You can also eat tastin for 4 days in a row.
Since the company opened a new Tastin downstairs, it has also become its fan. Whether it is the classic chicken leg fort, beef fort, or the Beijing roast duck fort, pickled pork fort, and fried pork fort with chili, he has tried it again.
“Burger embryo is very different from ordinary hamburgers. It is very chewy, the quality of meat is ok, and the vegetables are quite diverse. What’s more, I haven’t” sprayed “after eating it for so many days.” You can also write his feeling after eating it in a small red book, which won hundreds of praises.
In the extremely mature Western-style fast food track, the latecomers are not easy. However, under the banner of “Chinese Hamburger”, Tustin has “expanded” more than 3000 branches in just three years, and the number of outlets has leaped over Burger King, and it has been close to Wallace, McDonald’s and KFC.
In February of this year, Tastin became the top seller in the group purchase with goods list of Tiktok local life. The main package in the live broadcast room sold 2.12 million orders, with a sales volume of nearly 74 million yuan.
Tastin will become the top seller of Tiktok local life group purchase with goods list in February 2023
Unlike Rui Xing, who won at a high price, or at a high price, Tarstin, who has been low-profile for a long time, seems to have taken the road of “making a fortune with a low voice”. This makes people wonder what it has done right?
1、 Pizza is down, hamburger is up
In 2012, three Fujian people opened a pizza restaurant called “Tustin” in Shangrao, Jiangxi Province.
Different from the traditional Italian flavor, they played the “Chinese pizza” stunt and put Chinese dishes such as Beijing roast duck, pickled pork with Chinese cabbage, fried pork with chili and so on on.
Although the idea is novel, the business of the small store is tepid. After all, pizza and other foods that need to be baked for a long time can only appear in the form of dinner most of the time, thus naturally losing the target population with the demand for fast food.
In order to improve the operation, the small store constantly develops new products and tries to increase some turnover. Since Wei Youchun, one of the founders, joined Wallace and became familiar with the supply chain of hamburger fried chicken, he naturally began to make hamburgers.
The threshold for making hamburgers is very low. To put it plainly, it is two pieces of bread and some meat and vegetables. As long as we find the supply chain and SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), the new employees may learn it within 5 minutes.
Dustin did the same at first. Choose a good burger, meat pie and vegetables, spread some salad dressing, and finish with one clip.
But this involves a problem that is the same. Hamburgers on the market are all like this. The only thing to fight for is material and brand power.
In terms of materials, it is impossible for a fledgling store to compete with those top brands in terms of procurement costs.
If you want to use good materials, you have to increase the cost. If you want to set a competitive price, the space is limited.
In terms of brand power, let alone. McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King and the “Royal Three” of American fast food have a history of more than sixty or seventy years. The marketing costs of opening stores in various countries around the world are countless, which is hard for the new forces to match in the short term.
After making hamburgers for a year, the results were not very good. The product of Tustin is not the same as the traditional shanzhai hamburger restaurant in the third and fourth tier cities. It has returned to its own “Chinese track”.
Tastin finally established the brand line of “Chinese hamburger”
Although making pizza failed to make a circle, Tastin accumulated two valuable experiences. One is pancake. Tastin’s oven is ready-made and the baking technology is skilled. One is Chinese food, which is very clear about which dishes are suitable for cooking, and has paved the supply chain of prefabricated dishes.
Tastin copied these experiences into hamburger making.
In order to distinguish it from the ordinary hamburger, the founding team decided to make the burger embryo now and “bake it now”. Roll a piece of dough by hand, sprinkle with sesame seeds, and bake it in a high temperature chain oven to produce a golden castle embryo.
This kind of Shaobing (Baked cake in griddle) was unexpectedly widely favored by diners.
Compared with ordinary burgers, the freshly baked tastings burger has both wheat flavor and chewing head, which is immediately separated from other hamburgers.
After learning from the failure experience of pizza, the team also reduced the overall time of making the fort embryo to more than 3 minutes after many trials and mistakes. Although it is still slower than ordinary hamburgers, it has reached a new balance between taste and time.
Hamburgers with different flavors launched by Tustin
The sandwich of hamburger inherits the advantages of “Chinese pizza”. Although frying meat with chili peppers splashed with oil in a hot pot is started from semi-finished products, it is the over-heated step to fill the pot with air. When you eat this kind of Chinese hamburger, you will sometimes feel like eating meat buns and big cakes with meat. This is an uncommon experience in western fast food.
2、 Fill the gap between Wallace and “McCann”
If only the products have characteristics, it is difficult to let the brand, which was initially unknown, “storm” more than 3000 stores in three years.
Another point that Tarstin pokes at consumers is its pricing.
Looking through the comments on social platforms such as Little Red Book and Tiktok, you can often see a phrase describing Tastin, which is “better than Wallace and cheaper than McDonald’s/KFC”.
Yes, the price of Tustin is between Wallace and “McCann”.
Generally speaking, a Wallace hamburger is usually 5~7 yuan at a comprehensive discount. McDonald’s and KFC’s hamburgers are usually 10 to 30 yuan. The burger of Tastin is usually 7 to 15 yuan.
Tastin’s pricing fills the gap between Wallace, McDonald’s and KFC
It can be said that it just fills a vacancy. This vacancy price range is the psychological comfort zone after people have been anchored by the “Macon” price for a long time.
Either because of people’s spontaneous second innovation, or because of brand marketing promotion, around KFC and McDonald’s, social media often appear “V I 50”, “poor package” and other jokes. No matter whether the joke is true or false, it actually reflects a problem – the prices of these two brands are not low, and they are the food that ordinary people feel a little distressed to eat.
Wallace went to the other extreme. Although the price is low, the taste is delicious, and the sanitary condition is difficult to control because of its large number of branches – so that there is a well-known joke, Jet Soldier (meaning that it is easy to diarrhea after eating).
When a restaurant is most famous not for its dishes, but for its hygiene problems, it will obviously cause a considerable number of consumers to resist.
On the one hand, the price is expensive but sanitary, and on the other hand, the price is low but not sanitary. Before the appearance of Tastin, Chinese diners who wanted to eat hamburgers were faced with such a “prisoner’s dilemma” for a long time. Your wallet and stomach are like fish and bear’s paw. You have to give up one.
What diners expect is a hamburger that is not only sanitary, but also delicious and inexpensive. For the time being, this appeal was met by Tastin.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that Tastin has no health problems.
In 2022, a Tustin store was revealed by Jiangxi Metropolis Channel that the staff had no health certificate and the food was sold beyond the time limit. In black cat complaints, there are more than 900 related complaints, half of which focus on “less food” and “foreign matter in the meal”.
In the past three years, we have opened branches at such a speed. If we think with our fingers, we can also know that it is difficult to achieve unified management of each store. Stores in different regions, even different stores in a city, may have very different sanitary conditions.
In a store in Panyu, Guangzhou, a reporter from Salt Finance and Economics saw that the takeout boy rushed directly into the kitchen to pick up food.
However, from the perspective of public experience, there are not many posts on social platforms that cause diarrhea due to Tustin Hamburg. In the comparison of the taste of fast food hamburgers, it is often described as “better than Wallace, equal to (or even better than) ‘Macon'”. At this time, combined with its price, it is not surprising that Tustin can reach this point.
3、 How long can the new story be told
One of the reasons for Tustin’s rapid expansion is undoubtedly that it is actively attracting franchisees.
At present, the distribution of Tustin stores shows obvious regional concentration. The top three provinces with the most concentrated stores are Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang.
Its opening space is also deep enough, usually from the third and fourth tier cities, then into the second tier cities, and finally the first tier cities. It does not stick to the hot business districts, but prefers the Kaka corner of some marginal streets.
This is diametrically opposed to KFC and McDonald’s, which follow the route of sinking from the first line to the second and third lines, while Tastin chooses the same route of “county surrounded by city” as the ice city.
Check its official website, a 65-square-meter standard store, with a franchise fee of 38800 yuan. In addition to the deposit, brand use fee, design fee, decoration fee, equipment fee and material fee, the amount of money paid to the company in the early stage alone exceeded 400000 yuan. Taking into account the rent, water and electricity, and food costs of the store, it should cost about 700000 yuan to open a Tustin in a first-tier city.
The reporter of Salt Finance interviewed the store manager of Tastin in the east of Hanxi Avenue in Guangzhou. Although the lunch rush hour has passed, the takeout boy still frequently comes to the store to pick up the meal. The store manager told the reporter that the store had been open for three months, but the revenue was good, and the profit per month was higher than before. “Last month, after a rough calculation, we made about 40000 yuan without rent, water, electricity and manpower.”
If this momentum can be guaranteed, the cost is expected to be recovered within two years of operation.
The store manager told the reporter that he and his two friends each received 250000 yuan. Before opening, he went to the headquarters for training for three months, and only after getting familiar with the whole process did he begin to officially open the store. “It’s a bet. I ate it in Huizhou before, and it tastes good. After investigating it, I found that there is no one here, so I came to drive.”
The reporter observed in the store for a period of time, and found that because it took time to bake the hamburger embryo, compared with the traditional hamburger shop, the production of Tastin was slower. There are often a lot of takeout staff in the store, and the number of takeout staff is even higher than that of diners.https://www.stoneitech.com/
Compared with the full-time takeout staff of KFC and McDonald’s, these casual takeout staff will not only bring health hazards, but also bring negative impact on the dining environment of diners.
In terms of the dining experience, the proficiency and professionalism of the store service staff is still a certain distance from the standardized fast food restaurant. There was no warm greeting, no uniform clothes, and no toilet and cleaning staff.
These are the places where KFC and McDonald’s are superior to Tustin. This may be the problem that brands that have experienced brutal growth will face.
How to solve these problems in the later stage, whether to let a large number of franchisees go or train them strictly, these choices may affect the future direction of Tastin to a considerable extent.
Because of the choice of Chinese cuisine as the internal ingredient, the quality control of Tastin is actually more difficult to solve than that of “Macon”. After all, it is difficult to quantify the heat and seasoning. Fortunately, due to the rapid development of prefabricated dishes, the taste management of Chinese restaurants is much better controlled than before.
However, it is undeniable that the increase in the variety of dishes will inevitably increase the difficulty of standardized management. On the basis of cost control, how to take care of the tastes of local diners and bring the freshness regularly will be the subject that Tastin needs to tackle.
The catering industry has been one of the most affected industries in the past three years. Many restaurants struggled to survive under the reduction of passenger flow and the ban on canteen food, and many people fell into the darkness before dawn. It is by no means easy to produce a black horse going upstream.
But the catering industry is a hard work, but also a work of conscience. There are countless people who rise because of wind criticism, and also countless people who finally fall on the word of mouth. I just hope this new story of “Chinese hamburger” can be told for a longer time.
