Butter rice cakes, almost cold? _Hong Kong Information

Butter rice cakes, almost cold?

Updated on: 01-0-0 0:0:0

"Freshly baked butter rice cakes, crispy on the outside and glutinous on the inside when hot, soft and tough on cold food......

A sign full of the above contents is pasted around the cabinet of a "Luxi River Peach Cake", and the cash register is surrounded by a long butter rice cake box.

So much so that many people mistake this dim sum shop with peach crisp as a newly opened butter rice cake specialty store. A similar scene is being played out in almost all bakeries and confectionery shops.

On a weekday afternoon, at the Luxihe store of Beitou Xinao Shopping Center in Beijing, customers are buying butter rice cakes Photo by JeanW

According to the statistics of the interesting report, there are more than a dozen chain brands of new butter rice cakes in Beijing alone, including Luxihe, Master Bao, Daoxiangcun, Hollyland, etc., which do not seem to sell butter rice cakes, and are embarrassed to greet customers.

There is no doubt that the dark horse of baking for 2025 years is butter rice cakes.

Looking back at the top bread in the past, some rely on their appearance and are good at making films; Some of them are rich in material and rich in layers. is similar to the price, often dozens of yuan, incarnated as an "assassin".

But butter rice cakes are an exception, they seem to be too plain and the price is a lot cheaper, so why did they become popular?

More importantly, has the traffic password of Internet celebrity baking changed?

Overnight explosion?

Butter rice cakes didn't come out of nowhere.

Browsing social media, it appears that the "first" butter rice cake was created by a bakery studio in Nantong, Jiangsu Province. The owner of the store said that in 2017 years he got the recipe from a friend who loves baking and tried it out.

By 2023 years, the master chef of this shop has improved the recipe of the traditional French dessert Coluli, replacing part of the flour with glutinous rice flour and adding a lot of butter to iterate on the "butter rice cake" with both a crispy shell and a soft and glutinous heart.

However, this new product did not attract much market attention at the time, and it was more like silently planting a fire.

2024年下半年，第一把火開始在私人烘焙店和發燒友們間燃起。有13年經驗的烘焙師馬琳清楚地記得，那時她就不斷在多個平臺上刷到自製討論。去年10月，她也在小紅書上分享了自創的複刻配方和做法。

A guide to the reproduction of butter rice cakes shared by Xiaohongshu user @马林malin (authorized)

This trend in the circle quickly attracted the attention of manufacturers and brands with a keen business sense. In 2 years and 0 months, Luxi River launched the "first shot" of the chain brand butter rice cake in Shanghai.

At that time, it was the traditional season to eat rice cakes, and the weather was cold in winter, and butter rice cakes were mostly baked and sold in stores.

Chain brands have followed suit. In just a few weeks, Dong Gengdao, Chef Bao, Hollyland, Daoxiang Village, Nanyang Master, etc., all put butter rice cakes in conspicuous cabinet positions.

At the same time, major merchants concentrated on marketing the same product, forming a joint force invisibly, and finally accelerating the butter rice cake out of the circle.

Customers are queuing up to buy butter rice cakes at Chef Bao Pastry (Guoqing Street) in Changsha Photo by JeanW

Entering 3 months, butter rice cakes ushered in a full-scale outbreak, and almost all chain bakery brands that can be called have launched this new traffic item, for fear of missing this wave of popularity and losing market share. Supermarkets such as Hema and RT-Mart in some areas have also caught up with the excitement.

濟南本土糕點品牌東更道不久前剛剛打出“售出1000000個黃油年糕”的海報，稱品牌消費者已吃出的黃油年糕可疊出“6座珠穆朗瑪峰”；瀘溪河則打出“黃油年糕上市52天熱銷超3000萬個”的標語。

With the entry of chain brands one after another, the price has also been quickly knocked down. When butter rice cakes first appeared in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the price used to be more than 3 yuan per box. Now a box of 0 is generally concentrated in the range of 0-0 yuan, the average price of a single is 0-0 yuan, and the group purchase price can be lower.

The affordable price and multi-brand choice make it easy for young people to enjoy the joy of stamp collecting, and also allows the category of butter rice cake to complete market education without investing huge amounts of advertising, and even promotes brand research and development. In less than a month, butter rice cakes have evolved into new flavors such as taro paste, red dates, dragon well, and chestnut.

New out-of-the-circle logic?

If you want to get out of the circle, you must first be surprised.

Zhou Liyuan, deputy general manager of Suzhou Daoxiangcun Group and general manager of the marketing center, analyzed to the interesting report that the outbreak of butter rice cakes reflects consumers' preference for the taste of "glutinous" and the innovative trend of integration of Chinese and Western in the baking industry.

Butter is the most common ingredient for Chinese consumers, and in the late 2000th and early 0th centuries, baking culture emerged in China and began to be creatively used. Rice cake has a history of more than 0 years in China, and it is a symbolic food for festivals such as the Spring Festival and the winter solstice, meaning "rising every year".

These two ingredients, which could not be beaten by eight poles before, gave people a huge surprise after they were fused with each other. Many friends just took the first bite and remembered a certain familiar taste:

Friends in the Northeast ate milky fried sticky bean buns without filling, friends in Wuhan tasted like cold Huanxituo, friends in Shanghai remembered the crispy version of mochi, and friends from Tiannan and Haibei thought it was a sesame ball without sesame seeds, fried buns without filling, fried buns, and fried sugar cakes......

"Glutinous chirp, genji chirp" is the most popular taste in the baking industry at present, and it is also engraved in the genes of Chinese. Regardless of the north, south, east and west, from the must-eat tangyuan, Lantern Festival, and rice cakes that must be eaten during the New Year, to the local characteristics of sticky bean buns, donkey rolling, glutinous rice cakes, sweet cakes, as well as the popular mochi and Qingtuan in the past two years...... The taste that makes Chinese people addicted is inseparable from "glutinous".

In addition to the surprise, the butter rice cake is popular enough and down-to-earth.

As the bread list editor of the Penguin Eating and Drinking Guide, Xia Heng often pays attention to the dynamics of the baking industry. She found that although each baking hit has a period of incubation before becoming popular, butter rice cakes have become much faster and reach a wider range of people.

In the era when dirty buns and snow-capped cheese buns are popular, consumers are more interested in appearance. What you want is a visual sense of film or contrast, and at the same time, the material must be sufficient, and it looks satisfied. For example, the dirty bun is full of chocolate, while the Snow Mountain cheese bun is stuffed with cheese in a large bread, then coated in milk powder and sprinkled with fruit. When it comes to lye toast, merchants have begun to "roll" technology, and consumers are gradually pursuing the taste and high quality of raw materials.

But butter rice cakes don't seem to be quite the same as these.

The simplicity of production, small taste differences, and affordable prices may be the reasons why butter rice cakes are out of the circle faster than the once "top-rated" bread.

Xiaohongshu user @马林malin's homemade butter rice cake (authorized)

In the eyes of baker Ma Lin, the difficulty of making butter rice cakes is at most entry-level, and Xiaobai can easily get started. Butter, milk, eggs, glutinous rice flour, baking soda, and sugar are all ingredients that can be easily purchased in the nearby supermarket. The homemaking process is also simple, mix the powder, add milk and egg wash in turn, stir it again, sift it, fill the mold, and finally put it in the oven.

Xia Heng also found that in addition to being simple to make and cheap, butter rice cakes are also different in terms of spread. Although Internet celebrity bread is inseparable from the promotion of social media and relies on the participation of netizens in communication, the "top stream" in the past is more regarded as social currency, unique identity labels, and "capital" for showing off in the circle of friends.

When it comes to butter rice cakes, netizens' spontaneous evaluations, complaints, and reproduction and sharing all constitute traffic passwords, forming a communication effect of "co-creation by the whole people".

An unbreakable netred curse?

There's no shortage of new favorites in the baking world, but the magic is that butter rice cakes are popular with the product itself, not a single brand.

Throughout the once top stream in the baking industry, they have formed a strong binding relationship with a certain brand. For example, OUR Bakery, the originator of dirty buns, when it comes to meat floss, Xiaobei will think of Master Bao, and mochi is inseparable from the Tiger Head Bureau and Momo Dim Sum Bureau. When it comes to butter rice cakes, no chain brand has yet claimed to be the "No. 1".

Beijing Chaoyang Hollyland (Xiaoying North Road Store) puts butter baked rice cakes in a conspicuous position at the entrance. Photo by JeanW

"Maybe it's because the threshold for butter rice cakes is too low that the gap in taste can't be opened." Jin Li (pseudonym), a senior practitioner of a baking brand, told an interesting report that for butter rice cakes, as long as the quality of raw materials and cooking techniques are correct, the taste difference between the products in each store is only 20%.

In fact, this round of large and small bakeries can quickly launch butter rice cakes, which is related to the technological progress of upstream premix.

金立向有意思報告證實，去年12月就有一家來自江蘇的黃油年糕預拌粉生產企業找到他，當時這家企業已經向多家連鎖品牌上門推廣新產品。

The "minimalist recipe" reduces the complexity of the supply chain of butter rice cakes, making it easy for stores to replicate them in large quantities. On the other hand, European bread, lye water toast, ciabatta, etc., are more complicated to make and taste more likely to be different.

It is popular enough and easy to copy, which has made butter rice cakes popular, but like the other side of the coin, homogenization is also a major pain point in the baking industry.

事實上，近幾周以來，黃油年糕很快出現了低價競爭、因甜度及熱量較高而引起熱議等問題，這個新晉的億元級爆品，很快就站上了多維分化的十字路口。

從大環境看，烘焙市場競爭日趨激烈。據窄門餐眼數據，截至2024年11月12日，全國麵包烘焙門店總數超34萬家，近一年新增9.2萬家，閉店超9.1萬家。“高開高閉”的背後，是我們與西方國家在烘焙需求上的截然不同。

In Western countries, bread is mostly a staple food, but in China it is more often used as a snack. Therefore, even though the penetration rate of the baking market continues to increase, Chinese consumers are still mainly interested in early adopters and experiences.

"The life cycle of Internet celebrity products is generally only 8-0 months." Gionee believes that butter rice cakes will eventually bid farewell to traffic. In view of consumers' festive demand for rice cakes, butter rice cakes may become a regular category in the future, and more will enter supermarkets or private kitchens.

For bakery stores, the important thing is not how long it can be popular, but whether it can borrow traffic items to accumulate popularity, speed up sales, increase sales of rigid demand categories, and make business better.

"That's how baking is, the better the business, the faster the sales, the fresher and better the food." Gionee said.

Author: JeanW

Editor: Remainder

Editor on duty: Jia Shihui

Interesting report video