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36Kr learned that the chain roast meat brand "Xincai Rouji" has completed an angel round of financing of nearly 10 million. The investor is Hunan Qiantai Fund, which is jointly invested and led by Wenheyou. This round of financing will mainly be used for supply chain construction and store expansion.

Founded in 2021, Xincai Rouji is a new Hong Kong-style roast meat chain fast food brand from Changsha, Hunan. Its main products include a roast meat rice series including pork belly barbecued pork rice and roast duck rice, a "chopped material" series including barbecued pork, roast duck, and roast goose, and a Xiangchang (Hong Kong & Changsha) brine series that combines the sweetness of Chaozhou brine and the spiciness of Changsha brine.

Xincai Rouji chopping ingredients, photo provided by the interviewee

In the culture of Guangdong and Hong Kong, roast meat refers to a kind of meat that is first marinated with a secret sauce and then roasted in the oven. It is usually sold in a whole or large piece. After the customer decides which part he wants, the roast meat chef will cut it into pieces and pack it on the spot, so these cooked foods such as barbecued pork, roast duck, roast goose, etc. are also called "cut materials". For Kenson, a Hong Konger, the roast meat shop with roast goose hanging in the window on the street has long been a part of Hong Kong culture.

But as a serial entrepreneur, Kenson did not aim for roast meat at the beginning. Previously, he founded the Hong Kong-style beef brisket brand Xin Zi Ji, which was crowded with people every day and could sell 5,000 yuan in an hour. Later, due to the epidemic, the daily turnover dropped from 10,000 yuan to a few hundred yuan. In order to find a way out, he studied the catering market during the SARS period and found that most of the surviving restaurants were roast meat restaurants.

Thus, Xincai Rouji came into being. Facts soon proved that the roast meat category was highly resistant to risks. The daily turnover of the first store during the epidemic was maintained at an average of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, and many people would buy a duck or half a duck to take home as a dish.

After the epidemic, dine-in service resumed, and Xincai Rouji launched the roast meat rice. In Hunan, an important criterion for judging whether a dish is delicious is whether it goes well with rice, and Kenson told 36Kr that few customers who enter his store leave any leftovers.

Xincai Rouji Gaimafan, photo provided by the interviewee

Spiciness is a part of Hunan life and is rooted in people's eating habits. However, in this hot food paradise, there is a flavor that is opposite to spiciness - sweetness, which is not generally accepted. This means that it is not easy to capture the taste buds of Hunan people with sweetness, and one of the most striking features of roast meat is its unique sweetness.

The challenge is obvious, but Kenson believes that if the brand can gain a foothold in such a market, it will also establish its own competitive potential. "If you make salty food, you have to highlight the saltiness, and if you make sweet food, you have to make it sweet to the heart." Therefore, from the first day of founding Xincai Rouji, Kenson has been committed to bringing authentic Hong Kong-style roast meat to Changsha, rather than catering to the market and making some spicy roast meat.

What is authentic? One of the answers of Xincai Rouji is to present the original Hong Kong culture - the unique memory of Hong Kong with emotion, market atmosphere and sense of time, mostly with metallic colors and lines to create a simple but fashionable style. In order to restore this mood, Kenson sent designers to Hong Kong for study many times, and after many times of starting over, the rich Hong Kong design aesthetics in the store was generated.

Culture itself is attractive. When customers come here, whether they will linger and continue to buy again ultimately depends on the product. Xincai Rouji has its own differentiated advantages in products, such as choosing fat barbecued pork instead of lean barbecued pork.

Fatty and lean barbecued pork are two types of barbecued pork. As the name suggests, lean barbecued pork is made with all lean meat and tastes a little dry; fatty barbecued pork is mainly made with fat and lean pork belly, which is tender and juicy. In the barbecued pork contempt chain, fatty barbecued pork is better than lean barbecued pork. However, since the former is more expensive, it is generally only available in large restaurants like Bingsheng.

Kenson wants to educate the market with better barbecued pork and provide customers with a meatier and more authentic Hong Kong flavor. "In the entire Hunan market, we can achieve quality comparable to that of restaurants, but at a very affordable price, with an average customer spending of around 40 yuan."。The company is not afraid of costs and can maintain "value for money" mainly due to the supply chain advantages of Xincai Rouji.

Roast meat products account for half of Cantonese cuisine and have a good mass base across the country. Data shows that there are 25,000 roast meat stores in operation in my country, but 99.5% of them are individual businesses, and there are no leading brands in the national market.

According to Kenson, the reason why roast meat shops have categories but no brands is that they rely heavily on the individual role of roast meat chefs, which makes it difficult to expand in a standardized manner. After one or two years of exploration, Xincai Rouji has broken the bottleneck of roast meat's reliance on traditional manual technology. A lot of the initial work can be done in the factory, and the stores use high-speed electric ovens and unified roasting specifications to make products. There is no need for a master chef, and a newcomer can quickly get started after a few days of training.

In terms of products, Xincai Rouji uses more than 20 kinds of ingredients, seasonings and pure natural medicinal materials, with precise proportions down to milligrams, added one by one in a strictly prescribed order, without adding any artificial colors and spices, and mixed into sauce through 6 processes. Relying on its original craftsmanship, Xincai Rouji not only solves the difficult problem of "smelly" and "fishy" in roast duck, but also ensures that each piece of raw material will not lose its best taste and freshness after repeated roasting, and can fully penetrate the marinade.

In addition to supplying its own stores, Xincai Rouji Factory has also developed B-end customers such as hot pot restaurants and Cantonese restaurants. In addition to providing them with SKUs such as roast goose and roast duck, it has also developed products such as shredded meat pie. With the investment in the second phase of the production line, the development and supply of duck head and pork elbow marinated products are also planned.

Ouyang Jizhi, co-founder of Xincai Rouji, told 36Kr that in the production process of roast meat, many raw materials will be wasted. For example, there are only a few pounds of pork that can be used to make barbecued pork. The 2B business not only solves the waste of surplus materials, but also creates a more diversified business model for the company. He took the example of shredded meat patties, which were originally strips of meat cut off when making barbecued pork. After being developed by another partner, it became a single product that can match the hot pot scene. "It was originally a derivative product, but judging from the current development, it may soon become a big single product."

It is reported that Ouyang Jizhi has worked in McDonald's, Hema and other companies, and has accumulated more than 20 years of industry experience. His R&D partner Lao Xie once worked for a state-owned food processing company and is a veteran in the food industry.

Kenson, founder of Xincai Rouji, and Ouyang Jizhi, co-founder. Photo provided by the interviewee

At present, Xincai Rouji has opened 7 stores. According to the plan, in the next 12 months, the number of stores in Changsha will reach about 40, and at least one store will be opened in each of the 13 prefecture-level cities in Hunan, which is about 60 chain stores.

In Kenson's memory, doing homework and studying in McDonald's when he was a child was a popular cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong. He hopes that Xincai Rouji will be able to create a similar cultural penetration scene in the future, where people of all ages can not only eat a bowl of roast pork rice here, but also form a deeper emotional connection with the brand.