Culinary Insights from the Peony Economy: Capture Spring Traffic, but Also Protect Long-Term Value

What key long-term management elements are revealed by AI · KFC’s Luoyang case?

Against the backdrop of intensifying takeout price competition and the Economic Daily calling for industry rationality, the experiential value of offline consumption has once again gained attention. During the 2026 Spring Festival holiday, data from business sources show that the average daily sales of key retail and catering enterprises nationwide increased by 5.7% compared to the 2025 Spring Festival holiday, with the growth rate accelerating by 1.6 percentage points. In spring, Fliggy’s “2026 Qingming Holiday Travel Indicator” shows that domestic scenic spot ticket bookings during the Qingming holiday increased by over 70% year-on-year, with flower viewing and spring outings boosting tourism reservations.

The offline recovery combined with spring travel has brought new growth scenarios for catering brands—those who can convert flower viewing crowds into more stable in-store consumption are worth watching. The series of actions KFC took this spring in Luoyang may provide a noteworthy example.

To understand KFC’s choices, one must first understand Luoyang.

Every April, the Peony Cultural Festival in Luoyang, an ancient capital of thirteen dynasties, pushes the city onto national trending topics. Relying on the brand effect of the Peony Cultural Festival, Luoyang has recently used flowers as a medium, deeply excavating its historical and cultural resources, and continuously creating integrated formats such as “flower viewing + cultural innovation + Hanfu + cuisine,” promoting spring economy from simple sightseeing to a complex experiential economy. Data also confirms this trend: during the 2025 Luoyang Peony Cultural Festival, the city received over 10.33 million tourists, with total tourism revenue exceeding 8.29B yuan, achieving double growth year-on-year. Among them, the Luoyi Ancient City scenic area saw over 500k visitors during the festival period.

Dai Bin, director of the China Tourism Academy, once pointed out that the consumer spectrum of spring economy is becoming richer and more sophisticated—tourists not only want to see but also eat, stay, travel, and enjoy cultural entertainment. The peony economy is expanding from a single scenic spot to a more complete consumption chain. For catering brands, the opportunity may lie in how to embed into this consumption chain rather than just serving short-term tourist flows around scenic spots.

From “traffic watching” to “consumption staying,” stores are integrating into spring travel routes

Faced with millions of flower viewing crowds and billions in tourism revenue, what kind of catering brands can turn seasonal traffic into actual consumption? From the Luoyang example, the key is not about chasing hot spots in the short term but about long-term deep cultivation of the local market and the ability to connect brands, spaces, and city festivals.

KFC has been in Henan for nearly 30 years, with close to 400 stores, and has formed a differentiated exploration of “cultural tourism + catering” through long-term management. Themed stores such as Kung Fu, media, fire safety, and others have been successively launched, making the stores themselves carriers of city cultural dissemination. This long-term accumulation forms the foundation for its strategic cooperation with Luoyang’s Culture, Radio, Television, and Tourism Bureau, allowing it to participate as an official partner in the 43rd China Luoyang Peony Cultural Festival.

The two parties signed a strategic cooperation agreement aimed at cultural empowerment of tourism and brand linkage development, with the Peony Cultural Festival as a core project. On the product level, KFC launched a spring peony bucket in collaboration, which was simultaneously available in over 10,000 restaurants nationwide, along with limited spring items like salted egg yolk meat pastry green rice balls, with a total of 1.22 million units. This linkage from national promotion to local implementation exceeds typical co-branding activities and approaches a systematic layout centered around spring consumption scenarios.

In specific execution, KFC in Henan has set up 34 peony-themed restaurants, flower viewing check-in points, and pop-up stores across 18 cities, attempting to cover a more complete flower viewing route. Additionally, 12 KFC restaurants in Luoyang scenic spots and main urban areas have launched “fast pick-up” services to meet the needs of self-driving flower viewers for efficient meal collection. For offline catering, such service details are not only about convenience but also about transforming the original passing flow of people into more easily lingered and ordered consumption opportunities.

When stores are not just selling food, brands are competing for “space value”

If coverage of flower viewing routes reflects breadth, then the design of store spaces reveals a deeper change: in the spring economy, consumers entering a store no longer just want “a meal,” but also care whether it can integrate into their journey, facilitate social sharing, and carry emotional experiences.

The KFC store at Yingtian Gate in Luoyang is representative. Located at a landmark square near core scenic spots like Paradise and Ming Tang, the interior incorporates cultural symbols such as peony patterns and the outline of Yingtian Gate architecture, with displays of “Luoyang gifts” and stamp check-in stations. At night, the lighting outside the restaurant echoes the illumination of the Yingtian Gate ruins. As a result, the store is no longer just a transaction point for dining but a multi-functional space connecting dining, check-ins, shopping, and other behaviors, becoming a node in the city’s night economy.

Another visually impactful example is the giant peony bucket pop-up store inside the Chinese Peony National Garden. Located within the core flower viewing scene, it uses a giant peony bucket as a visual device, with KFC mascot “Qiqi” transformed into a Tang Dynasty flower seller interacting with visitors, offering customized peony-themed check-in props and on-site benefits. Such spaces are no longer just extensions of traditional pop-up stores but resemble experience organizations centered around flower viewing scenes: resting, checking in, interacting, and consuming all within the same space.

It is reported that during the holiday, KFC also launched dine-in exclusive meal sets, with a variety of main courses, snacks, desserts, and drinks for consumers to freely choose.

Luoyang is not an isolated case. This spring, similar offline scenes appeared simultaneously in multiple cities. For example, a KFC store on Wuhan University campus is surrounded by cherry blossom trees, naturally entering peak traffic during cherry blossom season; stores around Tianjin Wudadao Minyuan Square leverage the crabapple blossom period to attract tourists; the Jinan Daming Lake Quhua Residence store, near the Ruanruan Tower night scene, has become a natural stop along the lighting viewing route; the Orange Isle store in Changsha echoes the scenic area with its antique architectural style; and the KFC store near Baiyun Hotel in Guangzhou, surrounded by dense woods, is regarded by consumers as a city spot worth “walking into” due to its cultural attributes and aesthetic design.

The KFC store at Shanghai Expo Cultural Park offers another perspective. Located near Twin Peaks, it uses a large amount of environmentally friendly recycled materials for tables, chairs, chandeliers, etc., making it Shanghai’s only “small green store.” This indicates that attracting consumers into the store is not just about the food itself but also about the brand values conveyed through space. In today’s offline consumption environment, sustainability, aesthetic appeal, and local culture are increasingly becoming standards for consumers to judge whether a store is “worth entering.”

From peonies to cherry blossoms, from crabapples to night scenes, these stores point to the same change: as spring economy heats up, consumption scenes become richer, and consumers’ expectations for offline dining are no longer just about “solving the need to eat,” but about gaining a more complete, smoother, and shareable experience during limited travel time.

However, it must be recognized that festival traffic does not naturally equate to long-term customer flow, and a successful co-branding event does not simply replicate easily. For most brands, the real threshold is not whether they have launched a pop-up store or a seasonal limited product, but whether they possess sustained local management capabilities, a sufficiently dense store network, and long-term investment to embed brand experience into the city’s cultural and tourism routes.

From this perspective, the value of the Luoyang Peony Festival case may not only lie in KFC capturing a wave of traffic this spring but also in highlighting an industry shift worth noting: as takeout price wars approach their ceiling, offline consumption is returning to experience and space value. The competition among catering brands is no longer just about new product speed and promotional intensity but about whether they can enter consumers’ real life scenes and transform stores from transaction points into experience nodes. Those who complete this step earlier are more likely to establish more stable offline growth in this spring economy.