking about the market, let’s look at the audience. To some extent, the "high-order demand" of consumers also gives the space for the emergence and development of self-heating drinks.
First of all, as the beverage temperature preference index shows, consumers in China always prefer warm or normal temperature foods and beverages, because they are considered to be less irritating to the digestive system and beneficial to health.
Secondly, self-heating drinks allow consumers to achieve "hot drink freedom" to some extent.
In particular, compared with the traditional method, you need to find water by yourself and brew it by yourself before you can get the fragrant, delicious and isokinetic products of hot drinks.
When you walk on the street where you can’t find a convenience store, take out a cup of self-heating milk from your bag; Or in the early hours of overtime, take out a cup of self-heating coffee. To a certain extent, this has expanded and provided consumers with more convenient hot drink usage scenarios.
Now, let’s briefly understand the "long" and "simple" history of self-heating drinks.
The reason why it is "long" is that self-heating drinks have actually appeared in the market for nearly 20 years. In 2001, the old coffee giant Nestle developed a "self-heating" coffee drink called "Nescafe Hot When You Want".
The principle is that water and quicklime are placed in the interlayer of the tank respectively, and heat is generated through chemical reaction. After pressing the button at the bottom, consumers can drink 60-degree hot coffee within three minutes.
However, after the market test, the heat of this self-heating tank will not meet the demand in cold weather; Moreover, the equipment occupies a large container, with only 7 ounces of coffee in an 11-ounce container, which makes consumers disappointed.
In the end, just one year later, Nestle gave up this product.
With the rapid development of the "self-heating" market in recent years, more and more beverage companies have begun to explore new directions of self-heating drinks, and more and more self-heating black technologies have begun to appear in the beverage market.
For example, in 2017, HeatGenie, a developer of self-heating technology, developed a self-heating canned beverage. Its self-heating equipment used aluminum and silicon dioxide with safer and more efficient heat energy as reaction heat sources, and the heating materials of the new self-heating technology only accounted for one tenth of the bottles and cans.
In 2018, the company received $6 million in financing. In 2019, it was renamed as HeatGen, which upgraded its new appearance and heating method. It can start heating by upgrading from the previous rotating bottle cap to the rotating bottom cover. When the temperature is suitable, it can stop heating by pulling the can ring.
Pull the timeline back to the present, 20 years later, when the technical problem of self-heating drinks is no longer a problem, what about their market performance?
The self-heating red wine of Drunken Goose Niang was sold in limited quantities. Although it attracted attention when it was launched, a month later, this convenient self-heating red wine did not cause a "sensation" in the market.
Nongfu Spring’s self-heating coffee and self-heating cup have been partially praised, but it is inevitable that some consumers will leave a message saying: "The taste of coffee after heating is average, and the acidity and bitterness are relatively dull. The self-heating cup is too simple. " And "not bad, how to say, more heating, less a bottle. "Equal evaluation;
As for Jin Dian, the milk gift box with black technologies such as intelligent identification and unlimited hot charging was promoted on December 7th, but before the press release, this Versailles milk has not been officially sold.
Finally, the self-heating milk tea that appeared in 2019, now open Taobao to search for "self-heating milk tea", can not be said to have disappeared, but obviously there is no sense of existence in the market, in fact, the reasons can be traced.
The laudatory name is "self-heating milk tea", but to some extent, it is still old wine in new bottles. After all, when you want to drink a cup of hot milk tea, you need to finish it: take out the milk tea, open the package, tear open the self-heating bag and the bagged water, and then finish the brewing. The above series of operations are obviously too complicated, and it can’t even be called that milk tea is "self-heating". It is better to brew a cup of fragrance to save time and effort.
This is why the history of "self-heating drinks" is "simple": Nestle self-heating coffee, which was scrawled in 2001, or antler tip self-heating milk tea, which was "tepid" two years ago, and milk, red wine and other products with mediocre market performance now.
Although instant hot drinks are a new trend, the function of "self-heating" has not aroused much splash in the market.
"If the whole world uses the same old method to create wealth, it will not create wealth, but a disaster." In "From 0 to 1", PayPal founder peter teale said.
Undeniably, the innovation and appearance of self-heating drinks have met the needs of some segmented consumers, expanded the scene of ready-to-drink hot drinks to some extent, and filled the gap in the market of self-heating drinks.
However, judging from the performance of self-heating drinks in the past 20 years, it is not difficult to understand why such a product that meets the segmentation field has not become an "explosive product" in the end: self-heating drinks can only meet the needs of a limited group of people within a limited time and in a limited way.
At the same time, even simple ready-to-drink hot drinks require sufficient investment in materials, channels and configurations, not to mention "self-heated drinks" that require a higher technical threshold.
It is precisely because of this "limitation" and "high threshold" that for many big brands, self-heating drinks may be just a way for them to try to be closer to consumers and use the gimmick of "self-heating" to market and increase market volume. But after all, it is: it is tasteless to eat, and it is not a pity to abandon it.
For some young brands, self-heating drinks can’t be their main source of revenue, and the hunger marketing method of "limited sale" may be the best choice.
"The demand for hot drinks is mainly concentrated in winter and spring. According to different geographical locations, there are regional differences in the peak sales. The peak sales of hot drinks in the north can last for about 6 months, and the area south of the Yangtze River is basically about 3 months. Whether it is for the offline warm cabinet layout, channel implementation, or the product itself, (hot drinks) put forward higher requirements for us. " This is the Coca-Cola Company’s consideration for the layout of "hot drinks".
If the warm drink in winter is widely expected and the warm drink market still has certain potential, then after the uproar, the drink that can realize "self-heating" is only a false proposition.