The Research On Operating Mechanism Of Chinese Fast Food Chain Enterprises

Fast food is a product of social, economic and cultural development during a certain stage. Fast food has been promoted and thrived, with accelerating the pace of life, increase of working women and disposable income, decrease of family size. The origin of modern fast food industry is the United States. In the 1921, E. W. Ingram created the first fast food restaurants called the "White Castle" in Kansas.40 years later, American fast food expanded to the Europe and Asia and gained a whirlwind in the fast food industry. Since then, the world's fast food industry has been mature. It took more than half a century.China is famous for food which has a long history. Chinese fast food industry started in 1987.It thanked to Kentucky Fried Chicken that opened in Beijing at the same year and brought modern concept into China. With the reform and opening up, the national economy and per capital income grew rapidly. Chinese catering industry leaded in that period. Especially the chain restaurants had nearly 20% growth rate average annual. Catering industry is becoming an important supporting force in Chinese economic development. Although Chinese fast food had occupied the better advantage in terms of time, geographical and human. Compared with Western fast food chain enterprises in turnover, numbers of stores, operating philosophy, most of domestic Chinese fast food enterprises are traditional and they were only rough imitation of foreign enterprises. For the root causes-a complete, mature, effective replication of the modern operation mechanism, we lacked concrete research in detail.How to identify gaps, narrow them and create a modern Chinese-style fast food chain enterprise? It had become a hot topic between theorists and enterprisers. This article bases on catering theory, chain theory and operating mechanism theory, combining the present situation of fast-food business.I applied theoretical and empirical research together with qualitative and quantitative analysis, combined of inductive and deductive research methods then took a comprehensive study to Chinese fast-food companies. First from the basic theory, the theoretical definition and characteristics were described.Then I selected 10 enterprises on the benchmarking analysis, including Chinese and western fast food in 2006 and analyzed several enterprises that were among the top 50 in all the Chinese fast food enterprises in 2009.It compared some enterprises that were invested by Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, foreign-funded enterprises. The results showed that Chinese fast food industry had a great gap compared with international enterprises in the scale, expansion of capacity, profitability, and brand building ability, innovation, human resources and so on.In this paper, I defined operating mechanism and found out problems of Chinese fast food industry. From operating system and operating mechanism, I identified some factors that impacted development of Chinese fast food. Finally combined with basic theory, case information, existed research results, I reconstructed operating mechanism on the Chinese fast food.I hope Chinese fast food chain enterprises can rank top place among nations of the world as soon as possible.