What secrets does a convenience-store bento hide?

How does a new one come about? What's the thinking behind the rice and the side dishes… and why is it so cheap?

Every day before dawn — when foot traffic at most convenience stores is at its thinnest — more than 400,000 servings of fresh food arrive at FamilyMart's 1,600-plus stores across East China. Most of them are bentos.

One of the newest arrivals is the "Black Label Bento" oozing pork cutlet rice.

At 11 a.m. on October 30, when the first batch of oozing pork cutlet rice went on sale, it joined a knockout contest among more than 20 bentos: if sales disappoint in the month after its debut, FamilyMart will probably pull it from the cold case.

Roughly every two weeks, one or two new bentos appear and a few vanish.

In its first week on the shelf, the oozing pork cutlet rice did well, landing in the top three by sales. On WeChat, FamilyMart called it an "internet-famous new product."

How is a new bento like this born?

As a rule, developing a new convenience-store fresh-food item starts with a forecast of the coming year's trends.

About a year ago, while planning its lineup, FamilyMart decided there would be a market for "oozing" food, and picked "oozing pork cutlet" as the bento's theme.

The oozing selling point is hardly new — the earliest version of the idea was probably the squirting beef ball — but in recent years a few items have brought it back: oozing croissants, oozing chicken cutlets, oozing pork cutlets. Bakery brands such as Holiland and Maizi Gongfang have both launched croissants with a molten cheese center; McDonald's put out an oozing cheese chicken burger this July; FamilyMart rolled out an oozing bread at about the same time.

Convenience stores have always tracked the restaurant world closely.

Salad is another example. We have written before about the rise of healthy quick meals over the past two years, and the three Japanese-affiliated chains — FamilyMart, Lawson and 7-Eleven — have clearly caught the same signal: there are more salads on their shelves, and they are not the salads of before.

FamilyMart "upgraded" its salads this April. The packaging went from plastic boxes to kraft paper, and both the portion and the price went up. Where the old salads were small side dishes, these feel like a meal in themselves. "A salad at a salad shop sells for about 30 to 40 yuan. Using our advantage in scale, we came in at 16.8 yuan — half that," said FamilyMart spokesperson Wang Yiwen.

To catch the latest trends, a convenience store's product-planning department watches every kind of restaurant ranking, including Michelin restaurants at the far end of the price scale. The Michelin guide in Shanghai, for instance, lists a lot of Cantonese restaurants, which has convinced FamilyMart that Cantonese flavors will keep winning people over in East China. "There will be plenty more Cantonese-style bentos coming," Wang Yiwen said. On November 7, FamilyMart launched a Cantonese fried rice with two kinds of cured meat at its Shanghai stores. Lawson's bento lineup this year also gained a cured-meat claypot rice.

Lawson works the same way. In the summer of 2015, when its fresh-food division noticed Xinjiang food catching on in Shanghai, it followed with big-plate chicken noodles. If you live in Shanghai, you may have noticed the spring chatter about "internet-famous qingtuan," the green glutinous rice balls. Lawson rode that wave too, with a qingtuan-flavored snow-skin moon cake, and this year it added one filled with salted egg yolk and pork floss, the same filling as the qingtuan everyone was buying.

Beyond restaurants, convenience stores also borrow from packaged food and retail trends at home and abroad. Last year FamilyMart launched its FMC ready-to-eat dishes — six or so packaged items including dry-pot chicken wing tips, Sichuan-style diced bamboo shoots and fish-fragrant shredded pork. The idea came from convenience stores in Japan and Taiwan: a household of one or two people may want an extra dish alongside a salad or a bento.

How are a bento's side dishes chosen?

Picking side dishes is a little easier than reading trends. FamilyMart keeps a pool of candidates — tofu, broccoli, pickled vegetables and the like — and developers in the merchandising department choose from it, scoring the bento as a whole on color, aroma and taste.

Balance is the key. Take the oozing pork cutlet rice: both of its sides, pickled vegetables and king oyster mushroom stir-fried with cabbage, are light and clean. The rice underneath is fried with shiitake chili sauce, because, as Wang Yiwen put it, "cutlet dishes sometimes don't go that well with rice."

"So far we've found that Chinese consumers still like stronger flavors. If the main flavor is on the light side, we make the sides heavier. If the main dish comes with sauce, we make the sides lighter," Wang Yiwen said. That taste for strong flavors does not seem to have shifted much: Lawson general manager Zhang Sheng said much the same when we interviewed him two years ago.

Move into a new region and the flavors get adjusted. Lawson's Orleans chicken cutlet rice is less sweet in Wuhan than in East China. In Chongqing or Chengdu, mala — numbing and spicy — is unavoidable in both Lawson's and FamilyMart's boxed meals.

Convenience stores also steal from local kitchens. To get closer to popular mainstream taste, 7-Eleven in Beijing studied the kung pao chicken at Chuanban, the restaurant run by Sichuan's Beijing liaison office, and the flavors and methods of Xiao Nan Guo's Shanghainese dishes. In Chongqing, Lawson developed and produced boxed meals with the local restaurant chain Taoranju, and 7-Eleven used a sauce developed by Haidilao for its Sichuan dishes. FamilyMart teamed up with Funiutang, a Beijing shop that sells Hunan rice noodles, and Funiutang's "signature yellow beef rice noodles" made it into FamilyMart's stores in North China.

Beyond taste, how a bento is arranged matters just as much — probably because the form owes so much to washoku, Japanese cuisine. Around 2006, when several foreign-invested convenience-store chains started selling bentos in Shanghai, Lawson's then China general manager, Isamu Ochiai, said a bento also had to be "fashionable" and "good-looking." NHK filmed him saying it.

Color cannot be ignored either. Another bento, the cheese curry pork cutlet rice, runs red and yellow from the curry sauce through the cutlet, so FamilyMart set a single floret of broccoli on the rice.

Ingredient cost and price come into it as well. In a written reply to QDaily, Lawson's merchandising department said it starts from a price band and then assembles dishes to fit the number it has set.

Once the chefs have settled the combination, food-engineering staff join with the packaging. The oozing pork cutlet rice belongs to FamilyMart's Black Label Bento line, said to use better ingredients, priced at 15 to 17 yuan. To signal a "premium feel," the line uses black and gold. Some of FamilyMart's other bento lines currently use black-bottomed boxes too; over time it plans to move everything outside the Black Label line to a single ivory-white box.

On the shelf, the clear lid shows everything inside the oozing pork cutlet rice at a glance. Wang Yiwen told QDaily this is because consumers like "cutlet" bentos — they look generous. Make the base of the box shallower and the lid taller, and the big piece of meat inside stands out more.

Stir-fried bentos, by contrast — the fragrant crispy pork rice, say — are far harder to make look good, especially the saucy ones: the contents slide around, and sauce can smear the whole lid. The fix is to hide the food behind a printed cardboard sleeve.

Because this is microwave food, the reheating test is a crucial step before launch. If an ingredient loses its looks or its texture after heating, it probably won't be used. You will rarely find leafy greens in a FamilyMart bento, because the company thinks greens taste bad reheated. Lawson uses green vegetables such as bok choy more often; it believes that if they are cooled quickly enough, they hold their appearance.

After the reheating test comes a logistics test, to make sure the bento and other fresh food still look right after traveling through the supply chain.

Next is an internal tasting. We once sat in on one of FamilyMart's new-product tastings — you can read about that here. At the tasting, FamilyMart staff — the merchandising developers plus other employees standing in for consumers — score the product on seven counts: appearance, flavor, portion, value for money, novelty, seasoning and willingness to buy.

Reaching the shelf means the oozing pork cutlet rice cleared the passing average of 3.2.

Every week to ten days, a new main-dish bento shows up in convenience stores

Apart from the oozing pork cutlet rice, the other two of FamilyMart's three bestselling bentos — the runny-egg thick-cut pork cutlet rice and the curry cheese pork cutlet rice — are veterans, four and six years old respectively. Lawson's bento champion, the Orleans chicken cutlet rice, has been around since 2012 at the latest.

In a convenience store, the long sellers are the big sellers. If you find a product that has survived on the shelf for years, it is there because it moves.

For the past three years FamilyMart's bento champion has been this cheese curry pork cutlet rice, which sells an average of 10 boxes per store per day.

It was once called "Japanese-style curry pork cutlet rice," a name that inevitably brings to mind the similar curry pork cutlet rice sold at FamilyMart in Japan and Taiwan. But Wang Yiwen said this one was developed for local tastes.

Years near the top of the sales chart have also brought several rounds of improvement. Around 2013, FamilyMart added cheese to the cutlet. Whether the curry sauce should be poured over the rice or kept separate has been adjusted several times. The latest change: a small lift-out bowl for the curry, so that consumers can pour it over the rice, while anyone who doesn't want rice soaking in curry can dip instead.

FamilyMart's merchandising department revises packaging every six months. A change of packaging can lift sales on its own. Ryohei Yoshida, deputy head of Shanghai Lawson's business strategy department, described the same tactic in an interview with Global Entrepreneur.

Many ingredients simply don't survive the microwave, and costs set limits too, so a "small tweak" is often the way to give a product a second life. Lawson launched a pineapple sweet-and-sour pork boxed meal in late February this year, then brought it back in late September with oat rice in place of white rice. More common still are bentos reworked through sauce or pairing: FamilyMart's "pork cutlet" line comes in runny-egg, mapo tofu and curry versions.

Small tweak or big overhaul, what matters is that the shelf feels new. "Customers who come in always hope to find something new," Wang Yiwen said. This year FamilyMart will replace 70% of its 2,500 to 3,000 products (figure unconfirmed), up from a 50% turnover rate last year.

Since the second half of this year, in East China, where the competition is fiercest, FamilyMart has launched at least 17 new bentos and Lawson 13 — a new main-dish bento every week to ten days, and that is before counting desserts, oden and the rest.

What sustains that pace is the foreign chains' well-built production plants and distribution networks, plus decades of experience in the Taiwan and Japan markets. In some ways convenience stores may put out new bentos faster than KFC and McDonald's, which tend to refresh a theme and several items only once every month to month and a half.

But small tweaks and fast launches can't fool the tongue. Deng Wei, who eats bento three or four times a week, says the various bentos taste much alike — "they all taste like microwave food." Majiang, a second-year graduate student at Fudan University, said: "All of Lawson's bentos taste like the same single flavor, and it's subtly different from FamilyMart's single flavor."

In Beijing, 7-Eleven and Lawson also sell hot meals — finished or half-finished boxed dishes made in a factory or central kitchen and heated in the store. There are usually about 12 hot dishes to choose from, at 5 to 12 yuan, and hot meals are said to be more popular than the pre-packed bentos. Even so, consumers have asked on Zhihu: why do all these boxed fast-food dishes taste basically the same?

Why is a convenience-store bento so cheap?

Opinions on the taste vary. The price advantage is harder to argue with.

Most bentos cluster between 11.8 and 14.8 yuan; at 16.8 yuan, the oozing pork cutlet rice is among the most expensive FamilyMart sells. Even so, in a first-tier city a 16.8-yuan "premium" bento is still one of the cheapest lunches or dinners going.

Short of cooking, it is hard to find a proper meal cheaper than a bento. A KFC spicy chicken leg burger is 17 yuan; a McDonald's Big Mac is 20, and a combo generally runs 20 to 30. The average delivery order is 20 to 40 yuan — according to Ele.me's data, half of all orders in Beijing and Shanghai fall in that band.

FamilyMart's Wang Yiwen said the original idea behind bento pricing was to "let people eat a meal for half an hour to an hour of their hourly pay." The average wage in Shanghai in 2016 was 6,504 yuan a month; on a 40-hour week, a bento costs less than half of one hour's pay. It lands closer to half an hour's worth of per capita disposable income, which averages 4,525 yuan a month.

One reason bentos can stay cheap is buying and cooking at scale.

Lawson sells around 40,000 bentos a day in Shanghai. FamilyMart sells 300,000 to 400,000 servings of fresh food a day across East China — bentos, rice balls, salads, sandwiches — which takes 10 tons of rice alone. Working back from FamilyMart's rice output and spoilage rate, its bento sales in East China come to roughly 60,000 to 80,000 a day.

Factories and central kitchens are what make the low prices possible. FamilyMart has six fresh-food factories nationwide, with peak-season capacity of 500,000 servings, enough scale to buy chilled fresh chicken rather than the more common frozen kind. Lawson declined to answer questions about its factories, though industry people on Zhihu have praised the cost control at its "Pianjiang" plant in Shanghai.

Bentos do not, as a rule, carry a fat margin. In its written reply to QDaily, Lawson's merchandising department put bento gross margin at about 35%, meaning controllable costs — raw materials, production, transport — swallow 65% of the price. That is before store operating costs and the taxes the sale generates.

Given that private-label products usually run gross margins of 30% to 70%, bento sits near the bottom of the range. FamilyMart's Wang Yiwen said as much: "Bento isn't the highest-margin item among our own products. It isn't the product we make money on."

It stays cheap anyway, because it pulls people through the door — the same reason Carrefour and RT-Mart sell eggs cheap. Once someone is inside, other things go into the basket. Bento buyers often grab a drink, a snack or some oden on the way to the register. That is one reason convenience stores prize bento so highly despite the thin margin.

Fresh food, bento included, is why 60% to 70% of customers walk into a convenience store at all. In the trade it is a "high-intent" product. Bentos usually sit on the lower shelves of the cold case. Above them go desserts, packaged side dishes such as the FMC line or cooked items like duck necks, and rice balls — things people come in for less deliberately.

Walk in for a bento, let your eyes run up and down the case, and it is hard not to be tempted into something else. Fresh food, only 10% to 30% of a store's SKUs, drives 40% of its sales. That is also why so many drinks makers want convenience stores to launch their new products: buy the bento and a bottle comes at a discount.

Bento is also how the chains tell themselves apart. FamilyMart and Lawson have been fighting store by store in Shanghai, each with a clear edge somewhere — FamilyMart in its own-label ice cream, Lawson in desserts — and each with its own bento loyalists. FamilyMart's 2015 launch of the mid-to-premium Black Label Bento line, and its 2017 announcement that it would use chilled fresh chicken, were both attempts to open a gap on the competition.

"It used to be enough to fill your stomach. Now the convenience-store customer base is moving up in both quality of life and buying power. So we're moving our products up too," Wang Yiwen said.

Lawson launched a "Four Seasons Bento" line this year, built on ingredients in season. In rice alone — sweet potato rice, oat rice and so on — Lawson now offers seven kinds.

Competition like this is good for the people eating.

Shanghai has more convenience stores than chain fast-food outlets, so a bento is easier to buy than a chicken burger combo

Like fast food, the standardized convenience-store bento gives city dwellers a top-up of energy you can size up at a glance.

The label lists what's in it. An oozing pork cutlet rice runs about 3,900 kJ (more than 900 calories), roughly three medium orders of fries (110 g). Most bentos are not light: 3,000 to 4,000 kJ.

In a city like Shanghai, a convenience store may be the easier thing to find. FamilyMart, Lawson and 7-Eleven together have more than 2,200 stores in Shanghai, a denser net than KFC's 300-plus, McDonald's roughly 250, Burger King's 79 and Dicos's 60.

Among the 10 consumers QDaily spoke to, the reasons for buying a convenience-store bento came down to filling up fast or saving time: out running errands and suddenly hungry, the school cafeteria closed (or just dull), nobody home to cook (too much trouble for one or two people). In those moments, they reach for a bento.

June, who works at an internet startup, has eaten a FamilyMart bento for lunch on every working day for more than four months. She is an extreme case. "I'm sick of it, but I haven't found anything better that's just as easy to buy, so I eat FamilyMart every day, and every day I think it's awful." She gets one hour for lunch and wants to spend part of it with her head on the desk, and delivery is often late, so her solution is to buy a FamilyMart bento each morning and eat it at her desk. "It saves time," she said.

Some customers also trust convenience-store bentos more on safety and hygiene. Deng Wei, who works at a bank, goes to a nearby convenience store for lunch three or four times a week and rarely orders delivery because he is "not that confident about the hygiene." He also eats bento to earn points on his FamilyMart premium membership card, and thinks it is decent value.

(At their request, Deng Wei, June and Majiang are pseudonyms.)

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Images: FamilyMart, Lawson, and photographs by the reporter. Cover image: Unsplash.