Original, hungry for 3.5 hours, Sixiang Studio
After returning home from work, opening the APP to order takeaway food that he often eats to fill his stomach has become the daily routine of contemporary "social animals".
But the dishes you carefully choose and place an order for may not be cut and fried by the chef in the store, but a cooking package made a year ago – the takeaway owner only needs to reheat the pot, or even blanch it with hot water, and then put some vegetables on the plate, and a "delicate and nutritious" takeaway is born.
In this way, ordering takeout suddenly becomes a blind box, not knowing whether it is a fresh dish or a thawed cooking bag delivered today. And the food safety issue of cooking bags that has been exposed in recent years has also become a topic of much concern to consumers. So, how can we tell whether the takeout we order is made or a cooking bag?
Text | Canghai, editor | Roxie map | Sixiang Design Department
1
Prefabricated cooking packages are enveloping the catering industry
"Cooking bag" sounds like a new word, but in fact, most people have already come into contact with this kind of food that is "made in advance". For example, refrigerated sandwiches in convenience stores, eight-treasure porridge that I loved to drink when I was a child, and quick-frozen dumplings that I bought to save time… They are all "prepared dishes" like cooking bags used for takeaway.
Although people have been accustomed to preparing ready-to-eat or hot food at home before, they have rarely become the focus of public discussion. And the news about takeaway cooking bags that have been exposed one after another has gradually attracted attention to the development of the pre-made vegetable market.
According to a survey by iiMedia Consulting, the market size of China’s prefabricated dishes is estimated to be 345.90 billion yuan in 2021, and with future consumption upgrades, the scale of China’s prefabricated dishes may reach about 515.60 billion yuan in 2023. And takeaway packages have become an important part of the prefabricated vegetable market.
Not to mention a small-scale takeaway store, even Meizhou Dongpo, KFC, and Yoshinoya have also embarked on the road of cooking bags and launched their own work in progress food.
Image from the Internet
It can be said that the pre-made dishes represented by takeaway packages are gradually surrounding the catering industry.
2
The most popular cooking bag, do you have your love?
In order to conquer the catering market, takeaway cooking bags must first conquer consumers’ stomachs. Therefore, the choice of dishes, dish matching, and cooking methods of cooking bags are very important to both manufacturers and takeaway stores that buy cooking bags.
With the attitude of food research, Sixiang searched the shopping platform with the keyword "cooking bag", and counted the 10 best-selling single products in Taobao’s top-selling stores to see which dishes in the cooking bag were the most popular.
According to statistics, among the hot-selling dishes, meat dishes are often chicken, beef, and pork, and fish rarely appears, because fish reprocessing will make the dishes themselves more and more soft and rotten, making it difficult to maintain the integrity of the dishes.
Image source: Guyan Food Flagship Store
In addition, in the picture of the cooking bag provided by the merchant, a large number of green leafy vegetables are rarely seen, and potatoes, mushrooms, onions, broccoli, etc. are often used as side dishes. Even if some are paired with green leafy vegetables, most of them are rape. Green vegetables like spinach, lettuce, and canola, which require a high degree of freshness of the dishes, rarely appear in the cooking bag.
In order to meet the "mix and match" needs of cooking bag buyers, cooking bag manufacturers also packaged combination sets, such as "10 hot-selling dish tasting combinations" and "10 classic dish tasting combinations", and even differentiated regions and spiciness. They launched hot-selling sets for Northeast China, North China, South China, East China, Southwest China, Central China, and Northwest China.
3
How to distinguish between stir-fried vegetables and cooking buns?
Now that you have discovered the common takeaway cooking bag dishes, can you know whether the delicious food you ordered is made of cooking bags by distinguishing the products in the takeaway store?
That’s really hard.
Because the takeaway cooking bag that sells well is actually a more popular dish among home-cooked dishes. Even if you go to a restaurant to eat, dishes like fish-flavored shredded pork and potato beef will most likely enter the must-order menu. In addition, takeaway merchants will deliberately use some reprocessing and loading techniques to make it impossible for consumers to distinguish.
In the much-talked-about cooking bag report in 2018, when the merchant was asked "does the customer know it’s a cooking bag", he replied, "don’t let him know".
Source: Pear Video
So, how can consumers determine whether the takeaway they order is made by the merchant or a cooking bag?
Some consumers have shared tips on social platforms for identifying takeaway packages: they can be identified from the speed of delivery, whether the vegetables are boiled, and the distribution of dishes in takeaway stores.
It can be found that the dishes and dishes of the cooking bag are relatively simple, either simple and easy to process buns, porridge, or cover the rice and noodles, just heat the dishes inside, then cover the staple food, with a little vegetable leaves, you can transform into a successful meal.
The appearance of the cooking bag itself is the choice of the merchant in order to save manpower and time costs, so the delivery speed will be faster than that of the takeaway. Before, there was news that the merchant will deliver the meal in 5 minutes after the user places an order. 5 minutes, the chef who is making the meal may not have put the dishes in the pot yet. It is really not normal to make a dish with complete color and flavor in such a short time?
In addition to the more objective identification methods such as dishes and meal time, there is also a mysterious but very useful method of judgment – whether there is "pot gas".
Cooking bags are indeed convenient and fast, but the steaming "pot gas" of cooking is at least impossible to achieve under the current technical conditions. Cooking bags that have undergone cold chain transportation and long-term freezing and refrigeration storage seem to have lost their soul even after being heated. No matter how delicate the dishes are, there is no way to get rid of the problem of no pot gas.
4
What are the effects of eating cooking bags every day?
If consumers eat takeout made of cooking bags every day, what impact will it have on themselves?
Ji Yiyuan, a warrior up owner of the Bilibili website, did a small experiment on what happens to his body after eating takeout bags for 7 days. He, who couldn’t get fat no matter how he ate, gained 1.05 kilograms and his body fat rate soared by 1.5%.
Source: Ji Yiyuan
He said in the video that the food bags used for takeaway are not only oily, but also heavy in taste. Even people like himself who are not easy to eat and fat can gain weight even after eating for a few days. People who are prone to obesity can imagine. If you maintain a diet high in oil and salt for a long time, it will cause high blood pressure, severe damage to the kidneys, and even cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.
In addition to the obesity and disease problems that may be caused by long-term consumption of cooking bags, the food safety issues in the production process of cooking bags are even more worrying.
In November 2018, a news video titled "The Secret of Cheap Takeaway Instant Food Bags: The Production Process Is Disgusting, Selling 400,000 Daily" sparked a heated debate. In the video, the cooking bag manufacturers bought more than ten tons of meat at one time in order to reduce costs. Some of the meat in the cooking bag has even been in the freezer for more than a year.
Source: Pear Video
This kind of food production environment makes people unable to eat. But this video is not a small roadside workshop, but Anhui Banggang Xiang Food Co., Ltd., which the person in charge considers the "first echelon" of the industry.
Then again, even if the food bag purchased by the takeaway store meets the relevant regulatory requirements of the production process, there is no guarantee that the food safety issues that consumers receive are free of food safety issues.
According to the People’s Daily, in order to save costs, some takeaway store owners throw the entire cooking bag into hot water for heating without opening the outer packaging of the cooking bag, ignoring the possible cancer risk caused by heating the plastic bag.
All illegal operations that do not comply with food safety supervision standards are risky actions by merchants to increase their profit margins.
Takeaway stores that use cooking bags actually cost more food than those that cook by themselves, but their labor, housing rental and energy costs are lower, and they can make more money per order. To improve profit margins, merchants may also further reduce related costs, such as throwing cooking bags that should be heated in a pot directly into hot water.
The development of cooking packages may seem to offer merchants a shortcut to low-cost meals, but under the centralized production model, the profits of the catering industry will only continue to be concentrated in large enterprises, gradually squeezing the profits of small street shops.
The same plot has long been played out in the rise of community group buying. The difference is that consumers who buy food may only pursue low prices and efficiency, which is more or less what they want, but diners who place orders for takeout want to eat a "pot gas" full of food after a busy day, but this demand is forced to fall in front of the profit-seeking market behavior.
Original title: "The Birth of Internet celebrity takeaway: The cost of the cooking package was 5 yuan and it was" out of the pot "a year ago"
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