Prepared to Fail: Cafeterias and Restaurants Face Backlash for Pre-Made Meals

Tan Yunfei (谭云飞)

A school canteen scandal has Chinese consumers rethinking their growing demand for pre-prepared and ready-to-eat meals

Sick with Covid in early September, Zhao Dandan hoped to find comfort in takeout food. It only made things worse. The meat—salty, over-seasoned, and excessively tender—tasted heavy and oily, Zhao says.

But to Zhao, the culprits weren’t unhygienic cooking methods or shoddy restaurants. She blames the “pre-prepared” dishes that have become ubiquitous in takeout food and fast food restaurants across China in recent years.

Angry and desperate, the 32-year-old Beijing resident posted on the Instagram-like app Xiaohongshu complaining that “pre-prepared food is flooding restaurants,” and “begging” for recommendations of restaurants that cook their food fresh to order. “No central kitchen! No just-heat-up and ready-to-eat meals! Only fresh ingredients, and freshly cooked meals!” she wrote. Despite Zhao having only a few dozen followers on the platform, her post received several hundred “likes” and comments from users who exchanged methods for identifying pre-cooked food and discussed restaurants to avoid.

Zhao has joined a growing backlash against pre-prepared food, or yuzhicai (预制菜) in Chinese—dishes that are prepped in advance of serving, often by centralized kitchens that distribute the ready meals to restaurants that simply heat up or put together the ingredients on-site for customers. The method promises convenience and value but is accused of being unhealthy, non-transparent, and even damaging to China’s traditional food culture .

This September, parents of children at a primary school in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, complained that pre-prepared meals served in the school’s cafeteria were beset by issues including late deliveries and low-quality and grim-looking food. They even accused the meals of giving students diarrhea. China Newsweek magazine reported that some parents had quit their jobs in order to make time to cook and send their children pack-lunches rather than let them eat the school meals. On the microblogging platform Weibo, a hashtag related to the incident received over 110 million views within 10 days. “The day of human feed may not be far off,” one Xiaohongshu user commented on the news.

Originating in the 1940s in the US with the application of freezing technology in food processing and preservation, pre-prepared food emerged in China in the early 1990s when fast-food chains like KFC and McDonald’s arrived in the country and created demand for pre-prepared dishes from local manufacturers.

Though there is no officially recognized definition of yuzhicai , in June 2022 the industry body China Cuisine Association (CCA) described it as “ packaged finished dishes or semi-finished food” manufactured on standardized assembly lines. The CCA categorizes yuzhicai into four types: ready-to-eat food, ready-to-heat instant food that requires only hot water or re-heating, ready-to-cook food, and ready-to-use cleaned and prepped ingredients packed independently based on the quantity needed for a particular dish.

Over the last decade, pre-prepared food gained popularity in China with the development of cold chain logistics, the rise of food delivery services, and the increasingly fast-paced urban life. The Covid pandemic gave the industry extra impetus as strict control measures often confined people indoors and sometimes restricted the supply of fresh food and deliveries. Consultancy firm iiMedia valued the sector at around 345.9 billion yuan in 2021 and estimated that number would triple by 2026. Statistics from the iiMedia also show that the number of yuzhicai -related companies in China rose from 3,71800 in 2012, to over 16,000 in 2020. By the end of 2022, there were over 62,000 yuzhicai manufacturers in the country, according to Qichacha, a Chinese business database.

Liu Hui from Guangzhou, Guangdong province, uses pre-prepared meals for convenience. As a full-time employee and a mother of a 7-year-old child, she often relies on meals of frozen buns and dumplings, or pre-prepped steak. “For time-consuming dishes we want to try, we often choose to buy pre-made ones from supermarkets or restaurants…This can save us time and diversify our diet,” Liu tells TWOC.

Pre-prepared meals and frozen foods for home consumption are common items on Chinese grocery lists these days. The country’s leading online grocer Dingdong sold 3 million pre-prepared meals in seven days during the Spring Festival holiday in 2022, triple the amount sold during the same period in 2021.

However, restaurants accounted for 85 percent of the pre-prepared food industry in 2022 according to a report by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association and financial institution China Renaissance. The report also found that pre-prepared food made up 80 percent or more of the dishes of some well-known brands, including Real Kung Fu (which sells Chinese food), Yoshinoya (Japanese), and Xibei, a northwestern Chinese cuisine chain that has 344 stores nationwide.

Pre-made dishes are indispensable to many restaurants since they improve efficiency and standardization, says Duan Yongping, an executive chef at a chain restaurant branch with over 20 years’ working experience in Beijing. “If we have the ingredients, such as pork ribs and chicken, cleaned, cut, and packed; the sauces mixed and handed over with some equipment and then delivered to stores for cooking, it saves a lot of space, labor, and time to process them at the store,” he tells TWOC. In contrast, “[Dishes] prepared by individuals may vary based on their own skills and even moods.”

But pre-prepared meals have gained a reputation for being unhealthy and even unsafe. “We cannot trace the date the meat and other ingredients were [produced and] bought for the precooked dishes, even though there might be a date printed on the packaging…and we might not even know the expiry date of such dishes either,” Zhao argues. When Zhao interned at Yoshinoya 10 years ago, she witnessed its kitchen preparing orders simply by opening “packaged meals,” heating and plating them, and has been suspicious of such methods since.

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