Restaurant’s pandemic pivot becomes thriving vegan health platform
China Vegan Entrepreneurs 04 | Raymond, ZEROGO, Beijing
“Eating well, and even healing the body naturally through diet, can be part of everyone’s daily routine—not just something we read books about other people doing.”
Meet Raymond
Name: Raymond Xie
Location: Beijing
Previous Occupation: Pharmaceutical, Health and Management Consulting
Project: ZEROGO, a whole food plant-based community & service platform
ZEROGO’s story
After adopting a vegan lifestyle, Raymond opened ZEROGO, a whole food plant-based restaurant in Beijing. In January 2020, the restaurant was three years old and the business was thriving…and then everything came crashing down. Forced to close amid the COVID-19 lockdowns, the restaurant suffered massive financial losses. Uncertain if and when ZEROGO would be able to resume operations and recover lost revenue, Raymond decided to pivot. He permanently closed the restaurant and turned his attention to ZEROGO’s online community of fans and friends. In the months that followed, Raymond built up the community and developed ZEROGO into a one-stop service platform for people in China who want to adopt a whole food plant-based diet.
Building a casual chat group into one-stop service platform
Raymond’s intention when he launched ZEROGO was to help the people around him to improve their physical and mental health through a whole-food plant-based diet. When COVID hit, Raymond had to find a way to deliver this same value to people who were locked up at home.
Raymond started with ZEROGO’s existing online community, a WeChat group with several hundred customers, friends, and fans. He made a point of communicating daily with the group and providing value by sharing whole food plant-based food and nutrition information via text, photo, video, and audio messages. Raymond says that sharing photos of healthy meals became a “group ritual” that people looked forward to every day and was pivotal in establishing ZEROGO’s culture and values. But he quickly realized that the ZEROGO community needed more than just a helpful WeChat group to share photos and recipes in. They needed to “solve problems of what to eat, where to buy it, and how to cook it”. Raymond realized he’d need to offer a comprehensive series of solutions—from outreach and engagement to education and even product supplies.
Any one of these services required a lot of research and development to deliver, and Raymond wanted to deliver them all. His idea kept expanding until it seemed so large and complicated even a massive corporation would find it ambitious. When he began to feel intimidated by these massive plans, Raymond says, he reminded himself to be patient: "as long as you continue to show up every day, you will eventually see results".
As he became more clear on what ZEROGO needed to be, Raymond’s next step was to create a framework on which to map out their existing content and plan ongoing content creation work. “We sorted out all of our knowledge and methodologies related to healthy eating and continuously put out content to build up a strong content base,” says Raymond. His strategy served a clear goal: “We wanted to teach people how to solve their own problems rather than just giving them short-term solutions.”
Churn out enough valuable content, and you’ll end up with a product
Raymond and his team continued with their daily WeChat posts and group communication, and simultaneously began compiling their content into more marketable formats like PowerPoint presentations and explainer videos. Then they tested these new materials in the group and made improvements until they were professional enough to sell as educational products. They uploaded several video courses to paid online education platforms like the Lychee Mini-Course app (荔枝微课), which now provides a source of passive income.
As they continued to create content, Raymond and the ZEROGO team refined their framework and brand to focus on the integration of traditional Chinese medicine and holistic philosophies with Western nutrition science. Raymond want to give people objective and accurate information on the impact that every type of food has on the body and practical methods for natural healing. They have now launched several courses on basic nutrition from Chinese and Western perspectives, as well as courses on how to use food as medicine to accelerate natural healing, detoxify internal organs, reduce inflammation, and manage weight.
From community to services to products
Most businesses start by first launching a product, and then producing content and developing a community to drive sales. In ZEROGO’s case, it’s the other way around: Raymond started with a concept, a community, and a body of knowledge around healthy eating, then developed content and services—including an online store which sold a curated selection of products that aligned with their goals.
When he began developing the ZEROGO online store, Raymond set strict selection criteria: all products must be 100% vegan and free from synthetic additives, preservatives, artificial flavors and colors, refined sugar, MSG, garlic, or onions. “These strict standards made it much slower and more difficult to find products for our store”, Raymond says, “but because they represent the changes we are trying to help our users achieve, we believe they are very worthwhile”.
The secret sauce
Once the online store was established, ZEROGO began developing their own products to meet gaps in customers’ needs. Raymond had noticed a common pain point that frustrated the ZEROGO community in their nutrition and health goals: healthy food can be bland, and it’s hard to make it tasty without making it less healthy. Especially if you’re a busy working parent and not a chef.
What’s the secret sauce that might make healthy cooking easier for busy people?
That’s right…healthy sauce!
With this pain point in mind, Raymond and the ZEROGO team began developing their own all-purpose ZEROGO condiments which could be used to make anything from stirfries and salads to soups and stews. This “magic sauce” not only needed to make any vegan meal taste better, it also needed to be optimized for mass production and retail sale without the use of preservatives or synthetic additives. They finally succeeded and were excited to launch their new sauces last year.
THE RESULTS
Two years after its transition from offline restaurant to online platform, ZEROGO now has several online business streams and offers recipes, cooking tips, nutrition plans, online cooking and nutrition classes, community support, retail services, and even its own products. Raymond is proud that the ZEROGO platform is already helping more than 5000 people to improve their own and their families' daily meals and transition to a whole food plant-based diet.
Through the long-term interactions in the ZEROGO community, Raymond has watched members who had never touched a cutting board gradually learn how to cook. He also noticed that people not only improved their physical health, they also improved their mental health. By caring for themselves through cooking and eating, ZEROGO community members learned to love themselves and relax.
Raymond now recalls his 2020 business disaster as a blessing in disguise: “At the time I comforted myself that when one door closes, another always opens. If we are open enough, obstacles will turn into opportunities. Two years after closing our restaurant and pivoting to a 100% online business, this seems to be true for ZEROGO."
WHAT'S NEXT?
In the next three years, Raymond hopes to grow the ZEROGO community to 10,000 members and achieve a repurchase rate of 50% on the online store. He also plans to continue developing new whole-food plant-based products, like the all-purpose sauce they released last year, which can make it easy for everyone to cook and eat healthy food. For marketing and community development, he’s planning to launch a series of cooking classes in ZEROGO’s new studio, which people can attend in person or watch online via livestream.
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