China’s catering enterprises see steady recovery after optimization of COVID response

Restaurants across the country have resumed dine-in services and seen a steady recovery since China optimized its COVID-19 response.

In a branch of the famous hotpot chain Haidilao in Sanlitun, a popular shopping area in Beijing, restaurant manager Xu Bin was busy greeting customers.

Citizens dine indoors at a restaurant in Beijing. (People’s Daily Online/Yu Kai)

“We are expecting to receive more than 200 tables of guests today. Dozens of tables have been reserved for lunch. As Chinese New Year is approaching, we will receive more reservations and get busier,” said Xu.

The restaurant began to see business recovery on Dec. 16, 2022. Xu explained that the restaurant’s evening dine-in services even returned to pre-pandemic levels occasionally in recent days.

“We also welcomed an increase in foot traffic in other time slots. The foot traffic at weekends increased by about 30 percent compared with workdays. In general, we have sustained recovery momentum,” said Xu.

The recent recovery of consumption at Haidilao’s restaurants in Beijing is expected to continue in the next two weeks, said Wang Li, regional manager of Haidilao in the city.

According to Chinese online food delivery giant Meituan, catering consumption has recovered to varying degrees, and foot traffic at restaurants has seen steady growth since Dec. 8, 2022 in many places across China. In the week since that date, the platform’s online reservations for dine-in services in Urumqi, capital of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, soared by 413 percent compared with the previous week.

Meanwhile, many catering enterprises have taken the initiative to expand online sales channels in a bid to drive sales recovery. Orders for takeout food have begun to increase in some Chinese cities. Between Dec. 7 and 9, 2022, orders for takeout food to office buildings and industrial parks in Beijing increased by 33.4 percent from the same period in the previous week, data from Meituan showed. In early December 2022, sales of takeout hotpots in the city surged 116 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.

China has rolled out a range of policies to help catering enterprises tide over difficulties in 2022, including guiding internet platforms such as online food delivery websites to lower service charges.

Yang Liu, chairman of the China Cuisine Association, said the catering industry will see speeded up recovery this year thanks to the optimization of COVID-19 prevention and control measures.

Yang suggested developing new consumption models, accelerating the creation of new types of consumption and continuously stimulating the vitality of the consumption market to help catering enterprises recover as soon as possible.

Yang Lijuan, CEO of Haidilao, said the company would continue to bolster digital transformation, meet diversified and personalized consumer needs through multiple channels, expand consumption choices, and provide customers with a safer and more comfortable consumer experience.