Food kitchen interaction leads the development of new directions for compound seasonings

The COFCO Catering 2025 Supply Chain Ecological Co creation Conference will kick off on March 21st in Haikou. This grand event will gather personnel from COFCO oil related research and development units, production areas, channel distributors, end customer representatives, as well as industry association representatives and catering experts. It is worth mentioning that among the attendees, famous chefs accounted for a large proportion, which made COFCO Catering's "Famous Chef Craftsmanship Club" the focus of attention.

COFCO Catering is positioned as a one-stop integrated service provider for the kitchen and catering supply chain. The significance of the "Master Chef Craftsmanship Club" is not only to improve the layout of the seasoning series products. Since its establishment, the club has built a professional and dynamic platform for the chef community to open up, integrate, and co create dishes, helping to innovate traditional Chinese cuisine and promote the development and progress of the catering industry.

It is reported that even before the establishment of the "Famous Chef Craftsmanship Club", COFCO Catering had already built a one-stop kitchen and kitchen supply chain product layout, covering categories such as edible oil, seasonings, and daily chemical products. Nowadays, COFCO Catering's product matrix is becoming increasingly complete: the edible oil series has a complete range of product categories, which can meet different cooking scenarios and consumer needs; The seasoning product matrix is complete, and the vinegar series includes aged vinegar, fragrant vinegar, white vinegar, rice vinegar, etc; The soy sauce series includes light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, and extremely delicious soy sauce; The cooking wine series includes refined cooking wine, brewed cooking wine, etc; Daily chemical products include the Jingshuixiang dishwashing detergent series.

With a rich and diverse product system, COFCO Catering continues to provide comprehensive support for the catering industry, continuously consolidating its leading position in the field of one-stop catering supply chain comprehensive service providers.

In recent years, the personalized demand in the catering industry has surged, and the desire for taste innovation in the kitchen has become increasingly strong. COFCO Catering has keenly captured this trend and steadily promoted the improvement and layout of the composite seasoning field based on the interactive mode of the kitchen end.

Yue Dengrong, General Manager of COFCO Oil and Fat Catering Division, pointed out that COFCO Catering attaches great importance to the innovative research and development of compound seasonings. Starting from 2024, with the help of the "Master Chef Craftsmanship Club" platform, we have signed contracts with numerous top domestic master chefs. Adhering to the concept of "coming from chefs and going back to chefs", COFCO Catering innovatively creates a kitchen interactive model, deeply integrating the professional capabilities of top chefs in dish research and development, taste shaping, and other aspects with the industrial production capacity of food, gradually entering the polyphonic market. This innovative model can not only accurately grasp the actual needs of chefs for taste innovation, but also efficiently transform innovative achievements into products through industrial means and promote them to the market, effectively meeting the constantly changing needs of the catering industry.

Compared to traditional single seasonings such as soy sauce, vinegar, salt, and sugar, compound seasonings have significant advantages. It significantly shortens cooking time, makes the cooking process simpler, and reduces the difficulty for chefs to operate. In terms of ensuring uniform taste of finished dishes, compound seasonings perform well, whether it is chain catering enterprises pursuing standardized flavors or small and medium-sized restaurants hoping to stabilize dish quality, they can all play a role.

Thanks to the booming development of the catering industry, China's compound seasoning industry has entered a high-speed growth stage in recent years, becoming one of the fastest-growing sub sectors in the seasoning industry. Data shows that the market size of Chinese compound seasonings will reach 227.8 billion yuan in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 12.11%. It is expected that the market size of compound seasonings will reach 336.7 billion yuan in 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of about 13.3%, which is higher than the overall growth rate of the seasoning industry.

From the perspective of the industrial chain, the upstream food raw materials of compound seasonings, such as oils, sugars, flour starch, and packaging materials, have commodity attributes and belong to mature market leading industries. Compound seasoning production enterprises need to closely monitor price changes while continuously investing in research and development and production, ensuring raw material supply and stable production costs. In this regard, COFCO Group, to which COFCO Oil belongs, has a strong industrial advantage.

According to the official website, COFCO Oils and Fats is one of the 16 specialized companies of COFCO Group. As a large state-owned enterprise directly under the central government of the same age as the People's Republic of China, COFCO Group focuses on agricultural grain as its core business, focusing on categories such as grain, oil, sugar, cotton, meat, and milk, while continuously improving the asset layout of its agricultural grain main business. On a global scale, COFCO Group has formed an agricultural product trade logistics network covering major production and sales areas, engaged in the procurement, storage, processing, transportation, and trade of bulk agricultural products such as grains, oils, fats, oils, sugar, meat, and cotton.

Analysis suggests that in the process of upgrading food and beverage supply chain products, the specialization and high-end of food and beverage supply chain products, represented by compound seasoning categories, are the major trend. COFCO Catering takes compound seasonings as the entry point and has the ability to transform famous chef experience into industrial research and development codes, and transform consumers' taste memories into replicable food and kitchen supply chain quality products. Its compound seasoning products are expected to be launched in 2025