Behind the aura brought by "the first stock of spicy strips", the label of "junk food" that the industry can't get rid of all the time, and the erosion of Wei Long market by various online celebrity brands in recent years are all hidden worries in the heart of founder Liu Weiping.

| Author: Wang Zhening

Little raccoons, figs, Tuofei ... I believe this was the motivation for many "post-8s and 9s" to rush to the canteen after school.

when it comes to after-school snacks, we have to mention the "spicy strips" that cost 5 cents a pack in those days, among which Wei Long, the "industry leader", is the most popular one.

As many people's childhood memories, Wei Long has not only become the largest spicy snack food enterprise in China in recent years, but has even gone to the international market, selling "sky-high prices" on overseas shopping websites and becoming a "online celebrity" domestic product.

nearly 2 years after its establishment, Wei Long recently formally submitted a prospectus for listing in Hong Kong, which started the listing process. Prior to this, on March 31st, Wei Long had completed the Pre-IPO financing, raising $549 million at a cost of $4.48 per share. The total share capital of Weilong is 2.93 billion yuan. Based on the financing price, the overall valuation of Wei Long is over 6 billion yuan.

once the successful IPO rings the bell, Weilong will become a veritable "spicy first stock".

but even if you go public, it doesn't mean you can sit back and relax. The label of "junk food" that spicy strips can't get rid of all the time, and the erosion of Wei Long market by various online celebrity brands in recent years, are all hidden worries in the heart of founder Liu Weiping.

The dried sauce is passed down from my mother

Although many people are familiar with the name of Wei Long, few people know the background of the founder Liu Weiping.

In 1978, Liu Weiping was born in Pingjiang County, Yueyang City, Hunan Province. His hometown largely determined his future entrepreneurial direction.

Pingjiang county is located in the middle of Yu Xiaoshan depression, but it has a long history of making dried soy products.

According to Pingjiang County Records, as early as 3 years ago, Pingjiang dried sauce was listed as a court tribute by the Qing Dynasty. Therefore, almost everyone in the local area is proficient in the technique of making dried sauce.

When Liu Weiping was a child, she learned a lot from her mother and suffered a lot.

In addition to studying the processes of soybean screening, soaking and marinating with dried sauce, he often walks more than ten miles of mountain roads with a shoulder pole, and carries the dried sauce produced at home to the side of the road for sale.

after graduating from high school, he chose to go south with the tide of working. When working in Guangdong, he saw that thousands of factories were well managed and the machine production efficiency was high, and he was immediately inspired to start a business.

In 1998, Pingjiang County suffered a huge flood disaster, and the agricultural output suffered greatly. Soybean, which was originally used as raw material for making dried sauce, rose from more than 7 yuan a catty to 1.5 yuan, and the dried sauce industry was in crisis.

In order to cope with the soaring soybean price, the local workshop masters thought of using cheap materials instead. As a result, flour and gluten have become brand-new raw materials, and they have been made into a strip for sale-the taste is similar to that of dried sauce, spicy and sweet, and the price is cheap. This is the embryonic form of spicy strips.

Liu Weiping

Liu Weiping saw business opportunities at that time.

Pingjiang county is located in a mountainous area and is not rich in wheat. At that time, many workshops producing dried sauces turned to trying to make spicy strips, and the supply of raw materials soon fell short.

In this case, Liu Weiping thought that he must go out of Hunan and go to a place where wheat is abundant.

Many fellow villagers rushed to Xi 'an and Luoyang at the same time, but Liu Weiping thought these two places were too far away from the main line and set his eyes on Luohe, Henan.

In 1999, Liu Weiping, who was only 21 years old, went to Luohe with a small amount of savings from working in Guangzhou in his pocket. A few days later, he asked his younger brother to take people with him to the north, which opened the road to entrepreneurship.

Liu Weiping on the left

At that time, there was only one well-known enterprise in Luohe-Shuanghui, but Liu Weiping firmly believed that he could make a name for himself. Facts have proved that his "gambling" site selection was successful.

at first, Liu Weiping started from a small workshop. First of all, he combined the raw material bean skin brought from his hometown with the dried sauce handed down by his mother to develop a food that was "slightly sweet, slightly spicy, refreshing and full of aftertaste".

On one occasion, when Liu Weiping was eating beef tendon noodles, he thought it was delicious and was inspired, so he found a simple puffing machine to produce beef tendon noodles. After he asked the shopkeeper to improve the mold, he used a new machine to add caramel and Chili noodles to beef tendon noodles to produce the main products of spicy strips in the future.

He almost contracted a series of procedures such as purchasing, making and selling products. He got up early every day and was greedy for the dark, pushing a tricycle to peddle in the streets of Luohe.

It lasted for three years. Until 22, Liu Weiping was no longer satisfied with the status quo. With the money saved in the past few years, it improved its equipment and started mass production. Compared with the small workshops in the same period, the output increased significantly.

In 23, Liu Weiping named the brand "Weilong" and registered the trademark "Weilong Weilong", which officially opened the expansion of Zhang Zhilu.

Making use of the "mass line" to gain fame

At that time, Wei Long spicy strips were very popular among young people and primary and secondary school students. Knowing that products need to be consumer-centered, Liu Weiping specially arranged a team to guard the school gate after school hours, so that students could taste different flavors of spicy strips for free and gradually let them remember the name of "Wei Long".

Through on-the-spot investigation, Liu Weiping was familiar with the public's favorite tastes, and on this basis, he gradually improved and developed 12 kinds of spicy strips such as flour products and bean products.

in order to make the spicy strips easier to put in the pocket, he asked the factory master to change the original 12 cm long outer packaging into a smaller circle, and changed the original simple transparent packaging into aluminum foil and aluminum film packaging, which made the product outer packaging look brand-new.

besides improving products, Liu Weiping also attaches great importance to marketing.

His target is the local people in Luohe. He not only hired a large number of farmers to push around Luohe, but also hung posters and distributed advertisements of Wei Long spicy strips in various communities, supermarkets, schools and other places. He also gave lectures on health knowledge and wrote small soft articles to popularize the knowledge of spicy strips.

The "mass line" soon achieved results, and the name of Wei Long gradually started, and spicy strips began to be sold to the whole province and even the whole country.

for new and old customers, Liu Weiping requires that if the customer order is less than 6 orders per day, no new customers will be developed, which not only can guarantee the shipment, but also avoid the risk of short supply.

In 24, with the efforts of Liu Weiping, Luohe Pingping Food Co., Ltd. was established, becoming the first spicy strip company in China, and its flagship product was "Wei Long Spicy Strip".

During the expansion period, Liu Weiping never forgot that technology is the foundation, and he used all the money he earned to transform the production workshop. In the same year, he invested several million yuan at a time, bought a production line from Europe, and changed the packaging machine from semi-automatic to fully automatic.

not only that, he established a set of internal management system, including the control of product quality and output, and invited a professional quality inspection team to supervise.

The combination of slow and steady expansion and production, in just a few years, Wei Long has established snack food factories and bases in many places in Henan, and has marched into the whole country.

There are dangers behind the wind and water

In the years of development, the industry dilemma that Wei Long has always been unable to get rid of focuses on food safety.

In 25, CCTV exposed an underground black workshop producing spicy strips in Hunan, and the sanitary environment was extremely bad. In addition, there are reports that some spicy strips are added with prohibited ingredients.

As soon as the news came out, the negative impact quickly swept the whole industry. Many people thought that spicy strips "looked unclean", and now they even think that spicy strips are "made of toilet paper".

For many years, spicy strips were labeled as "junk food".

At that time, many illegal small workshops were closed down, and the market demand for spicy strips was declining all the way, and the whole industry became depressed, leaving everyone in danger.

in the storm, Wei Long spicy strips, as the industry leader, have been struggling with food safety issues.

In 215, Wei Long's Zui Kou Shao and Da Gluten were punished by Luohe Quality Supervision Bureau for replacing qualified products with unqualified products. In 219, the chaos in the spicy strip industry was exposed by CCTV's "3.15 party".

In order to clear up the impression of "junk food", Liu Weiping invited a professional photography team to go into the workshop to photograph the internal assembly line and work. After the photos were sent to Weibo, the reading volume quickly exceeded 1 million. Although some netizens questioned that this was "posing", it also reduced people's speculation and worry about the "black-box operation" of spicy strips production to some extent.

internal photo of Weilong production workshop.

In recent years, Liu Weiping has focused on marketing, and made use of fashion elements to make the brand "out of the circle" among young people.

It invited Zhao Wei and Yang Mi to endorse its new products

Zhao Wei endorsed Wei Long's "classic" series; Yang Mi endorsed "Kissing" series.

In 215, Wei Long released a spicy version of "Playing Truant" and filmed a spoof video, which caused a fire.

In 216, Wei Long directed and performed the "hacked" accident of Tmall flagship store, and the homepage was covered with expression packs, which attracted a lot of attention.

Also in 216, seeing the rise of live broadcast industry, Liu Weiping invited Michael Jack, the famous online celebrity at that time-"Foxconn's first quality inspector", to enter the factory and make a live broadcast with the help of the e-commerce platform. The process lasted for a whole month, and hundreds of thousands of people watched the live poster of Michael Jack every day.

Every year, Wei Long can play new tricks in the homepage form of the "Double Eleven" online store.

It imitates Apple's mobile phone to launch the "Spicy Bar 7" product.

In recent years, it has become a trend phrase that young people blurt out.

Wei Long is not only playing well in domestic marketing, but even foreign users are "sucked up" by Wei Long spicy strips

But no matter how slick the marketing is, the products will speak for themselves in the end. Now, Wei Long will be listed soon, and the company also stated in the prospectus that it will continue to expand its market share and seize the future growth opportunities of spicy snack food industry.

However, most snacks in online celebrity can't escape the dilemma of "listing is the highlight": three squirrels suffered from major shareholder reduction after listing, and the market share of Baicaowei gradually declined, all of which indicated that the road of Wei Long's continued expansion was not easy.

Although Wei Long strives for high quality, it is still difficult to shake the industry products from being labeled as "junk food". In addition, the "March 15th" party was frequently exposed, and consumers complained that they "ate bugs" in spicy hot pot ...... The industry dilemma is very difficult.

After the highlight of 216-217, Wei Long's marketing influence in these two years is no longer as strong as before, and the proportion of events that Wei Long participated in or initiated in the annual hot events gradually declined. At present, in terms of the number of fans on the short video platform Tik Tok, Wei Long is still far from the three squirrels.

This listing may be another declaration of war on the market after Wei Long has been dormant for more than two years.

At present, the competition in online celebrity's food industry is fierce, and there are more and more strong enemies in front of Liu Weiping. There are three squirrels, good shops and delicious snacks before, and then there are rookie brands such as Xiangxiangzui and Spicy Prince. The diversified development momentum of various brands is obvious. If online celebrity Wei Long always relies on spicy strips as its main route, it may need more stamina.