Originality makes business more valuable.
Tustin, a "county burger", broke through the tight encirclement at a low price, with more than 5,000 stores, which is almost equal to McDonald’s. Many people eat it as a substitute for McDonald’s and KFC, especially some migrant workers who want to save money, and regard it as the first choice for lunch. However, something happened to this arrogant Tustin recently, and food safety problems appeared again.
Author | Chen Chang
Editor | Chen Fang
Operation | Liu Shan
Eating raw chicken in a chicken burger is a bit disgusting to think about.
Recently, Tustin China Burger, praised by netizens as "KFC’s replacement" and "a rising star in the hamburger industry", was exposed by consumers as having eaten raw chicken.
The consumer posted a graphic saying: "Tastin has put up with you for a long time, and after a year, I feel sick of eating raw chicken again." In the picture, white chicken is exposed in the food shaped like a drumstick.
The "City Boundary" found the store involved, Tasting (Nanchang Science and Technology Normal Store), and called. The other party admitted that it did happen, and said that someone would be responsible for responding to the matter to the outside world, but as of press time, there was no response.
Tasting, which was exposed this time, has been in the limelight in recent years. It focuses on positioning Chinese style hamburgers, and its biggest feature is low price. After a spicy chicken leg burger discount, as long as 8.9 yuan, a three-piece luxury single meal is only 19.8 yuan.
Tasting started to make hamburgers in 2019. In 2020, the number of stores was only 500, and then it opened to more than 5,000 in lightning speed, covering 331 cities in 22 provinces across the country. The number of stores surpassed Dicos and caught up with McDonald’s.
This has caused the catering industry to discuss and pay attention to its business model. How about Tustin’s hamburger? How did the company quickly enter the public eye? What hidden dangers have been exposed by this food problem?
Catch up with McDonald’s
In the past year or two, although Tasting hamburgers are very popular, the company didn’t actually sell hamburgers when it started.
In 2012, the Tasting brand was born, and the first store was located in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, mainly selling pizza. This explains a question in many people’s minds, why Tasting advocated the national tide, but took a foreign name.
Tustin pizza is characterized by on-site hand-shooting and open-hearth baking. At the same time, it is different from the pizza on the market. Instead of sausages, cheese and bacon, it is Chinese food such as Beijing roast duck, braised pork with plum vegetables and fried pork with pepper.
▲ (Chef Tustin shows the pastry crust. Figure source/city boundary)
At that time, the pizza market in China was in a state of division, with nearly 1,000 Pizza Hut Happy Restaurants alone. Tasting, which looks nondescript, failed to attract consumers, and the progress of opening stores was slow. Until 2017, the number of stores was still only 100.
The turning point occurred around 2019, when a new "freshly baked burger embryo" was launched in Tustin, and the production process of handmade noodles and on-site baking was displayed in the store’s open-file operation room. The company’s products also changed from selling pizza to selling chicken leg hamburgers.
It turns out that this road is right. In 2020, the number of Tustin stores exceeded 500, and in 2021 it exceeded 1,000. In November of the same year, the company gained 120 million yuan from equity financing of Puzzle Venture Capital and Source Capital.
With the blessing of capital, in 2022, Tasting opened more than 2,000 stores. As of November 1, 2023, the data of narrow-door dining shows that the number of Tustin stores has reached 5,414, leaving Dicos (2,385) and Burger King (1,554) far behind and catching up with McDonald’s (6,205).
Until now, the crust has been a big selling point of Tustin hamburger.
Wu Jing, a girl from Anhui Province, was impressed by the pastry crust when she first ate Tastin. "I saw the staff rolling the cake skin behind the glass with their own eyes. After baking it in the oven and taking it out, it was a thin layer, which looked fragrant." She told the "city boundary", "It is also chewy in the mouth, and the wheat flavor is rich, and the spicy chicken leg inside is crisp and tastes good."
"After eating, I even want to ask the clerk if the crust can be sold separately." Wu Jingxiao said. Most importantly, Tastin is cheap and affordable, which is very suitable for a student party like Wu Jing. She and two men and one woman eat for four people, and the money spent is less than that of 90 yuan.
▲ (Tustin Hamburg. Source/interviewee)
Chenchen, an office worker in Hangzhou, has made Tustin Hamburg the first choice for lunch since he opened it near his company. He also praised Tustin’s crust. "There is a kind of happiness in eating strong pasta. Going to his favorite mushroom beef burger every day can soothe my battered mind."
Wu Jing and chenchen are just one of many "Ta Men" (a general term for Tustin fans). Searching for Tustin in Little Red Book, there are more than 60,000 related notes, and there is no lack of discussion on Tustin in Weibo. "I have eaten Tustin for three days in a row" and "Who knows the happiness of the Tower Gate".
Not everyone can appreciate Tustin’s happiness. Narrow-door catering shows that there are currently more than 5,000 stores in Tustin, mainly concentrated in second-tier to fifth-tier cities, with first-tier cities accounting for only 7.46%. In particular, there are only two in Beijing, one is located in Beijing West Railway Station, which opened in August 2023, and the other Anzhen Store is still in trial operation. The clerk revealed to the "city circle" that the company’s plan is to open 10 stores in Beijing before the end of the year.
However, this does not affect the continuous expansion of its audience. Official website shows that as of October 2023, the number of online members registered in Tustin is 6899.3w+.
Killed out on the cheap
It’s been 33 years since McDonald’s entered China in 1990. Why did Tustin go as far as McDonald’s after making hamburgers for four years?
There is naturally more than one mystery. In most people’s view, low price is the first factor that constitutes its explosion.
Earlier, the "Market Circle" made a survey report. Influenced by the consumption environment and the online marketing involution, this generation of young people are more and more careful in eating and drinking. Before eating, they are used to using their mobile phones to search for 9.9 yuan Tik Tok/Meituan group purchase.
"McDonald’s member day on Monday, 30% off pizza at Domino’s on Tuesday, 9.9 set meal at Burger King on Wednesday, KFC crazy on Thursday, Wallace Dicos on Friday, and Alipay takeaway 118 at Haidilao on Saturday and Sunday." This popular money-saving package on the Internet has won numerous praises.
It is against this background that Tustin came into being.
According to the menu of Beijing Anzhen Store, the luxury single meal including drumsticks, chicken nuggets and coke costs only 19.8 yuan. In contrast, the same category of drumsticks in McDonald’s and KFC costs 40 yuan.
The "city boundary" made a comparison according to the data of narrow-door meals. From high to low per capita consumption, among the six mainstream hamburger brands, KFC ranked first with 34.43 yuan, followed by Burger King, Dicos and 30 yuan. McDonald’s is 27.81 yuan, followed by Tustin and Wallace, who are less than 20 yuan, at 19.22 yuan and 18.98 yuan respectively.
Tustin is also very good at playing e-commerce marketing. On Tik Tok, Tasting has opened many accounts, among which "Tasting Fuzhou Store" has the largest volume, with at least 40 live broadcasts per month, and it has been broadcast more than 270 times this year, which is comparable to the selection of model workers in the live broadcast industry in the East, which makes it gain 2 million fans, and many other accounts have reached tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fans.
The anchors beat the group purchase price in the live broadcast room, including a spicy chicken leg fort 8.9 yuan and 10 wing tip 5.9 yuan, which is so cost-effective that it is difficult for consumers to refuse. When many people eat Tasting drumsticks in their mouths, they will find that the ingredients are almost the same as McDonald’s and KFC.
In the view of Wang Hongdong, the founder of Dining Collection and an analyst in the catering industry, "this is where Tastin is smart."
Take Jia Guolong’s China Fort as an example. The categories in the store include Fried Cattle Fort, Hanging Furnace Roast Duck Fort, Braised Pork Fort with Wine, and so on, like an upgraded version of Chinese hamburger.
But Tasting is different. The decoration of the store adopts China red doorknob and naive lion head Logo, which borrows the potential energy of the national tide, but the products are the familiar spicy chicken leg burger, plate-roasted chicken leg burger, beef burger, French fries, chicken rice flower and so on. In other words, Tastin is actually doing fried chicken business under the banner of Chinese hamburger, which is essentially western fast food.
Wang Hongdong believes that if the two are compared, Tasting is more dominant. After all, Jia Guolong’s selling of "air buns" (Jia Guolong’s China Fort was renamed as "Jia Guolong’s air buns" before) has an explanation cost and will dissuade many consumers.
"But Tustin entered a market that was fully educated by KFC and McDonald’s, and Chinese hamburgers were more like a propaganda strategy." Wang Hongdong said. In addition, he also believes that the category of fried chicken burger is very suitable for take-out, and basically the take-out ratio of these local fried chicken burger brands is very high. "Plus it is cheap, so it can develop rapidly."
Many interviewees confirmed this view to the "city boundary", "it is really for eating fried chicken." During the visit to Anzhen Store, the "City Boundary" found that most of the shops were young people and children, and they ate Tastin as a substitute for KFC and McDonald’s.
Wang Hongdong also said that Tastin is also very good at site selection.
At the address of Beijing Anzhen Store in Tasting, KFC is 50 meters away, and Jia Guolong’s China Fort is next door. Jia Guolong, the clerk of China Fort complained, "We just opened it for two months, and Tustin came." Tastin’s practice of keeping a close eye on his peers is equivalent to winning all the people who eat fried chicken and those who are curious about Chinese hamburgers.
▲ (Tasting Anzhen Store is next to Jia Guolong’s China Fort. Figure source/city boundary)
As mentioned earlier, Tastindo has won the favor of consumers in the sinking market. Some people may ask, if you go to a first-tier city, will anyone pay the bill?
With this question in mind, Wang Hongdong once specially inspected the location of Tasting’s stores in Guangzhou. "Most of them are located in villages in the city, where consumers are highly price-sensitive and business is very good." He judged from this that as long as Wallace, KFC and McDonald’s can open places, there is no reason why Tustin can’t open them.
Food safety problems are frequent.
Even though the path from pizza to Hamburg is clear, Tustin faces many developmental problems.
Search on the Internet found that many diners who have eaten in the store will vomit Tastin’s slow meal. The root cause lies in the crust of freshly rolled cakes. Wu Jing has to wait 10 to 15 minutes for several times.
The "city boundary" calculated at the store and ordered four hamburgers and some snacks. It took exactly 15 minutes from the time the order was placed to the table. Because he hoped to publicize the characteristics of the existing rolled dough, Tasting used the Ming chef, and he could see that there was only one female staff member rolling the dough manually, and the rest were baked by one person, wrapped by one person, and helped to order at the front desk.
And these four people, to 50 square meters, full seat can accommodate more than 30 people to supply meals. The complexity of production and the lack of manpower eventually led to the slow delivery speed of the store.
▲ (Tasting Anzhen Store. Figure source/city boundary)
Like all restaurant chains, Tastin has not escaped the management pain point of joining. Like the food safety problem at the beginning of the article, I searched a lot on the complaints of black cats. For example, eating raw meat causes diarrhea, chicken feathers are eaten in the set meal, and there is hair in the hamburger … Some people describe Tustin as another "jet fighter" after Wallace.
During the period of 315, 2022, the Tasting store was exposed by the "Urban Scene" column of Jiangxi Metropolitan Channel that there were serious food safety problems, including the staff did not hold a health certificate, the food was short of weight, the meat products were still sold after the expiration date, and the expiration date of the food was modified without authorization. Since then, Yang Bing, general manager of Tustin, has admitted in an internal letter that the operation of individual stores is not standardized and not in place, saying that he and the team are "anxious and full of worries".
A netizen in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province recalled his experience of eating raw chicken to the "city boundary". "Afterwards, I contacted the store at the first time, and the store returned the hamburger money to me and promised to make me a new one next time. But a series of rhetoric from the store made me feel uncomfortable and felt that I was making something out of nothing. So I chose to expose it on social media. "
"Then Tustin officially called me and said that I would be given a single meal coupon as compensation." In a word, the netizen is very dissatisfied with the handling result of this matter, and hopes that Tastin can strictly control the quality.
It is worth mentioning that although Wei Youchun, the founder of Tustin, once worked as a franchisee of Wallace, the joining mode of Tustin is different from that of Wallace. Wallace turned employees or partners into store partners through the "store crowdfunding" model. Tastin is a more traditional joining model.
According to Wang Hongdong’s analysis, Wallace binds the interests of employees, partners and the company together. Employees will have a sense of being the hero and be responsible for the operation of the store, and the store closure rate is low. However, in Tastin’s model, the interests of franchisees and company headquarters cannot be completely consistent. In order to make quick money, franchisees may not operate according to the requirements of the company, and the probability of food safety problems will be high.
"So, Wallace’s model is more recognized in the catering industry." Wang Hongdong said.
Zooming in to the entire Chinese hamburger track, Tastin is not the only brand that is eyeing Chinese hamburgers. Among them, there are many Tustin imitators. For example, the China Hamburg brand "Dafangfang" launched the concept of "Western-style Hamburg, Oriental Expression", and it also worked hard on Hamburg embryo; Another "Chuzheng Hamburg" is very similar to Tustin in the decoration style of the store at first glance.
Judging from the financing situation, the capital market also has expectations for Chinese hamburgers. According to the rough statistics of the city boundary, Chuzheng Hamburg has received an angel round financing of 3 million yuan, Limbaugh has received an angel round investment of several million yuan, Odington Hamburg has completed the A round financing, and Kenweiting China Hamburg has just completed the seed round financing in October this year.
According to 36Kr, at the end of 2021, Yang Bing once said, "The management team led by Wei Dong (Wei Youchun) has made a clear plan for 2022, with 2,500 stores to be opened, 5,000 stores to be opened in the next three years and listing in the next five years".
Now, the goal of 5,000 stores has been achieved, and the next listing plan can’t be achieved just by opening stores. In the future, can Tustin’s products continue to be competitive? How to build a complete operation support system after scale? There are also the biggest food safety problems at the moment, etc., all waiting for Tastin to break through and solve them one by one.
(Wu Jing and chenchen are pseudonyms in the text)
Originally produced in the city, please do not reprint it without authorization.
E-mail for communication suggestions: gaojian@boyamedia.com
Original title: "A 8.9 yuan," County Burger "Sneaks at McDonald’s"
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