Fantastic Food Contest Guide
By Anisa.
Kitchen
Since the main goal of the food contest is to collect as many points as possible, we want to cover all of our bases. The most important step to scoring high in the food contest is to max out your kitchen!
The kitchen is unlocked once you’ve upgraded to stage 14-1 (Snowy Cottage).
Ingredients & Recipes
You can unlock an ingredient either by owning the required Chibi Sakura or upgrading to a certain stage! You can check an ingredient’s unlock requirements on the “Ingredient Encyclopedia” page.
You can also check what ingredient a Chibi Sakura unlocks on its details.
The more you upgrade your Chibi Sakura, the more output of its corresponding ingredient you can get in the grocery store.
Strategy: I would say the most important ingredients to unlock first are the most common ones! I’ve listed the ingredients by optimal recipe occurrence below.
Common Ingredients
| Ingredient | Recipes |
| Eggs | 33 |
| Flour | 32 |
| Meat | 31 |
| Chili Pepper | 29 |
| Green Pepper | 23 |
| Carrots | 20 |
| Potatoes | 18 |
| Tofu | 17 |
| Leafy Veggies | 16 |
| Mushrooms | 15 |
| Onion | 14 |
| Chicken | 13 |
| Shrimp | 13 |
| Cabbage | 12 |
| Beansprouts | 9 |
| Eggplant | 9 |
| Green Onion | 9 |
| Black Fungus | 8 |
| Crab | 8 |
| Rice | 8 |
| Squid | 8 |
| Beef | 7 |
| Milk | 7 |
| Starch | 7 |
| Sugar | 6 |
| Butter | 5 |
| Cream | 5 |
| Garlic | 5 |
| Honey | 5 |
| Blueberries | 4 |
| Breadcrumbs | 4 |
| Chives | 4 |
| Oyster Sauce | 4 |
| Tomato | 4 |
| Fish | 3 |
| Pepper | 3 |
| Seaweed | 3 |
| Celery | 2 |
| Corn | 2 |
| Cumin | 2 |
| Kelp | 2 |
| Lobster | 2 |
| Clams | 2 |
| Pumpkin | 2 |
| Yam | 2 |
| Cauliflower | 2 |
| Lettuce | 1 |
| Peas | 1 |
| Soybean Paste | 1 |
| Cucumbers | 0 (in recipes, but no optimal recipes) |
| Mutton | 0 (no known recipes) |
Note that this is only by optimal recipes. This is more useful for when you’ve already unlocked all ingredients and are preparing for the contest!
Unlocking new dishes also gives you rewards! So even if the dish is not needed for the food contest it’s just nice to do in general.
Remember there is more than 1 recipe per dish. Try to research all 5 recipes per dish to unlock more rewards for the future! Each new recipe you research also gives you a free copy of the dish, plus 1 free copy for unlocking the dish for the first time. That’s 6 free dishes without using the grocery store!
Grocery Store
To add more of an ingredient to your inventory you will have to use the grocery store. One thing people often miss is that you can unlock more than just 3 shops. You can have a maximum of 10 shops, just scroll down to unlock more!
The price for each shop goes up, so make sure to save your coins.
Each shop can also be leveled up~ a fully upgraded shop can produce 2x your order amount. This will be especially important for your food contest production! You can get upgrade materials (green and pink brushes) by completing daily orders or purchasing them with Culinary Coins.
Strategy: Save your Culinary Coins to unlock more ingredients and shops. Complete daily orders to upgrade your shops!
Preparing Before the Contest
Now that we know how to unlock ingredients and get the most out of our grocery store, let’s look at how to prepare before the food contest starts!
Daily Orders
Each day, you want to complete your orders as best you can. Especially if you haven’t unlocked all ingredients or fully upgraded your grocery store yet. You get Culinary Coins and upgrade materials as a reward for each order you complete!
The higher your dish level, the more rewards you get! If you are low on an ingredient, check your club storeroom or ‘request assistance’ from your club members. You can get up to 120 coins from completing the 6 daily orders if they are all at level 5.
If you complete all of your orders, remember to collect your 300 bonus coins!
This is easy to miss in some versions of the game because of the text cut-off!
Private Order
Your private order starts once you’ve completed all the daily orders. Share it to the world chat so other players can help you! You can get up to 300 coins for adding ingredients to other players’ daily orders and up to 700 coins for filling ¾ of your own private order.
Strategy: Try not to complete your own private order unless you absolutely have to. Save your ingredients and ask others for help!
Overall, counting both daily and private orders, you can get a maximum of 1420 Culinary Coins per day!
Speedup Tickets
One speedup ticket reduces shopping time by 30 minutes. You can get tickets for free from club rewards, achievement rewards, and spending Culinary Coins.
The shop (where you can spend Culinary Coins) resets once a week. If you have coins to spare try purchasing all the tickets you can.
Also remember to complete daily tasks in the club so you can get the weekly ticket rewards! You can’t participate in the food contest until your club is level 4. It helps to use the message board to communicate with your club members or to set up a space outside of the game where you can all chat.
Strategy: Try not to spend your speedup tickets. Even during the contest, save them only for last-minute attempts!
Ingredient Preparation
How do some clubs get ahead in the contest so quickly? It’s most likely because they spent the earlier half of the week preparing ingredients!
The food contest has 10 stages and a total of 23 possible dishes. The dishes for the contest change every week, but our advantage is that we already know what the most common ingredients are!
Order common ingredients in bulk at the beginning of the week and then some less common ones, just in case. You don’t need to stack up on too much of these because your club members will help.
Different clubs will have different strategies, so it’s best to discuss this with your members. Over time, you’ll probably have so many ingredients saved that you can instead focus even more on the next step…
The special ingredient is actually what we want to prioritize collecting the most. Almost every contest has one dish that is worth more points than the others, and that dish will always use an ingredient from the featured Chibi Sakura series of the week (i.e. the banner that releases on Friday).
If the featured banner is a 7☆ banner, we know for certain that the special ingredient will be the one its series can unlock. For example, if the upcoming banner is Prancing Dance (7☆ Butterfly Dream) then we know the special ingredient will be blueberries because the Chibi Sakura of that series unlock blueberries.
If the featured banners are two 6☆ banners, then it’s a guessing game of which special ingredient your server will get. For example, if both Warm Velvet Tale and Young Dream are running, then the special ingredient could be either crab or pumpkin.
The upcoming banner is normally announced a couple days before it releases—keep an eye out so you can guess what the special ingredient may be.
However, be warned! It seems every 4th contest does not have a special dish. In that case, I recommend stocking up on an ingredient such as eggs, since so far there has always been a dish in the contest that requires only eggs for its recipe.
The Contest
The contest has finally arrived! You’ve prepared as best as you can but don’t worry if it wasn’t enough—the contest lasts for 3 days! You can access the contest from either the home screen, the kitchen, or your club room.
Here is a quick overview of how the event works:
- There are 10 different stages, each with either 2 or 3 dishes. Adding 10 of each dish gives you +20 points.
- After that, you only get +1 point for adding 1 more of that dish. Gain enough points and you can unlock the next stage!
- Please remember you can still add dishes even if it says ‘Complete’!
- The special dish that gives you more points than the rest even after you’ve filled the dish requirement. It is normally in one of the last 3 stages. The number of points this dish gives you varies from contest to contest. It could be +15 points or even +50 points depending on how difficult the recipe’s ingredients are to collect.
Once you’ve completed all the stages of the contest, prioritize collecting the ingredients required for the special dish. But if you can make extra of the other dishes, that helps too!
Strategy: Collecting and upgrading the correlating Chibi Sakura will allow you to get more of the special ingredient per order. So if you are not set on saving for a future banner and can pull on the current one, I’d say you should try!
If there is no special dish, prioritize collecting the ingredients that finish the fastest and make the simplest dish. Everything is worth the same amount, so speed is the priority!
So far, this is normally eggs or green peppers to cook ‘marinated/jammy eggs’ or ‘grilled green peppers’. Bulk orders for both take 300 min for 120 in total (that’s 240 if your shop is upgraded to x2 production).
The more active club members you have, the easier it will be to prepare and to get more points. And of course, the more you upgrade your Chibi Sakura, the more ingredients you can order at a time—so players that spend money do have an advantage. But remember that while placing is exciting, what’s more fun is participating with your club members in a team event! I hope the event doesn’t become something too stressful for you~ let’s try to keep it a friendly competition!
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