As the saying goes, people take "food" as the sky, especially for infants and young children.
The children's "good meal" should be full and well eaten, and the nutrition should be sufficient and balanced, which is extremely important for the baby's emotional, health, and intellectual development.
For babies living in the nursery, the main meals are provided by the kindergarten every day. Therefore, when parents choose a nursery school for their children, they will take meals as the focus of attention. But in reality, meals have long been the short board of most nursery schools. This is not because the park does not want to do a good job, but because the investment in self-built kitchens is too high, and it is difficult to pass the fire audit, and the quality of the service agencies is uneven when it comes to meals. In short, "a good meal" has always been one of the problems to be solved in the nursery.
Fortunately, some institutions are already trying to break the game, trying to find a solution that allows children to eat well and parents to rest assured. In this phase of "new infrastructure for childcare", we have found a "game-breaker" - a professional childcare catering brand "Plus U Meal" established in 2021. With their understanding of scientific diets and mature big data technology, they have joined the tide of new infrastructure for childcare with the goal of empowering the operation of the garden with meals.
"It's time to face up to the issue of childcare"
Zhao Xingjia is the CEO of Jia U Meal, has many years of experience in kindergarten management, and understands the importance of "eating" in infant and child care services and the impact it will have on children's growth.
Standing at the forefront of China's rapid development of childcare, Zhao Xingjia synthesized the pits he had stepped on and observed the chaos in the industry, and issued an appeal to the whole industry: "It is time to face up to the problem of childcare catering."
Zhao Xingjia said that eating is one of the three major issues that parents are most concerned about (eating well, playing well, and learning well), and childcare operators can only pay attention to and meet this core demand of parents and provide healthy meals for children, so that parents can rest assured that they will not question the service of the kindergarten because they are worried about the baby's eating problems.
At the same time, he believes, "From the time a baby can eat the first bite of complementary food, the scientific diet will be put on the agenda." ”
In order to meet the meal needs of the children in the kindergarten, in the past few years, Zhao Xingjia has tried various meal pairing methods, but the results are not ideal. This is because in the process of infant growth and development, at different ages, there are different needs for the state, type and nutrition of food, and special babies such as allergic babies and obese babies have more complex requirements for meals. He smiled bitterly and said that it was too difficult to find a suitable feeding pattern for childcare.
Zhao Xingjia has also tried to build a self-built kitchen to cook for children, but the "big pot dish" of the garden is difficult to standardize, and customization is even more difficult, and setting up a kitchen will add a lot of management work. Moreover, with the strengthening of the state's supervision of childcare, it is difficult for self-built kitchens to obtain food business licenses, and it is not a sustainable channel.
They have also tried opting for a central kitchen heat chain for dining. This model is currently more mature and standardized, but there is still a long-distance distribution process, and it has to maintain a high temperature of more than 60 degrees to meet food safety requirements, thus sacrificing taste and nutrient loss.
What is even more worrying is the chaos of food supply. For example, some gardens will choose unqualified small workshops to serve meals, which will have many food safety risks. What's more, some meals will be deducted as a profit, and the promised meal standards will be greatly reduced.
It is based on these insights into the industry and their own just needs, in 2021, Zhao Xingjia, who has been looking for the best meal supplier, met the smart and healthy meal brand Weishi, and the two sides hit it off, and jointly launched the digital catering platform "Plus U Meal", which is designed to provide balanced meals for children aged 0-6 years old, with Zhao Xingjia as CEO, leading to create a set of solutions that use big data technology to achieve scientific catering and help the operation of the park.
In fact, at the national level, since the first year of childcare in 2019, all departments are gradually increasing the promotion and supervision of healthy diets. On December 28, 2021, the National Health Commission also issued the "Guidelines for Infant Feeding and Nutrition in Childcare Institutions (Trial)", which requires the feeding and nutrition of children aged 24-36 months to achieve "reasonable diet, balanced food mix, dietary diversification, appropriate amount of oil, less salt, less sugar, less condiments." ”
In Zhao Xingjia's view, the development of standardized childcare meals can effectively avoid the hidden dangers of food safety caused by similar small workshop meals and reduce the regulatory pressure of regulatory authorities. Through the procurement of childcare meals, the kindergarten can not only provide healthy meals for children, but also do not need to prepare a separate kitchen, save the trouble of declaring qualifications and fire audits, and at the same time reduce the manpower allocation of the kitchen and invest more energy in the operation and management of the kindergarten.
The emergence of "plus U meal" is a model exploration that integrates the strengths of both sides. On the one hand, Weishi, founded in 2019, has mastered the core strength of digital catering, and has built a central kitchen with 6,000 square meters and 100,000 clean standards in Shenzhen, with a mature supply chain system, which can achieve "thousands of meals for thousands of people"; on the other hand, the nearly 100 nursery schools operated by Zhao Xingjia not only have large-scale catering needs, but also know the pain points of childcare and catering, and once the mature catering model is hatched, the entire industry can be empowered.
Zhao Xingjia said that after nearly half a year of exploration and practice, Jia U meal has found some ideas to solve the shortcomings of the garden meal, and took the lead in practicing and verifying the effect in the garden it operates.
The correct way to open the "meal pairing" of childcare
"Plus U meal" is for the childcare market to focus on children's balanced meal matching products, each meal is strictly implemented in the "Children's Diet Standards", strict selection of grain and oil, vegetables, meat and eggs suppliers, through the "hundred ingredients, thousands of combinations, scientific cooking", to ensure that children get "12 kinds of ingredients per day, 25 kinds of ingredients per week" balanced meals, according to the needs of the kindergarten with recipes, to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner, priced at 23 yuan -50 yuan.
Admittedly, "good rice" is only the basic that childcare matching brands must do, and compared with traditional food pairings, there are two differences between adding U meals.
The first is to use big data technology to achieve digital food supply. After the kindergarten places an order through the Mini Program, the system will combine the age, development and other data of each child (this part of the data is filled in by parents), formulate a personalized meal plan, and visualize the nutritional data of each meal and the child's development, so as to make a "visible" scientific diet for parents and the kindergarten.
Second, all 40 processes in the whole process are digitally managed and monitored. After receiving the meal order, the central kitchen starts to start the meal production, and special orders for allergic babies and obese babies are processed separately. After that, through the vacuum quick cooling technology, the meal is quickly cooled to less than 10 degrees in 10 minutes, inhibiting the reproduction of microorganisms at the same time, it can also better lock the taste and taste of the food, and then distribute it to the garden through the whole cold chain, and after the garden is heated half an hour in advance, the children can eat delicious and nutritious meals.
Zhao Xingjia said that this is the way he has wanted but can't ask for food for many years. Speaking of this, he was a little excited, because what excited him was not only to find a catering method for providing scientific meals for infants and young children, but more importantly, he found a set of solutions that used the operation and management of the catering empowerment park, that is, the use of scientific diet concepts and products to help the park enhance its brand power, and finally to improve the business effectiveness of the kindergarten by creating a scientific dietary catering experience. Zhao Xingjia defines this solution as the "right" way to open childcare and catering.
Zhao Xingjia believes that the essence of childcare operations is to create value for customers, and to let customers experience the value of childcare, only when these values are perceived, parents will pass on the word of mouth and form a so-called word of mouth. How well children eat in the kindergarten is the most concerned issue for parents, and it is also the key point that plays at least 1/3 of the support role in word of mouth.
In the set of solutions shown by Zhao Xingjia, the kindergarten can use the ability to visualize the whole process of adding U meals and support one-click traceability, and easily have the confidence to face parents' doubts, such as "where do the ingredients come from", "whether there is pesticide residue detection", "how to achieve healthy dietary standards" and so on, which can be calmly dealt with.
Not only that, Plus U Meal will also jointly hold a trial meal activity with the cooperative kindergartens, inviting parents and babies to taste meals on the spot, so that parents can personally test and experience the meal standards of the kindergarten, supplemented by scientific diet lectures and digital platform data presentation, comprehensively present the kindergarten's attention and efforts to balance the baby's diet, and consolidate the brand power in the minds of the parents of the kindergarten.
At the same time, the digital platform for home co-education created by adding U meals allows parents to grasp the data of their children's growth and nutritional intake, and can also carry out scientific dietary concept publicity in daily life to deepen parents' understanding and acceptance of this concept.
This interlocking and multi-contact approach to the family makes the dining experience an efficient scene for enrollment and drainage in the park, and produces deep empowerment in enrollment and daily operation. According to Zhao Xingjia, in the practice of adding U meals to empower enrollment, "the enrollment conversion rate has increased by nearly 60%, and the results have been remarkable."
Although it has only been promoted for half a year, it has covered more than 260 homes, providing healthy and scientific meals for more than 7,000 infants and young children every day, so that the scientific parenting experience of the kindergarten is fully exposed, and the new way of empowering the kindergarten is continuing to be unlocked.
Zhao Xingjia reminded the responsible people of the childcare institutions that meals will become a new growth point after decoration, curriculum, and marketing, and there must be a sense of urgency to attach importance to scientific diets, and only by turning the "short board" of meals into "long boards" can we truly create a strong brand reputation.
Why does childcare catering need to be digitized?
The two characteristics that are most different from traditional meals are related to digitalization, so will the introduction of digital concepts into childcare and catering be a gimmick? Or does childcare really need to be digitalized?
Zhao Xingjia's answer is: need, and it has far-reaching significance. He listed four reasons.
First of all, by recording the children's meal data, parents can see the growth and changes of their children in the kindergarten, help the kindergarten to display service quality, enhance word of mouth, and then improve the renewal rate and referral rate.
Second, data on children's meals and growth can help countries develop more nuanced balanced meal recommendations. In the current "Balanced Diet Pagoda for Chinese Women and Children", although guidance and suggestions are given for the dietary needs of infants and young children aged 7-60 months, the scope is relatively broad and lacks empirical evidence. If there are more digital catering products such as U-food, they can develop more detailed dietary guidance through the precipitation of data, so that Chinese infants and young children can obtain more adequate nutrition and grow up healthier.
Third, only through digitalization can we truly achieve scientific and achieve thousands of meals for thousands of people. In addition to the previously mentioned in the combination of the baby's individual situation to develop a meal plan, plus U meal technical team also realized the record of all the relevant data of ingredients, the advantage of this is that you can truthfully display the nutritional data of each meal, but also according to each child's meal taboos, especially allergy babies and other special groups in time to exclude taboo ingredients, to ensure that children eat scientifically, eat at ease.
(Photo caption: Digital catering design case of plus U meal)
The fourth point is that if you want to make meals safe and healthy, you must use digital technology to supervise the whole process of production. Taking the U meal as an example, due to the limitation of the service radius of the central kitchen, the U meal has formulated strict meal matching requirements, and all meals delivered to infants and young children must be eaten within 24 hours after the completion of the production. Such requirements, extremely test the efficiency of production and distribution, only rely on digital technology and management, so that every link is visualized, digitized, in order to ensure the realization of safe childcare and catering.
Zhao Xingjia said that the torrent of digitalization is promoting the iterative upgrading of various industries, and the childcare industry born under this era needs to take digital technology as an essential ability for industry infrastructure construction, and the preparation, operation, management and other sectors of the park need digital empowerment, and catering needs digital empowerment. He believes that in the near future, digital childcare will no longer be a slogan, but an inexhaustible driving force for the rapid development of the industry.
According to Zhao Xingjia's calculation of the service capacity of plus U meals, he expects that in 2022, jia U meals will be able to serve at least 38,000 infants and young children. In the future, he hopes that U meals can go out of the Greater Bay Area and set up central kitchens in the five major regions of southwest, central China, east China, north China and south China, so that U meals are expected to serve 100,000 infants and young children in 2023.
Zhao Xingjia said that the goal of adding U meals is to let children eat delicious and healthy balanced meals, so that every penny spent by parents is more valuable, so that the kindergarten is no longer trapped by enrollment and kitchen management, and the energy and financial resources saved will be invested in more operation and management, providing parents and children with a more extreme childcare experience.
Based on his call to "face up to the problem of childcare catering", he spoke out to his childcare colleagues on the road where China's new childcare infrastructure has just broken ground:
"We have to understand that only by providing a perfect value experience can we trigger a buying point for customers."
We have to be ready to go, and once the timing is good, it is time for us to make efforts to a higher level. ”