In recent years, prepared dishes have captured the hearts of consumers with the characteristics of "ready-to-eat, immediately hot, immediately cooked and immediately combined", rapidly occupying the catering market. The scale of prefabricated vegetable markets has expanded rapidly since 2019. In 2022, China's prefabricated vegetable market will reach RMB 419.6 billion; It is expected that by 2026, the scale of China's prefabricated vegetable market will reach trillion-yuan level.
The development of industry cannot be separated from the escort of a series of policies. This year, "Cultivating and developing the Prepared Dish Industry" was written into the No.1 Central Document for the first time, which instilled strong policy confidence for the high-quality development of the prepared dish industry, and also put forward higher requirements and expectations for the industrialization, scale and standardization of the development of China's prepared dish.
As the concept of prepared dishes is known and accepted by more and more people, the investment and cultivation of prepared dishes industry are increasing. It is understood that at present, many seasoning enterprises, are doing prepared dishes, even prepared dishes have accounted for half of the company's sales. The 108th National Sugar and Wine Trade Fair held in Chengdu this year set up a special section for prepared dishes. A source from a food company said, We serve thousands of restaurant brands with prepared dishes, and show off our products such as chili sauce and hot pot base.
The development of prepared dishes has put forward a higher demand for manufacturers' automation, food safety and efficiency. Traditional, simple packaging has a large market scale in China. If packaging enterprises want to gain more opportunities in the prepared vegetable market, they should bring some value delivery to this industry and provide value-added services for customers' products. For example, packaging can help extend the shelf life of food, reduce waste in the delivery process of prepared dishes, and ensure the food safety of prepared dishes. This is exactly the value of functional packaging.
Given the nature of prepared dishes, packaging needs to withstand freezing, heating or slow cooking at low temperatures, and it needs to have good mechanical properties and barrier resistance to protect food during transportation and storage. Vacuum packing is the most common way. Vacuum packing can be divided into vacuum bag and vacuum box. The main function of vacuum bag is to deoxygenate, which is conducive to preventing food deterioration. Commonly used vacuum packaging machine types are double chamber vacuum packaging machine, rolling vacuum packaging machine, stretch film vacuum packaging machine and so on. Vacuum box is commonly used to pack ready-to-eat products such as chilled meat, vegetables, duck neck, crayfish, cold skin, etc. These products are usually packed with air-conditioned vacuum packaging equipment, and most of them are packed with air-conditioned vacuum packaging machine.
One of the important factors restricting the development of prepared dishes is the taste, and the reducibility of the taste of prepared dishes will also be the focus of development in the future. In this respect, incubator, refrigerator is one of the development direction. For example, with the unique material characteristics and corrugated structure, it can effectively reduce the heat loss caused by heat conduction, convection and radiation, and can control the temperature to keep in a certain range, so as to ensure the freshness of fresh food. Warm Change smart packaging can record the process of food temperature changes, in order to remind consumers of the freshness of food. But the increased cost of smart packaging is also something the prepared food industry needs to consider.
In addition, green packaging is also an important trend in the development of prefabricated vegetable packaging. At present, more and more consumers oppose excessive packaging and advocate low-carbon concept. Therefore, it is hoped that prefabricated vegetable enterprises and packaging bag production factories invest more efforts in technological innovation, and use high-tech means to produce green and environmentally friendly materials with good performance, reduce the impact of materials on the environment, and promote the green development of the prefabricated vegetable industry.
