Do pre-made dishes that have become popular during the epidemic really taste "flavorful"?

Chinese culinary food culture, pays attention to "food is not tired of fine, eat is not tired of fine"

Nowadays, the aging process is accelerating, the elderly are inconvenient to cook, and young people are reluctant to spend time in the kitchen.

A buyer walks past the freezer of frozen pre-made dishes and ingredients by Wei Peiquan / Photo by Wei Peiquan

Chinese cooking is difficult to make thousands of dishes blindly

"Zuo Zhuan: The Twenty Years of Duke Zhao" records: Once, when the Marquis of Qi returned from hunting, Yan Ying, the minister of Qi, greeted him, and Liang Qiuqi, the favorite minister, also arrived

Yanzi replied: "Harmony is like a scorpion.

Cooking relies on human operation, and ingredients and condiments are organic substances with different properties, so there are bound to be many uncontrollable factors

Standardized pre-cooked dishes to test your taste buds

Pre-prepared dishes are convenient dishes that can be eaten directly by heating or steaming after pre-preparing the raw materials, simplifying the production steps, using modern standardized assembly operations, and simplifying the production steps

In the 1980s, the original prepared dishes and cooking kits took Japan by storm

"What we eat in restaurants outside is basically pre-made dishes

According to iiMedia Research, the scale of China's prefabricated vegetable market is expected to maintain a growth rate of more than 20%, and is expected to exceed 510 billion yuan in 2023

See the supply side at a glance

Second, look at the demand side

Three views on policy trends

　　"Not enough fragrance" problem to be solved

　　The prefabricated food industry "looks beautiful", but the lack of industry standards and other problems has spawned many pain points and blockages that plague the development of the industry, making prefabricated dishes "not tasty enough"

　　During interviews with some food companies, reporter Banyuetan found that the industry does not clearly define the concept of pre-made dishes.

　　At present, the entry threshold for the pre-prepared vegetable industry is relatively low, and many of them adopt the workshop-style production and processing mode, which makes it difficult to guarantee food safety and quality

　　In addition, the cost of developing prepared dishes is high, including raw material, labor and cold chain logistics costs

　　Gao Mingqin, director of Shandong Yuandu Yinghe Law Firm, suggested that relevant state departments should formulate industry standards as soon as possible to standardize industry access conditions, and regulate the raw materials, processing technology, packaging, labeling, storage, cold chain transportation, microbial indicators, additives of prefabricated vegetables.
Make unified regulations on indicators, pesticide residue indicators, etc.
, and guide the industry into the standardization track
.

(Zheng Xuejing, Chen Guofeng, Zhou Mian)