Nov 4, 2020|

JD Fresh Holds the First Catering Retail Alliance Conference

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by Rachel Liu

JD Fresh announced that it will create 10 catering brands with sales over RMB 100 million yuan on JD, and help the industry to create an over RMB 50 billion yuan catering retail market.

The announcement was made during the first Catering Retail Alliance Conference at JD’s  Beijing headquarters on November 4th, an event that focused on the future of the retail industry and was attended by 150 leading Chinese catering brands including Meizhou Dongpo (眉州东坡), Donglaishun (东来顺), Guangzhou Restaurant and more.

JD formed the Catering Retail Alliance this February to open its ability in omnichannel, cold-chain logistics, finance and technology to help catering enterprises offer ready-to-cook or instant dishes on JD, as many catering enterprises were suffering from the closing of offline stores during COVID-19. The alliance also aims to help catering enterprises achieve transformation and reach out to customers through both online and offline channels. Traditionally, these catering enterprises mainly focused on offline and had to deal with high cost of rents and labor. Since 2018, JD has been helping brands move their businesses online, which enables the brands to reach cities where they don’t have offline stores.

Take Meizhou Dongpo for example: Since COVID-19, its ecommerce business has increased 3500% YOY, and JD accounts for the largest percentage among online platforms. Sales of instant meat products increased 700% YOY and instant dishes 900%. “You can only have a limited number of restaurants,” said Gang Wang, CEO of Meizhou Dongpo on the conference. “I think omnichannel is a trend for the future of the catering industry.”

JD can also leverage its big data to provide suggestions for brands on new product development and customer management. Zhiqiang Wang, head of Business Purchase at JD Fresh at said, “We are able to help brands develop customized products more effectively through C2M. For example, we started to investigate the instant dishes market since 2017 and found it has great potential. We immediately started to build a team to develop the products with brands and saw a rapid increase since the beginning of this year.”

Lao Chenghuangmiao (老城隍庙) is a brand that has successfully developed online products with the help of JD. As the brand lacked experience and knowledge about developing online products, JD suggested that it could develop instant food that is suitable for small families or for one person, as the customers of JD Fresh are mostly family customers or white-collar workers. Leveraging the help of JD’s Catering Retail Alliance, the brand only took 10 days to finish the launching of new instant food products. Now it has developed over 10 types of instant food products that are wildly popular among customers.

 

(liuchang61@jd.com)

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