How can traditional catering make its own catering cultural characteristics?

"Food is the most important thing for the people", and catering is a basic part of everyone's daily life. However, different cultural backgrounds have different dietary concepts and customs, which eventually form different dietary cultures. China's catering culture has a long history, extensive and profound, and it is called the world's three major cooking systems together with French cuisine and Turkish cuisine. China's food culture has rich and colorful cultural connotations and a solid technical foundation, and various raw materials, technologies and styles blend with each other. As the most important aspect in the macro-social environment of enterprises, culture has a very important influence on the formulation of enterprise strategies, because culture will affect consumers' demand preferences, supplier selection and other behaviors, and correspondingly affect the product or service design, production process, marketing strategy and other behaviors of industry competitors. For catering enterprises in China, culture has a far-reaching impact on enterprises, and catering consumption itself is a cultural phenomenon. It is necessary to deeply study the catering culture in China and regard it as a contingency factor in strategic formulation. Since the 1990s, many domestic catering enterprises have been imitating western fast food enterprises such as KFC and McDonald's, from production to store decoration, but with little success. Ignoring the local catering culture and blindly imitating the west are the main reasons for its failure. 1. Main features of traditional food culture in China 1. Catering concept: "taste-oriented, taste-oriented" and "taste-oriented, taste-oriented", that is, maintaining the natural flavor of cooking materials or making food perfect (taste-oriented) after cooking is the fundamental purpose and highest requirement of cooking. As we all know, westerners pay more attention to nutrition in their diet. In their view, eating is like adding fuel to biological machines, so they pay special attention to the nutritional components of food, whether the contents of various inorganic elements such as protein, fat, carbohydrates and vitamins are properly matched, whether the heat supply is just right, whether these nutritional components can be fully absorbed by consumers, and whether there are other side effects. The color, aroma and taste of dishes are inferior requirements. We can know this from the brochure of KFC. The catering culture in China is completely different, with the pursuit of delicacy as the first requirement. China people always put the word "taste" at the forefront when tasting dishes, and China people will say with one voice when praising a good dish: "It's delicious!" China people often say modestly when they treat their guests, "The food is not ready, and it may not be to your taste." He would never say, "Vegetables have low nutritional value and insufficient calories." China people's highest pursuit of gourmet beauty is to achieve an indescribable "artistic conception", and it is difficult to shoulder this heavy responsibility only by relying on intangible "realm" carriers such as "color, fragrance, taste, shape and container". 2。 Catering content: diverse raw materials and prosperous dishes. China has a vast territory, and its complex and diverse natural environment provides a variety of raw materials for animals and plants. According to a survey by a botanist in the West, people in China eat more than 600 kinds of vegetables, six times more than those in the West. As the saying goes, "diet is like a dialect, and it is different everywhere." Chinese food varies from place to place and has a variety of tastes. In 1950s and 1960s, the theory of "Cuisine" rose, and four cuisines appeared, namely Sichuan cuisine, Shandong cuisine, Jiangsu cuisine and Guangdong cuisine. Since the 1970s, there have been five major cuisines, eight major cuisines, ten major cuisines and twelve major cuisines. There are often many subsystems or branches under each "cuisine", such as Cantonese cuisine, Guangzhou cuisine, Chaozhou cuisine, Dongjiang cuisine, Hainan cuisine and other subsystems. The number of cuisines in China is really dazzling. 3。 Catering technology: synthesis and art in the production of Chinese dishes, although there are whole fish, whole chicken or whole sheep, they are basically in the shape of silk, diced, sliced, block and strip. Before getting angry, it was an independent individual form, but after being put into a round-bottomed pot and stir-fried, it was mixed and served according to the chef's idea. What is put on the plate is a whole with good color, fragrance, taste and shape. Therefore, the production of China cuisine has changed from "individual" to "whole", which embodies the philosophy of "harmony" in China traditional culture. In China, cooking is an art, which is very interesting and even playful. For China, cooking is as important as music, dance, poetry and painting. China's cooking does not emphasize the standardization of accuracy to seconds and grams, but emphasizes randomness, perception when cooking, and grasping the results by experience. China's cooking has a strong skill of cutting and cooking, most of which can't be replaced by machinery, some of which can't be explained by science, and even some of which are stunts and unique skills. These skills are scattered among the people or outside the palace, competing for each other, changing endlessly and enjoying endlessly, and machinery can never replace them. 4。 Dining Mode: Joint Dining System China advocates "group sharing" and implements joint dining system. After cooking, the chef does not divide the dishes in advance, but serves them to the table, allowing diners sitting around the table to choose their own dishes and dishes according to their own preferences. Any dish on the table is not unique to a single diners. In China, it is the most common way for people to sit around a round table and enjoy their seats. This fully embodies the * * * enjoyment characteristics of China's diet. Through the dining system, eating has actually become a medium of emotional communication between people and a unique social activity. Chatting, talking about business and exchanging information while eating, China people have always been used to expressing farewell or welcome feelings at the dining table, and people often use the dining table to calm their mood swings. Second, the influence of China traditional catering culture on catering enterprises. Dietary culture is a living habit and cultural tradition formed and preserved by a country or a nation under long-term historical conditions, which is relatively stable in a short period of time. For catering enterprises in the catering culture environment, catering culture is an uncontrollable factor, that is, a factor that cannot be changed through personal efforts. Therefore, before making a competitive strategy, catering enterprises must examine the influence of the characteristics of catering culture on enterprises. 1。 The choice space is large, and the "taste priority" leads to the diversification of market demand. In China, most people are gourmets, among which "a wide choice of food raw materials", "rich food choices" and "flexible cooking" are the basic styles and typical traditions of China's national food culture, so for China people, they have more choices in food and beverage. However, China people's extreme pursuit of the "taste" of catering consumption naturally leads to greater personalized demand for catering consumption. Therefore, in China's catering industry, consumers' tastes are scattered. Every consumer wants to consume different styles of catering products and try new tastes every time or even every day. At the same time, they are willing to pay a certain price for their "mouth" and are unwilling to accept standardized products. This decentralized demand leads to a small demand for a specific product style in a certain period of time, and the small batch under this diversified demand cannot support the large-scale operation of production and marketing strategies, and large enterprises have no advantage in dealing with such problems. 2。 Synthesis and art lead to uneconomical scale of catering production. People's pursuit of five flavors of food must be "harmonious" in order to be satisfied. It is difficult to achieve "harmony of five flavors" in the practice of catering production. We should follow the principles of "the sum of meat and vegetables", "the sum of nature and taste" and "the sum of seasons", that is, we should pay attention to the proper collocation of animal raw materials and plant raw materials, the proper collocation of nature and taste of main materials, auxiliary materials and seasonings, and the proper collocation of seasons. Only in this way can we achieve the best taste effect and nutritional effect. The coordination of various materials, time and place makes the production process more difficult to standardize. At the same time, Chinese traditional catering enterprises pay attention to fuzziness, perceptual perception when cooking, and emphasize grasping the results by experience. Knife work, for example, emphasizes the consistent cooperation of eyes, hands and heart. In China, not only do the apprentices taught by the same master cook different dishes, but also the master cooks the same dish at different times. Therefore, the relaxed standard of "a thousand teachers and a thousand laws" and the criterion of "the best is the best" are popular in China cuisine. It is precisely because of the fuzzy production process that emphasizes experience and perception in China's catering production that the quality of products often depends mainly on the chef of the enterprise. The management of the key role of the chef has always been a difficult problem for Chinese catering enterprises. Once the scale of catering enterprises is expanded, the problem of chefs will become a bottleneck, and the quality of products will not be stable and consistent, resulting in no scale benefits in the production of catering enterprises. 3。 The catering system causes the scale of catering services to be uneconomical. The catering industry has the dual characteristics of production and service enterprises. However, in China's catering culture, catering consumption needs to exchange "feelings", and the exchange of "feelings" needs to be carried out in a good environment, which of course puts forward higher requirements for catering services, and in the increasingly homogeneous market environment, catering services have increasingly become the key factor of competition. When personnel service becomes the key to enterprise management, small enterprises can often provide more thoughtful and appropriate services, and once the scale of enterprises expands, the quality of services provided will decline. Moreover, the service quality management of catering enterprises needs manual supervision nearby, but smaller catering enterprises are more convenient to control and supervise, and small enterprises have more advantages than large enterprises. 4。 Diversity and comprehensiveness lead to no scale advantage when dealing with customers and suppliers. Due to the diversity of catering consumers' demands in China and the various choices offered by many competitors in the market, the switching cost is low. Therefore, although some catering enterprises are large in scale, they do not have obvious advantages in dealing with consumers. In the transaction with suppliers, due to the comprehensiveness of the cooking process and the extensive selection of raw materials, and because most domestic residents buy raw materials from farmers' markets or supermarkets and make them at home, for suppliers, that is, fresh raw material production enterprises, catering enterprises purchase many varieties, but the batch is small, which leads to no scale advantage in communication with suppliers. Third, the competitive strategy choice of catering enterprises in China shows that the traditional catering culture in China deeply affects consumers' preferences and choices, as well as the cost structure and behavior choice of catering enterprises. It is precisely because of the influence of various catering culture factors that the scale effect of catering enterprises in China is not obvious in the process of production, service and trading with customers and suppliers. Therefore, it is unrealistic for catering enterprises under the background of China catering culture to excessively pursue centralization and expand production scale and market share to gain scale advantage. The author thinks that unless we grasp the new trend of the development of traditional catering culture and find some new opportunities for concentration, such as the cultural requirements of the public for fast catering, catering under the background of traditional catering culture can only pursue a larger share in a relatively small market through market segmentation, thus gaining a competitive advantage. 1。 The regionality and diversity of fragmented catering culture under strict management make it difficult for catering enterprises to achieve large-scale expansion. One solution is to maintain the small scale and autonomy of a single enterprise as much as possible, which can ensure the differentiation within the enterprise and the adaptability to the local area. Specifically, an enterprise can establish multiple sub-brands or business centers, endow them with the right to operate independently, and at the same time, coordinate and control multiple autonomous units through the internal control center to realize the * * * enjoyment of internal resources of catering enterprises and meet the diversified needs of external customers and the requirements of internal management. 2。 Due to the diversification of consumer demand, product type or product segmentation and the specialization of customer types, catering enterprises can not establish a competitive advantage covering the whole catering market, but they can choose a relatively narrow target market through market segmentation, which can improve their professional image and thus improve the differentiation of customers. Although the market is relatively small, enterprises can obtain higher profit rate. Specifically, we can focus on some product types for specialized production, such as Sichuan food, jiaozi and other products. It can also be subdivided according to the customer's occupation, age, income and other standards to serve specific segments of people, such as business people and children. 3。 Concentrated geographical regions Due to the regional characteristics of China catering market, there is no national economies of scale in the catering industry. But for catering enterprises, by concentrating equipment, marketing attention and sales activities, an important economy in a certain region can be obtained. So we often find some catering enterprises with high status in a certain area. 4。 Backward integration Because of the wide selection of catering raw materials, including main ingredients, auxiliary materials, seasonings, etc., it is difficult for catering enterprises to achieve scale and reduce costs in the procurement process. Through backward integration, the competitiveness of enterprises can be improved to a certain extent, which will put pressure on those competitors who cannot achieve integration.