Catering industry is vital to national well-being and the people's livelihood. The industry has been growing steadily at a rate of nearly 10% in recent years, acting as an increasing important role that fuels consumption and makes critical contribution to the economic development of China. In 2016, the total income of catering industry in China is 3,400 billion RMB, realizing a 10.8% year-on-year growth, and it is estimated that the income of China's catering industry will surpass 5,000 billion by 2020. Meanwhile, however, the smart level of catering industry is far behind other industries, which imposes a heavy impact on the rapid development of the industry.
As mobile internet technology develops and the O2O catering business matures day after day, traditional catering service suppliers seize the opportunity brought by internet+ to further improve service quality. In the future, quality catering enterprises will no longer be content of just being a platform that attracts customers to their shops, but they will gradually shift their focus to the construction of fundamental smart information systems such as the information flow, capital flow and logistics of their enterprises. A network system that integrates data for targeted marketing will be built and perfected based on the aspects of marketing development, publicity and promotion, daily operation, varieties of dishes, and customer bases. Smart catering is no longer limited in the lobby and kitchen of a restaurant, but it is expanding to upstream supply chain, purchase-sale-stock and customers. The services of smart catering in the future will integrate upstream, midstream and downstream businesses completely, realizing highly efficient smart catering management.
In order to help catering industry to embrace smart catering, explore new techniques, models, products and operational types for the exploration of catering operations, further improve the effective combination of catering industry and the latest information and internet-based models, and facilitate the resource integration and cooperation between catering enterprises and other quality service suppliers, Eleme and Zhi Xun Exhibition plan to work with industry associations and industry leaders and elites together, and plan to hold '2017 China Smart Catering Innovation International Summit' themed with 'Innovation-driven development for a smart future' in Xi'an, a renowned ancient city, on June 14th 2017. The summit aims to promote the resource integration and cooperation between catering enterprises and other quality service suppliers so that they may realize mutual promotion, complementation, resource sharing and progress, in order to improve the overallinformationalized level and data management ability of the industry, share the latest business models, and forecast development opportunities in the future; achieving more concentrated high-level architecture of the industry chain, bringing top elites of the industry together; as well as more straight-to-the-point brainstorms, and more opportunities of business cooperation, making positive contributions to the development of catering industry in China.