Chapter 494

Last night, Su Yuanzheng and Su Miao had exactly this kind of boxed lunch.

We provide a set of boxed lunches, which include one meat and one vegetable, plus fragrant rice, which can satisfy passengers.

The prices of different meat dishes vary, but they are basically around 1.2 yuan.

In addition to boxed lunch sets, fried noodles and fried rice are also very popular.

Although they don't have much meat, they are a large enough staple food and are cheaper, costing only one dollar per serving.

Many passengers with children can buy one portion and share it with their children to keep themselves full. Sometimes, the staff who distribute meals will give more food to passengers when they see them with children.

There is another option for meals on the train, which is to go directly to the dining car and order food, which is exactly how Su Miao and others plan to eat at the moment.

Today's menu is hung in front of the dining car. All dishes are cooked to order and the prices are much higher than boxed meals.

However, every dish tastes delicious and comes in generous portions, just like what you would order in a restaurant. It’s perfect for a family or a group of people to enjoy together.

In stark contrast to the overcrowded passenger carriages, the dining environment is usually quite nicely decorated.

Su Miao observed the dining car. There were clean and tidy curtains hanging on the windows. The seats were arranged relatively spaciously so as not to appear crowded. There was a tablecloth on the table and a vase with artificial flowers as decoration.

Su Miao looked at the menu and asked Teacher Ding and her father what they wanted to eat. They both told her to order whatever she liked, so she ordered a few dishes at random.

A serving of minced meat and eggplant costs one yuan and twenty cents, a serving of braised pork costs one yuan and forty cents, a serving of stir-fried pork with garlic sprouts costs one yuan and thirty cents, and a serving of mapo tofu costs seventy cents.

Then, according to each person's appetite, she ordered a small bowl of rice for herself at 20 cents a bowl, and a large bowl of rice for Teacher Ding and her father at 30 cents a bowl.

The money spent on this meal is enough to buy four or five boxed lunches.

People who don’t have a lot of money in their pockets usually choose lunch boxes that are more cost-effective.

But in Su Miao's opinion, the price was not expensive. After all, the skills of these chefs were very good, and it was like eating in a restaurant.

Having experienced the reform of train meals, she knows that after entering the 1990s, the meal sales system on trains has undergone major changes. Being able to enjoy such good meals on the train, she can only eat and cherish them.

At this time, the catering contracting responsibility system has gradually been adopted. The Railway Bureau is no longer fully responsible, and it is no longer the same regardless of how much is sold.

Under the contract responsibility system, the contractor only needs to hand over a fixed amount, and the remaining money is his profit.

At this time, the chefs and salesmen were also replaced by employees hired by contractors instead of railway employees.

It was also from this time that the quality of food on trains began to decline drastically.

Contractors can choose their own purchasing channels, and driven by profits, they often choose the cheapest ingredients, but this cannot guarantee the quality of the ingredients.

In addition, in order to sell more boxed lunches and get more rewards, chefs and salesmen began to frequently launch food trucks for sales, no longer clearly dividing the meals into three categories, and selling meals from morning to night.

The taste of food that has been left out for a long time naturally cannot be compared to that of food that has been freshly cooked and eaten.

As for the hired chefs, their cooking skills are getting worse and worse, and their work attitude is becoming increasingly slack.

When Su Miao graduated in her previous life, a classmate's cousin had only learned to stir the wok for a few months and bought a health permit to enter the dining car to cook. She and her classmates also tried the cousin's cooking skills, but they were just edible.

The meals made by such chefs naturally cannot be compared with those made by chefs in original restaurants. Many people even think that the meals are not as good as those made at home.

The accumulation of various factors has caused the originally high-quality train meals to decline year by year.

But it is not easy to have a hot meal on the train, especially long-distance trains. It is difficult to heat up the food you bring with you, each station is far away, and the variety of food sold by station vendors is limited.

When you are hungry, you have to buy food on the train. Because of this monopoly, although the quality of the food has been reduced, the price has risen sharply, much higher than when it was government-run.

This will lead to more complaints.

However, this situation did not last long before it was broken by something.

That’s the new instant noodles!

In the early 1990s, the ties between the mainland and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan became increasingly close. Many businessmen saw the huge and blank market in the mainland and began to flock in to seek business opportunities.

Boss Wei, who came to the mainland from Taiwan to invest in the edible oil business, suffered a Waterloo.

At that time, ordinary cooking oil was sold for only 80 cents because of price subsidies, but the public was not interested in his high-end oil, which was priced at two yuan.

Just when he was about to spend the 40 million investment he brought, he got new inspiration on the train.

The instant noodles he brought from Taiwan to fill his stomach attracted the attention of the passengers around him.

In fact, at this time, there were already some instant noodle brands in the mainland, such as Huafeng, Shuangfeng, etc., and their sales were quite good.

However, these early instant noodles were just a piece of noodle with a packet of seasoning consisting of chili powder, salt, and MSG, without even any chili oil. They tasted bland after being washed down with hot water.

Compared with the Taiwanese instant noodles brought by Boss Wei, it is much inferior.

The passengers sitting next to him were attracted by the extraordinarily rich aroma. They looked into his bowl and saw noodles, vegetables, and even meat and other ingredients inside. It was particularly tempting. Everyone asked him where he bought the noodles.

Boss Wei, who has a keen business sense, quickly changed his strategy and gathered other Wei brothers to build a factory in the mainland.

When naming the brand, Boss Wei noticed that people in northern China usually call each other "Master", so he decided to use the word "Master" to appear more professional.

The surname was taken from the Chinese character “康” (healthy) to create the image of “a health food expert who pays attention to health and deliciousness”, and thus Chef K was born.

In August 1992, Chef K's Braised Beef Noodles, which would later sweep the country, was officially launched. With the help of an animated character for marketing, it became widely known.

Unlike several previous brands in the mainland that took a lighter approach, the braised beef noodles add a packet of beef sauce to its ingredients and also add dried vegetables that can be soaked.

The rich sauce flavor and the presence of both meat and vegetables have made Chef K’s noodles quickly become a high-end product in the instant noodle industry.

When setting the price, they also put in a lot of effort to do research.

At that time, the instant noodles available to the public in mainland China were roughly divided into two types:

One type is imported "high-priced noodles", which are sold in airports and hotels, but are difficult to promote due to their high prices;

Another type of noodles is extremely cheap packaged noodles. Although they are cheap, they don’t taste good. Most people only use them for emergency purposes and don’t want to eat them at other times.

After understanding the average income of the general public and taking into account the purchasing power of consumers, they did not set a very high price for Master K instant noodles, but chose a medium price, initially selling at 1.98 yuan.

And this 1.98 yuan became the goal for children to save pocket money for a long time.